Passion
Deep down inside, into the brightest corners of my mind, I am a historian.
History has forever been the great passion of my intellect and heart. I study it with the ravenous appetite of an addict, keen on gleaning from facts, figures and threads the potentiality of our species unto the near and far future; I want to know where we're going; I want to predict.
Predicting the future of the human race is fraught with difficulties: we're divided, messy, multi-leveled and maddeningly complex. Our history, grafted onto the geographical terrain and physical limitations of our world (eg: limiting rather than limited) becomes an astronomically mathematical issue, the likes of which mathematics will likely be unable to grapple with for some time. (footnote1: there have been advances in the sphere of mathematical algorithms that can predict things ranging from the winner of the US presidential elections to the occurrence of international disputes and war, but these are geared more towards specific occurrences and less towards the general trend of human history/future).
It is still left to the holistic portion of the human mind (that intuitive, non-dissecting and sometimes inexplicable intelligence one half of our mind harbors) to predict the course we will follow as a species (footnote2: even where the next species of our branch of the tree will further branch. Which will survive and thrive and which will fade?)
Study is what I do. I study economics, astronomy, marketing, biology, sociology, politics, technology, religion, medicine and countless other facets of human reality, and I always do it from a historical perspective. To emphasize, I study these fields. I don't read them with passing fancy, I analyze, dissect and integrate the new information in these fields to affect my world-view, to effect my world-theory.
I add years, millennia, eons (all depending on the scale) to the dilemma that has always faced our species, and the answers we have always given that dilemma: Why are we here and here are we going?
From the coasts of prehistorically described Africa, an entire continent barren of life, except for the coasts we came to exploit to our utmost, up to the likely robotic-astroid-mining future of our likely jobless future.(footnote 3: as our species was pushed to the coasts of Africa, scientists believe we were forced to adapt to an abundance of food that only a keen intellect would be able to exploit.) (footnote 3.5: with the jobless recoveries in the west, the economy has grown, but people have lost their jobs to the cheaper automated option of robotic employs. Rather than a historical rarity, joblessness has been continuously pushed by automation for the past 20+ years, as automation has moved into non-labor realms, reducing the potential of human workers to avoid the reach of robotic competition: there is no job that is completely safe, and it is only a matter of time...unless we destroy ourselves before this inevitability!)
This is something religion and philosophy have both been unable to answer for me, something that everyday emotions and materialism are wont to explain but cannot; we have a need for a new philosophy and a new religion, the old ones are mostly clung to by the traditionalists and ideologues. (footnote 4: hence why fundamentalism, a very modern approach to religion, has come to the forefront of religion and other ideologies: the more adaptive people have left religion or are currently doing so, and the traditionalists and ideologues are completely taking over these spheres of [moribund] thought).
If religion and philosophy can be reduced to their most basic ideological elements, both represent cosmologies and an attitude that human-kind has of constructing cosmologies. What we can learn from the two is not the truth-of-the-matter, but that we should approach the truth-of-the-matter, that we should understand, that we must make-sense of the bewildering complexity of the cosmos and our place in it.
We must integrate all human knowledge into a robust and functional cosmology.
We must integrate our knowledge as a species (homo-sapien-sapien), as a form of chemical-existence (life), as the beings of this spinning rock (Earthlings) and as an individual divided by those same maddeningly complex divisions that divide each of us humans as labeled above (of white history, Mackenzie of Kari and Ray, of Canada, of Ontario, of the forest, of Taiwan, of Australia, of travel, of European mutt-blood, of post-Catholic origins, of agricultural and nomadic precursors...).
This attitude, this Raison d'être, this approach, this is what history is for me. It is my other love, my mistress and companion, my explanation, my morality and my guiding tool.
History is...history.
History has forever been the great passion of my intellect and heart. I study it with the ravenous appetite of an addict, keen on gleaning from facts, figures and threads the potentiality of our species unto the near and far future; I want to know where we're going; I want to predict.
Predicting the future of the human race is fraught with difficulties: we're divided, messy, multi-leveled and maddeningly complex. Our history, grafted onto the geographical terrain and physical limitations of our world (eg: limiting rather than limited) becomes an astronomically mathematical issue, the likes of which mathematics will likely be unable to grapple with for some time. (footnote1: there have been advances in the sphere of mathematical algorithms that can predict things ranging from the winner of the US presidential elections to the occurrence of international disputes and war, but these are geared more towards specific occurrences and less towards the general trend of human history/future).
It is still left to the holistic portion of the human mind (that intuitive, non-dissecting and sometimes inexplicable intelligence one half of our mind harbors) to predict the course we will follow as a species (footnote2: even where the next species of our branch of the tree will further branch. Which will survive and thrive and which will fade?)
Study is what I do. I study economics, astronomy, marketing, biology, sociology, politics, technology, religion, medicine and countless other facets of human reality, and I always do it from a historical perspective. To emphasize, I study these fields. I don't read them with passing fancy, I analyze, dissect and integrate the new information in these fields to affect my world-view, to effect my world-theory.
I add years, millennia, eons (all depending on the scale) to the dilemma that has always faced our species, and the answers we have always given that dilemma: Why are we here and here are we going?
From the coasts of prehistorically described Africa, an entire continent barren of life, except for the coasts we came to exploit to our utmost, up to the likely robotic-astroid-mining future of our likely jobless future.(footnote 3: as our species was pushed to the coasts of Africa, scientists believe we were forced to adapt to an abundance of food that only a keen intellect would be able to exploit.) (footnote 3.5: with the jobless recoveries in the west, the economy has grown, but people have lost their jobs to the cheaper automated option of robotic employs. Rather than a historical rarity, joblessness has been continuously pushed by automation for the past 20+ years, as automation has moved into non-labor realms, reducing the potential of human workers to avoid the reach of robotic competition: there is no job that is completely safe, and it is only a matter of time...unless we destroy ourselves before this inevitability!)
This is something religion and philosophy have both been unable to answer for me, something that everyday emotions and materialism are wont to explain but cannot; we have a need for a new philosophy and a new religion, the old ones are mostly clung to by the traditionalists and ideologues. (footnote 4: hence why fundamentalism, a very modern approach to religion, has come to the forefront of religion and other ideologies: the more adaptive people have left religion or are currently doing so, and the traditionalists and ideologues are completely taking over these spheres of [moribund] thought).
If religion and philosophy can be reduced to their most basic ideological elements, both represent cosmologies and an attitude that human-kind has of constructing cosmologies. What we can learn from the two is not the truth-of-the-matter, but that we should approach the truth-of-the-matter, that we should understand, that we must make-sense of the bewildering complexity of the cosmos and our place in it.
We must integrate all human knowledge into a robust and functional cosmology.
We must integrate our knowledge as a species (homo-sapien-sapien), as a form of chemical-existence (life), as the beings of this spinning rock (Earthlings) and as an individual divided by those same maddeningly complex divisions that divide each of us humans as labeled above (of white history, Mackenzie of Kari and Ray, of Canada, of Ontario, of the forest, of Taiwan, of Australia, of travel, of European mutt-blood, of post-Catholic origins, of agricultural and nomadic precursors...).
This attitude, this Raison d'être, this approach, this is what history is for me. It is my other love, my mistress and companion, my explanation, my morality and my guiding tool.
History is...history.