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Harry Nimbus's avatar

Your latest essay resonates with an idea I've been reading about that the study of history can help a decadent society understand its present and maybe brighten the dark future it seems headed for. That we have enduring archetypes to aid in our search for truth finds correspondence, I think, in the notion that the past is always present. Benedetto Croce said that "all history is contemporary history," and a quote attributed to Mark Twain draws a beautifully coherent analogy between history and poetry: "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." The past and present, for example, is brimful of tyrants who think they understand history and so can shape it and direct it to a preferred outcome through their anti-human ideologies, and Clive James already wrote in 2006 that the West was renewing a "familiar pattern . . . of despotism and terror that so often succeed the collapse of a representaive system." There's something holographic, it seems, about the way this pattern connects to so many points in history, like a reference wave. And since I also share with my fellow human beings the widespread habit of repeating mistakes that encourage self-destruction, the concept of a living past feels very real to me in both an inner and outer sense, and worth exploring in a way that could benefit the future.

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RDM's avatar

<sigh> So much in these articles. Impossible to comment efficiently and completely…

“…when things don’t add up, it’s not the phenomena that require correction, nor is it the job of science to make stuff up so the math works. The conclusions must show correspondence with the observed phenomena…”

This. Is. It.

Period.

We found Reality too intractable, but since we invent/discover/“own“ Mathematics, that’s the pit we have fallen into. (I’m not entirely a crank, here: I have 1 degree in physics and another one in advanced mathematics. I love the stuff...)

A la Turner and Lakoff, I think we see and use *metaphor* to help develop our correspondences … basically an infinitely rich linguistic construct.

With the death of proper poetry in science our Science withers as well. I basically see most ‘science’ these days as engineering refinement, not extending our core understanding of the Universe.

Great article…geez….Thank You.

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