This page consists mostly of footnotes referenced by links from other pages (or, sometimes, from within this page itself) arranged in no particular order (I started off arranging them alphabetically, but that isn't consistent.) Feel free to browse here. The links on it started off accessible from elsewhere, but I've changed things around, and eliminated some of the referring links. But I left the footnotes 'cause they're interesting.
"Anarchy! - No rules, OK?" Sounds good, doesn't it? But it's not quite like that. Just as Monarchy doesn't mean "One rule", but "One ruler", Anarchy really means "No rulers." Society needs (and will spontaneously adopt) rules, but what the Anarchist has a quarrel with is that that means somebody has to enforce them. "Natural" human societies (see my rave about villages) seem to survive quite happily on peer pressure as a regulatory mechanism. Laws are usually invented by conquerors.
"Gaia" (or Gaea, or Ge) was the name given by the ancient Greeks to the Earth Mother Goddess. (Here are some links to ancient Greek mythology: ) More recently, the word has been used in the Gaia Hypothesis, which describes the entire world as a living entity, with physico-chemical as well as biological feedback systems in place. Mountain Man Graphics has a good explanation of the Gaia Hypothesis
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HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. It is the language in which the World Wide Web is written. There is an introduction to HTML at University College at Cork, and another one at Builder.com. Maran Wilson has an excellent HTML Quick Reference once you are past the raw beginner stage.
HTML is not an arcane tongue. If you've never seen any, you can see it right now by right-clicking on this page, and then clicking "View Source" on the menu that comes up (if you have the right sort of browser, that is.) That will show you what I did: and if you want, you can copy it into a text editor (I used Notepad), delete most of my stuff, cut and paste and add your own bits, and voilá! Go on, try it. The more people who can make web pages, the better.
Someone once defined "adventure" as a really bad time happening to someone else a long way off. The Chinese have known that since ancient days. "May you live in interesting times" is a curse.
The name Rational Anarchy comes from the novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein. Anarchists in general have a bad name as bomb-throwing nihilists (the Nihilists were an entirely different political group.) But, whatever faults Anarchism may have as a political philosophy, Rational Anarchists are prepared to live under whatever rules the rest of society may propose - just as a normally sane Whig may live under laws created by a Tory government.
This is a modification of a quote from a 19th century Christian apologist, who said, "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him". Why he thought this was an argument for the existence of God, I'm not sure - the simplest interpretation is that God doesn't exist, and we did invent Him.
Gaia, the personification of the living planet, is a potent metaphor in this (new) age. However, the scientists who originated the concept have been forced (by contradicting evidence - no conspiracy of the status quo here) to publish a retraction of their hypothesis. But Gaia, nonexistent though she is, is wholly physical, not spiritual. Thus it is possible to "invent" her in the sense that one invents a supercomputer or a fusion reactor.
The idea of the human race as the "brain" of an evolving world organism is older than the Gaia Hypothesis by far. If I have a religion at all, it is the belief that all heaven and hell is in this world, and our choices are what makes it what it is. Those of us who can see our preferred future without wishful thinking should try to put in place the feedback mechanisms which will, eventually, become the metabolism and nervous system of the Earth Mother, Gaia.
This is the one about the wastrel son who went out carousing and dissipating his wealth, while the faithful son stayed behind and helped his father with the farm. After many years, the wastrel, having seen the error of his ways (or at least having run out of money), came crawling home. The father, rejoicing, threw a big bash - I'm sure there's something about fatted calves in there - and generally made a big fuss about this yoyo, while the son who'd been working all those years had made do with beer and biscuits. I submit that, if the father had really been wanting to encourage a conscientious work ethic, he would have thrown a bash for the other son, then handed the prodigal a pitchfork and said "OK, get to work: you've got about ten year's backlog to make up before you deserve anything like that."
P.S. - A friend has sent me a pointer to The Bible Gateway, an on-line concordance to several versions of the Bible in several different languages. The Parable of the Prodigal Son can be found in Luke chapter 15.
I've always been interested in Classical civilization and its precursors, but I first developed my theory when I heard about the Hittites. They were contemporary with the Minoan/Mycenean civilization, Babylon, and one of the flowerings of Egyptian civilization. Middle Kingdom? I forget. Anyway, the Hittites disappeared from history in the blink of an eye, sometime in the autumn of 1200BC. The official records, on clay tablets unearthed in the capital Hattusa, continue with no indication of anything untoward except hints of unrest in the provinces (but there's always unrest in the provinces), and then just stop. Immediately above that is a layer of ash, and then soil undisturbed by the works of man until modern times.
