Peering into our complexities

I have been reading the substack Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon since late 2024. It’s J.N. Nielsen’s more recently platform as his work is available on tumblr and there is a newsletter or two. I have been educated by all this and is my go to read on substack. Especially for the generalist reader (as opposed the general reader) with a weakness in and for (philosophy of history | history of philosophy) nexus.

By generalist reader I include myself and here used it to indicate an interdisciplinary approach which is as yet… not fully formed (see Problems of Interdisciplinarity ). 

This type of reading is broad, regardless of the reader’s own skills, trades, or specialties. The reading includes a lot of history, science, popular mathematics, deep dives into psychological pathologies, all within a framework that admits of evolution and the causal mysteries of emergence within a chaos/system cyberneticism. It will often circle back to social theory, at least by wway of letters and literature.

A decade ago I first heard of Big History, but never followed up on it very much, and I tended to think of it of life on earth, the recent long ages of the paleolithic where humans domesticated themselves with meetings called shared. About 15 years years ago Id did some catch up study on Hom oevolution, as it was something I had not chased up since the early 80s, so I whacked it in there.