A collection of 16 posts
The mourning traditions of earlier cultures prescribed precise patterns of behavior that facilitated the public expression of grief and provided support for the bereaved.
What is most needed in our present crisis is a philosophy that can move through the impasse between modernism and postmodernism.
What, I wondered, would have happened had Jesus emerged in a Roman Empire that had gone through an industrial revolution?
The central problem with the university administration’s opinion column was that none of the accusations were relevant to the fieldwork and research in question.
We should work to devise effective solutions to continue that progress, rather resorting to using all men as scapegoats for the violence that remains.
“We’ve successfully banished the notion of punishment in that realm,” Sapolsky writes. “It may take centuries, but we can do the same in all our current arenas of punishment.”
Transferring guilt across generations from ancient ancestors to their heirs was highly convenient for religious authorities.
They witnessed the defeat of the Ottoman Turks at the siege of Vienna, ending a thousand years of implacable Islamic expansion.
Donald Trump’s first major speech in Europe reminds me of the old Jewish joke in which two men ask a rabbi to resolve a dispute.
All the European powers combined didn’t manage to kill that many people throughout all Asia during their entire colonial histories.
As time went on, once-unquestioned assumptions about free speech and due process were attacked into oblivion.
From an evolutionary perspective the current domestic political crisis can thus be understood as an aftershock of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The term propaganda has its origins in the 17th century efforts of the Catholic Church to propagate its views and stem the rise of Protestantism.
Human societies, generally are conservative, and they prefer primarily two things, order and rule of law in society, and the perceived safety of one’s own tribe.
The biggest threat to human civilisation is not from some random weirdos blowing themselves up. The biggest threat is neither solely cultural or economic, but a hybrid of the two.