This was interesting, more so when you consider that at that very time, give or take maybe five years, the Mycenean civilization fell into a dark age so profound that they lost the art of writing and had to borrow the Phoenician alphabet when they reinvented it several centuries later. The Babylonians were conquered by the Akkadians, who rampaged all the way to the Mediterranean, then raced home to spend the next few hundred years defending their own capital from the hill tribes. And Egypt was first bothered by the Sea Peoples and then conquered by the Hyksos kings. And all of this happened within the space of a dozen years or so.
There followed about four hundred years of dark age. Around 800 BC, the Greeks started their classical period in earnest, the Egyptians threw off the yoke of the Hyksos, the Phoenicians founded Carthage, somebody (Greeks? Etruscans? Local tribes?) founded Rome, and the Akkadians started the definitive expansion that earned them their place in the history books. Again, it looks like some sort of watershed or phase-change had been crossed.
Four hundred years later, the growing civilizations came into serious conflict. This was the time of the Pelloponnesian War, Alexander the Great, and the Punic Wars. There was a great winnowing, which left Rome in unquestioned (although oft-disputed) control of the whole Mediterranean civilization-centre around the time of Christ.
And there it stayed for - guess how long? - four centuries, that's right. From 1AD to 400AD the major outlines of the Roman Empire were roughly constant. They waxed and waned a bit, but there was nothing like the growth shown in even the first century BC. And that period is generally considered the definitive Roman civilization. Who talks about the Roman Republic?
Then, around 400 AD, boom! It all fell down. The Great barbarian Invasion crossed the Danube in 404, and Rome was sacked in 412. There were earlier premonitions - the Empire was divided because of the difficulty of defending the whole thing, and in 395 even the Western capital was moved to Ravenna. But the final dissolution was still very sudden - people living under Gothic toleration could easily remember when Rome ruled the world.
Came another dark age. After 400 years, again, civilization began to coalesce. The Carolingian Renaissance, Baghdad under Suleiman the Magnificent, King Alfred who united the English, the founding of Kiev.
Nowadays the next 400 years are almost forgotten history, lumped into the Middle Ages, but by the time the Renaissance began, in thirteenth-century Italy, the shape of modern Europe was clearly recognizable. The Spaniards had pushed the Moors into the southern corner of Spain, the English and French were sorting out who owned what, the Holy Roman Empire was a solid power in central Europe, and all of Europe was Christianized.
Then, of course, the Renaissance came along. It spread across Europe until, by the sixteenth century, it had reached even such outposts of civilization as England.
From 1600 to now has seen the flowering of European civilization. The artistic and most particularly the scientific output of Europe is most definitively seen in the last four centuries. And, although the Americas and the Indies were first visited by Europeans before 1500, it wasn't until a century later that the mercantilist economy truly got underway.
You see the pattern? A sixteen-century cycle, subdivided into four-century phases, which I call Chaotic, Emergent, Winnowing and Mature. The same pattern seems to show up in China, too, but with a six-century offset. I haven't researched China that much, but the Late Chou dynasty is now supposed to have reunited the empire in about 200 BC, after a dark age of some three or four centuries. Their last period of chaos began around 1000 AD.
The actual histories of each phase are determined by a sort of politico-economic style. In the Chaotic phase, organizations are small, short-lived, and unstable. In the Emergent phase, organizations struggle against the chaos, building in size and stability. In the Winnowing phase they struggle against each other, attempting to carve their own niche in the world. (In the Pre-Classical and Modern cycles, a number of nations co-existed. In the Classical cycle, the winnowing went on until only one political entity survived. Perhaps the cycles alternate, Imperial with Multi-national? With only one sample we can't tell.) In the Mature stage, the surviving societies reach the pinnacle of whatever sociopolitical organization they have settled, and finally disintegrate in stagnation or speed-wobbles, leading right back to Chaos again.
So where are we now? According to this theory, we are due to start the Chaotic phase of the cycle right about now, give or take ten years. Most of the minor cultures around the world have been subsumed into the European civilization, so they will go down with it. China is the only real wild-card. Has a century or two of Western domination been enough to drag them into our cycle? Or will they stay in the middle of their own Winnowing phase? If so, they should find the rest of the world easy pickings for the next few centuries. So the background of Buck Rogers In The Twenty-Fifth Century, where the world is dominated by China, may not be so far wrong.
As far as testing the theory goes, only time will tell. It's worth pointing out, though, that when the United Nations was formed there were about fifty nations in the whole world. Now, barely 50 years later, there are about two hundred. And economically, environmentally and politically the world is looking more precarious by the month.
We are living in interesting times. But you know what the Chinese thought about that.
RUC main page.