Quest or Quiescence?

After three and half years of hindsight, I think it's time to once again ask the central question of our time:

Do we husband our values, or do we export them?

If it is true that a Healthy Set of Beliefs and Motivations is one that enables a human being--like a cell, a tissue, etc.--to assimilate into higher and higher levels of organization (this, I think, is intuitively obvious), then it is vital to our long term interests as free individuals that we spread those realities that facilitate complex bonding potential and flexibility, i.e. the values of the Declaration of Independence and Rawls' Theory of Justice (in its fundamental abstraction, not as it manifests itself in redistribution).

In Iraq, we are seeing the consequences of an infertile mental substrate. The culture of Arabia is stuck revolving around its own Lorenz attractor of stagnant beliefs and practices. Only intervention or massive war will break the generational transfer of these detrimental values. That is, for me, still the issue in the War on Terror.

Our technology will continue to find its way to the mal-adjusted. Adjustment qua memetic evolution (genetic?--probably not, but a scary thought) is the only way out of the coming slaughter, yet most ignore it. It's all about how to manage Iraq's dissolution, or how to bring our boys home, all the while the real problem--the problem that brought us 9/11 and will continue to do so--is forgotten.

So the question remains: do we draw up the bridge, cement the boundaries around our American system and treat all other undeveloped cultures as "environment" (see J.G. Miller's Living Systems); or do we embark on a costly quest to beneficently, and perhaps even forcefully, evolve the belief structure of almost half the people on the planet?