We could talk about a great many things right now. Despite all the efforts of the political classes in the United States and its inner circle of allies, the world is shaking off the enforced stasis of the last few decades and moving toward an era of tumultuous realignment. The remarkable success of populist parties…
Tag: history
The Flight from Prediction
I think most of my readers know that my academic background, such as it is, is in the history of ideas. To some extent that was simply the best option I could find when I returned to college in 1991 to complete my degree. Then as now, the University of Washington didn’t offer a major…
An Unfamiliar World
Last month’s post on the future of warfare in the deindustrial era mentioned in passing one of the most significant factors changing the world we know to one that most of us have never even imagined. That factor is demographics: in particular, the immense shift now under way from growth to contraction in human numbers…
Deindustrial Warfare: A First Reconaissance
This January has five Wednesdays, and in the usual way of this blog, the fifth Wednesday gets an essay on whatever topic the readers select by vote. As usual, it was a lively contest, but this time one of the perennial underdogs—warfare in the deindustrial age—came out on top. That didn’t surprise me greatly. The…
An Anthropocene Worth Having
For more than two years now I’ve been trying to figure out how to introduce a way of thinking about humanity’s relationship to nature that cuts straight across nearly all of the conventional thinking on that subject. It’s been a challenge. I’m glad to say, though, that a project now being lauded by the corporate-enabler…
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
These days I hear a lot of people talking about whether it’s possible to change the world, and if so, how to go about it. It’s understandable that this should be so, since the world around us is such a steaming mess. Nor, despite the bleatings of true believers in progress, is it getting better. …
Notes on Stormtrooper Syndrome
For some time now I’ve been looking for a way to talk about one of the most common bad habits of thought in the modern industrial world. Habits like this are far more important that a casual glance might suggest. Plenty of pragmatic factors are piling up crises for our civilization just now, but many…
Our Werewolves, Ourselves
The muse who inspires these essays is an unruly goddess. I was planning this week on picking up the threads of the sequence of posts I began at the start of this year, summing up what I’ve learned so far in my exploration of enchantment, disenchantment, and the rise and fall of civilizations, and sketching…
Against Enchantment 3: Jean Gebser
In the months just passed I’ve pursued an exploration of the myth of disenchantment—the notion that our civilization, for the first time in human history, has shaken off the comforting daydreams of myth and magic in order to see the universe in all its cold and uncaring reality. So far, in the course of that…
Against Enchantment 2: Owen Barfield
Last month’s exploration of the history of enchantment began with a look at the other side of the equation—the disenchantment of the world mapped out by Max Weber—and then a survey of the ways that enchantment and disenchantment were understood by Ken Wilber, one of the modern thinkers who’s built a theory of history on…