I’ll start with a link to another insightful and honest analysis by Paul Robinson, a seemingly true expert on Russia who is a professor at the University of Ottawa: Patriotism is enough. Western analysts often mistakenly describe the people now governing Russia as nostalgic for the Soviet Union, an idea which Putin’s recent statements about … [Read more…]
I’d like to return to an essay I wrote in 2009, Darwin, Einstein, and the Totemic Mind: In the totemic mind of ancient hunters of elk, we see the possibility of modern hunters of the secrets of God’s Creation, hunters who carry out their quest in the acts of shaping their minds to embody the … [Read more…]
The answer is: communities are real entities, just as real and just as strange as the abstract forms of being, quantum wavefunctions, from which concrete being is shaped. But no more real nor more strange. To see the reality of communities (and some other `abstract’ entities), we can return to my basic claim about being, … [Read more…]
In the past few months or so, I’ve tried to allocate more of my mental energies to studying mathematics and history, concentrating for a short while (4 or 5 substantial book’s reading time) upon some histories of the ancient Celtic peoples (Gauls to the Romans) and the Germanic peoples of the era of the Roman … [Read more…]
I’ve uploaded a new novel, The Simple Life. It’s the story of some men and women and children gathering together in New England to form a community and take care of the vulnerable and the abandoned. After they start to form that community, the climate turned a little ice-age cold. Many have moved down to … [Read more…]
By “liberalism,” I mean a closely related set of systems of freedoms of a specific sort, those emphasizing and even `enforcing’ an individualism which in its moderate form is compatible with the traits of many northwestern Europeans and fewer other Europeans and—for the most part—far fewer others. [An example of enforcing individualism would be changes … [Read more…]
It’s not the failures but rather the great successes of the West which have left it as a hollowed-out and collapsing civilization, that is, our successes as individualists and our successes in nurturing our individualistic inclinations and pushing them ever further at the expense of our communalistic inclinations. It’s not hard to understand. Human being … [Read more…]
Adam Smith famously took a new approach to the ancient problem: how to describe and understand the mysterious workings of created being in which ordered forms exist or even can be seen coming into existence. Those ordered forms can be forms imposed upon concrete matter—concrete entities such as stars or human beings, the latter being … [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…]