Suchergebnisse

Fate -- what the Greeks called moira, 'the dealer-out of portions', does exist. Herodotus best captures its complexities: from his geographical determinism regarding the landmasses of Greece and Asia Minor and the cultures they raise up to his receptivity to the salience of human intrigues, he skillfully conveys how self-interest is often calculated within a disfiguring whirlwind of passion, so that the most epic events emerge from the oddest of incidents and personal dramas. It is this very contradiction concerning fate that produces our finest historians: men and women who discern grand determinative patterns, but only within an impossible-to-predict chaos of human interactions, themselves driven by the force of vivid personalities acting according to their own agency, for better and for worse. Fate is like the gods of ancient Greece: fickle and morally imperfect, but pliable for those who are brave. Adapted from the source document.

The Pax Romana was a period of relative peace and stability throughout the Greater Mediterranean. But history is often a matter of convulsions. In 200 AD, the Roman Empire still existed in the shadow of the recently deceased emperor and pagan philosopher Marcus Aurelius -- at a time when, according to Princeton University historian Peter Brown, 'a charmed circle of unquestioning conservatives' gave order to the world. By 700 AD, the Roman Empire had vanished from the Near East, Europe had become Christian, and the Near East and most of North Africa had become Muslim. In The City of God, St. Augustine revealed that it is the devout -- those in search of grace -- who have no reason to fear the future. And as the tribes of old now slowly come undone in the unstoppable meat grinder of developing-world urbanization, religion will be more necessary than ever as a replacement. Late Antiquity is useful to the degree that it makes you humble about what awaits you. Adapted from the source document.

Fundamentally, the past year has been about grappling with the most profound question in political philosophy: how to create legitimate central authority. No thinker has tackled these questions as painstakingly and eloquently as the 19th-century English philosopher John Stuart Mill. Adapted from the source document.

Because of the way geography illuminates and sets priorities, the physical contours of East Asia augur a naval century. China is engaged in an undeniable naval expansion. It is through sea power that China will psychologically erase two centuries of foreign transgressions on its territory -- forcing every country to react. The struggle for primacy in the Western Pacific will not necessarily involve combat; much of what takes place will happen quietly and over the horizon in blank sea space. Adapted from the source document.