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 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…]
Richard Sale has written an intelligent essay upon the diseased state of the public mind of Americans: The Menace of the Crowd. Wikipedia has a stub article about Richard Sale (journalist). Sale’s essay was published on the website, Sic Semper Tyrannis, run by “Colonel W. Patrick Lang [who] is a retired senior officer of U.S. … [Read more…]
Human being is complex, as is true of most interesting entities. Even God’s simplicity, touted rightly by ancient and Medieval theologians and their not-so-worthy successors in modern times, is only a way of speaking against very specific types of errors. Mostly, they were concerned in ages which saw change lead eventually to decay that God … [Read more…]
The issue of `deep states’ had drawn the attention of at least some mainstream journalists for an instant or so around February of 2014 because of a very interesting article by Mike Lofgren, a former Senate staffer; I’ll get to that article in a short while. The attention seems to have been a flash in … [Read more…]
Kimberly Noble, MD and PhD, pediatrician and neuroscientist, has written the article, Rich Man, Poor Man: Socioeconomic Adversity and Brain Development, which is posted at the website of The Dana Foundation, a foundation run by neuroscientists. There is good stuff in the article which has a properly optimistic tone to the idea that we can … [Read more…]
Military men, even the warriors or “rough boys”, hold a variety of opinions on political issues, including how to use the military. My readings in history and in the news and blogging sites of the Web have led me to believe their opinions tend to be better founded and better reasoned, in terms of basic … [Read more…]
Is the invisible hand justly celebrated by Adam Smith really the hand of the pilgrim human community, of the Body of Christ forming—however imperfectly and incompletely—in this mortal realm? Yes, though the language is far from optimal and that language can lead to improper concepts regarding the Body of Christ and its relationships to human … [Read more…]