Ghulf Genes

Those who’ve wondered what it might be like to be in the sky inside wondrous clouds massively crowding a blue sky would have their answer th...

Action and reaction. The aggressive expansionary tendencies of Westerndom, let’s call it, massively stimulated a “modernizing” reaction in ...

May you live in interesting times.      Supposedly a Chinese curse Monique commented on LaMarotte saying, “I am beginning to get the feeli...

Now the natural tendency of humanity is upward, in the direction of the ethereal—and that tendency is much helped by hardship, which concent...

For those who share my interest in the deeper past—and attempts at grasping its enormous complexity and maddening structure—I recommend two ...

We speak not strictly and philosophically, when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave o...

Those familiar with theories of cyclic history will have heard of Pitirim Sorokin (1889-1968), a Russian-born but U.S.-settled sociologist. ...

Nowhere are the urban roots of the word ‘civilization’ more evident than in the neglect which historians have lavished upon the rustic and h...

I’d just finished yesterday’s posting (“history is a lens for examining our own times”) when Brigitte came in and handed me a letter in that...

I’ve been attracted throughout my life to methods of seeing that which is much smaller or much greater than eye can focus. We don’t need too...

The writing of blog entries, with the implied possibility that people all over the world might just chance to see it, has a somewhat bracing...

One of the intriguing patterns Arnold Toynbee thought he had discovered in the late stages of a civilization was that its elite elements pol...

In my childhood a three-fold structure dominated history. It divided into ancient, medieval, and modern. Prehistory formed a shadowy fourth ...