Albert Jay Nock wrote of a friend of his who had spent some years in the United States and was returning to Europe. This friend spoke of his admiration of many American characteristics, but said he was disturbed on realizing that Americans are the first people in history to pass directly from barbarism to decadence … [Read more…]
Reality often messes up our formal models or our less rigid schemes of how reality should work. A good thinker takes such glitches not as a sign that we can’t use models in a particular situation but rather as an invitation to think their way to a better model or perhaps to develop a more … [Read more…]
See the article, Notable: Bigger groups make less social time for red colobus, at John Hawk’s website. [I had a problem linking properly to this article but it can be found under “Stories” if it doesn’t come up on the front page. I will adjust my link when possible.] Professor Hawks discusses an article summarizing … [Read more…]
Happy New Year. May the Good Lord bless you and yours. It’s now 2015. Where Am I In My Mission? Clearly, I’m not writing a blog which simply responds to cultural or political or intellectual events or states. I’m not part of an established institutional effort, not part of a mission as the term would … [Read more…]
That Brazilian globetrotter, Pepe Escobar, has summarized the New Cold War in a recent article, The new European “arc of instability”. In that article, he published a paragraph from an email he received from the Saker, a former military intelligence analyst who lives outside his homeland of Russia but defends her strongly and intelligently in … [Read more…]
In my last two essays I posted, Mathematical Models of Human Communities: Parts and Wholes and Mathematical Models of Human Communities: We Live in Narratives, Not in Models, I acknowledged the usefulness and potential truthfulness of mathematical models but claimed we need to consider wider aspects of this world and of all of Creation. In … [Read more…]
In the last essay I posted, Mathematical Models of Human Communities: Local and Global Processes, I discussed briefly my oft-stated opinion that we need to model human nature, personal and communal, by a model (qualitative and quantitative) which is much like those of the theory of general relativity where local regions of space and time … [Read more…]
In Sociodynamics: A Systematic Approach to Mathematical Modelling in the Social Sciences (Dover Publications, 2006), the physicist Wolfgang Weidlich develops a model of some aspects of human communities; his model is developed bottom-up in a manner similar to the development of a model of an industrial process or of (allegedly) well-defined human activities. Weidlich is … [Read more…]
Peter Frost, dissident anthropologist, wrote about some issues in the matter I’ve considered in recent blog essays—the formation of complex societies. See Mathematical Models of Human History: Are They Plausible? and A Different Model of the Growth of Centralized States in History. Frost’s article, The Agricultural Revolution That Wasn’t, looks at the broader issue of … [Read more…]
Christians are bound to recognize that the God of Jesus Christ is truly Lord and truly Creator. We are bound to do our best to honestly and courageously and faithfully respond to God’s Creation as we can best know it and as we come into contact with it. To turn away from Creation or to … [Read more…]