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Metahistory

The Long View 2007-07-11: Let's Pick on First Things

Under editor Rusty Reno, First Things has posted a slate of articles recently about the post-liberal future, which in some ways could be seen as a change from the pro-democracy stance First Things took under Father Neuhaus. However, there was the famous End of Democracy issue in 1996 that caused

The Long View: The Translator

John J. Reilly’s book review of John Crowley’s The Translator comes up at an apropos time: I am digesting a history of science fiction in the twentieth century, and The Translator seems to be a good example of science fiction as a kind of secular scripture. There is

The Long View: Staring into Chaos

You can't get a much better summary of the strengths of the early metahistorians than this: They suggest that basic science will be exhausted, though applied science will still have possibilities. They all expect that the vital elements in society will be increasingly religious, though a fossil secular

The Long View: The Years of Rice and Salt

This book review is the source of one of my favorite cocktail party theories: a number of seemingly well-established sciences are built upon an n of 1. In a grand sense, geology and biology fall into this category, since the big theories like plate tectonics and evolution depend on one

The Long View: The Reformation

John reviews a fine one-volume history of the Reformation, marred by a jarring lapse into modern obsessions at the end. The Reformation: A History By Diarmaid MacCulloch Viking, 2004 800 Pages, US$35.95 ISBN: 0670032964 In the later volumes of A Study of History, Arnold Toynbee came to the

Spengler's Future Updated

I added in a hyperlinked table of contents to Spengler's Future, John's programmatic [literally, he used BASIC] comparison of Rome, Egypt, the Ottoman Turks, and that offshoot of northwest Europe current known as the West. This is all rather fun, as long as you take it

The Long View: The Second Religiousness in the 21st Century

This is a seminal essay that John wrote for a presentation at the annual conference of the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations, at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul in Minnesota, USA in 2005. He synthesizes many of his ideas into a broader prediction of