Stewart Brand reports a presentation to the Long Now foundation given by historian Niall Ferguson and futurist Peter Schwartz. In Schwartz’s opening remarks, he said that his plans to write a book titled THE CASE FOR OPTIMISM were derailed by reading Ferguson’s WAR OF THE WORLD. He’s been grappling with the issues Ferguson raised for 18 months. “You do alternative pasts, I do alternative futures. Where historians commune with the dead, futurists have imaginary friends.” Schwartz characterized Ferguson’s view of history as basically down, with an upside possibility, whereas his own view was of history as basically up, with always the possibility of getting things wrong. . . Ferguson said, “I think our difference is that I’m a pessimist and you’re an optimist. You’re Pangloss and I’m Cassandra.” Schwartz noted that since his parents were in slave-labor camps in World War II, and he was born in a displaced-person camp after the war, “It would be churlish not to...

For the most part we see what we expect to see. Scholars have long assumed the Spaniards first introduced chickens to the New World along with horses, pigs, and cattle. But now radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis of a chicken bone excavated from a site in Chile suggest Polynesians in oceangoing canoes brought chickens to the west coast of South America well before Europe's "Age of Discovery." . . . In 1532, Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro recorded the presence of chickens in Peru, where the Inca used them in religious ceremonies. "That suggests chickens had already been there for a while," says Storey. "It's possible there are stylized chickens in the iconography that we have not recognized because we did not know they were there. A great deal of scholarship seems like this to me. The more we know the less we see . . . until someone manages to be confronted by something difficult to deny, and so...

The Hollywood version of the American southwest after the Indian wars and the closing of the frontier - and much earlier in Texas - is of rough, vigilante justice meted out by flawed heroes. The truly bad were tracked down and summarily dispatched with a minimum of fuss or passion. All in a day's work. There's some truth in that but it was as likely to be solid citizens as flawed heroes who did the deeds. One of the striking changes in American society after 9/11/2001 was the number of solid citizens who remembered their roots - or at least the Hollywood version - and voiced interest in some vigilantism. That's one of the reasons that Bush was applauded for his initial handling of the event. I'm putting this out there for your consideration with a fully conflicted heart. I don't feel diminished by the deaths of Mohammed Atta and the other creeps who killed thousands on September 11....

This post began as a quicky update to I'm Late, I'm Late, which briefly explored some ideas about oikophobia, the aversion to home, the mirror to xenophobia. But perhaps it can serve as a brief meditation on nationalism on this holiday weekend which honors the birth of the United States. Born on The 4th [via Maggie's Farm, which dredged up this old article by David Gelernter that I read before but had forgotten] As Disraeli saw it, liberals and conservatives were equally progressive. But liberals were rational internationalists who worried what the Germans would say. Conservatives were romantic nationalists who worried what their forefathers would have said. (Thus "national" Republicans invoke the wisdom of the people and the authority of the Founding Fathers. "Philosophic" Democrats invoke the wisdom of the intellectuals and the authority of the United Nations.) There's some mixing of concepts here. In Disraeli's time "liberals" were Whigs who favored free trade and such, and so quite...

It's useful to be sceptical about narratives - just-so stories about how things are or were in the past - since they are always instrumental. There is no such thing as history in the sense of a narrative that is a true account of what happened in the past, there are only histories, just-so stories told about the past in service of present objectives. What actually happened wasn't known at the time and will forever remain mysterious. The same is true of news stories or blog posts - early drafts of histories - but more so. Still, they are all we have, they can't just be ignored. Seeking out and comparing various accounts of things may not shed any light on truth but they can at least debunk one another and save us from giving them unwarranted credence. Consider this account of neglected news [via Instapundit]. "The present era of globalization and low inflation has an important precedent: 1880-1914,...

Jon Christensen's column in the Jan-Mar 2006 issue of Conservation In Practice, What Does “Wild” Really Mean?, briefly explores the perennial dispute about the words "wild" and "wilderness" by reviewing articles in the Wildlife Conservation Society "status report", State of the Wild 2006. You would think that the Wildlife Conservation Society might have a grip on what it means to be wild. The society grew out of the venerable Bronx Zoo to become one of the most respected wildlife conservation organizations in the world. . . But the inaugural 2006 edition seems to be deeply troubled by a question that has plagued conservationists of late: What does “wild” really mean? It’s ironic that Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature (2), has literally the last word in an afterword to the State of the Wild 2006. McKibben is in many ways responsible for starting this most divisive of debates in modern conservation. But there is a surprising twist...

One of the common confusions of this time, like all other times, is mistaking new methods for new behaviors. This post by Douglass Rushkoff The Networked Individual is an example. [via Future Now] Sure, we knew that people existed in their individual bodies for a long time. Even cavemen knew that hitting the guy over there meant hitting someone else. But people were so highly identified with their tribes, clans or fiefdoms, that they didn't really think of themselves as individuals. Anyone who was a true individual was pretty much an outcast -- either banished, mutant, a leper or, at best, a shaman, whose individuality was as much a curse as a blessing. Then as now everyone exists within a society and disregards its behavior norms at risk of exclusion or worse. Nothing has changed but the names and scale of society. The cell phone may be bringing us into a new renaissance, but it may end up differently...

Archaeological journalist David Keys' book Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of Modern Civilization and his theory that in 535 A.D. a world altering event occurred which largely determined the course of civilization was the subject of an episode in the PBS series Secrets of the Dead, one of my guilty pleasures. Using evidence from ice cores, tree rings and carbon dating he develops a theory that a massive volcanic explosion caused years of failed crops and disease that brought down major civilizations all over the world and allowed societies better adapted to those conditions to thrive...and replace those of antiquity. Perhaps it is so. Perhaps the dark ages really were dark for a time due to a world girdling cloud of volcanic ashes and vapors which drastically cooled the world. The resulting crop failures and increase of diseases such as bubonic plague might explain the fall of civilizations from Constantinople to pre-Columbian America. The recorded history of the...