India’s revolt of the petite bourgeois Jatt class
What’s going on in India with the protests of farmers? The New York Times has a report, and that’s the sort of place many Americans will get their news from. […]
The battle for the soul of the Heart of Asia
Kumārajīva was one of the early translators of the Buddhist canon into Chinese. His father’s lineage was reputedly Indian, while his mother was from the elite of the city of Kucha, on the northern edge of the Tarim basin. It was one of the cities where a form of Tocharian was spoken. This enigmatic Indo-European […]
Complementarity in the 21st century
The late Gordon R. Dickson wrote a series of books in a (mostly) future history termed The Childe Cycle. I’ve read a substantial number of the books in this series, and it’s rather uneven. On the whole, I would say that the earlier books are better than the later works. Dickson died before he could […]
The hegemon and world-citizen
On occasion, I read a book…and forget it’s title. I usually manage to recall the title at some point. For the past five years or so I’ve been trying to recall a book I read on Asian diplomatic history written by a Korean American scholar. Today I finally recalled that book: East Asia Before the […]
Stanislav Petrov and our common humanity
The first time I watched Gorky Park in the 1980s I remember how strange it was to see citizens of the Soviet Union, or as we called them all then irrespective of ethnicity, “Russians,” with normal human motivations and concerns. In other words, depicted in the fullness of their humanity. As a child in Reagan’s […]
Our civilization’s Ottoman years
Some right-wing intellectuals are wont to say that multicultural and multiracial empires do not last. This is not true. Historically there are plenty which lasted for quite a long time. Rome, Byzantium, and the Ottomans, to name just a few of the longest. But, though they were diverse polities modern liberal democratic sensibilities would have […]
Taking the end of the age seriously
I am about two-thirds of the way through Why the West Rules-for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future, and I have to agree with Tyler Cowen’s assessment so far. The author is an archaeologist, and though a little less shy in regards to general theory than most in his […]