Nature Red in Tooth and Claw – The Scholar's Stage

Science Proceeds One Question at a Time

01 January, 2025Books and Literature, Nature Red in Tooth and Claw, Small and Simple Things

MIDWAY through his 900 page history of biology, zoologist Ernst Mayr considers the problem posed by Alfred Wallace. Wallace was a contemporary of Charles Darwin who independently developed a theory of speciation by means of natural selection. By the time Wallace came on the scene Darwin had been sitting on his evolutionary theory for two decades. Reading Wallace’s 1858 paper “On the Tendency of Species to Form Varities” spooked Darwin. He did not want to be scooped. Within a year Darwin had rushed his material into an “abstract which… must necessarily be imperfect” as it only gave “the general conclusions” of his theory, and offered only a “few facts in illustration” to support them. We know this abstract well: it was published as The Origin of Species.

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Dionysus Against the Daoists

29 September, 2024History, Narrative, Nature Red in Tooth and Claw, Religion, Romans and Grecians, The Middle Kingdom

IN WESTERN PHILOSOPHY AND AESTHETICS a contrast is sometimes made between the Dionysian and the Apollonian. Made famous by Nietzsche, this schema was first used to describe the thought and art of Ancient Greece. On the Apollonian end we have all that is rational, intentional, structured, abstract, or well ordered; on the Dionysian side we find all that is passionate, instinctual, chaotic, sensual or protean. The Apollonian strain of western culture is associated with daylight, law, mathematics, sculpture, discipline, and the city; the Dionysian strain is associated with nightfall, violence, poetry, music, drunkenness, and nature. The Apollonian element is stereotypically male; the Dionysian element is stereotypically female. The Apollonian ideal is realized by the solitary philosopher solemn in thought. The model Dionysian is an ecstatic madman frenzied in a crowd.

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Gaza and the Extremist’s Gambit

31 October, 2023Bargaining and Balancing, Dogs of War, Nature Red in Tooth and Claw, Near East

Can strategic sense be found in “senseless” violence?

This is the question I attempt to answer in a column I have out this week for Mosaic, tilted “The Extremist’s Gambit Helps Explain Why Hamas Attacked Now.” The piece was prompted by the many expressions of shock and puzzlement I read on social media when news of Hamas’ desert massacres spread across the internet. “There is a temptation to explain away heinous violence as a product of irrational emotions or beliefs,” I write. “Hamas terrorists, under this schema, murder Israeli children and partygoers under the influence of unquenchable ethnic hatreds, fanatical religious doctrines, or simply a perverse taste for cruelty itself.”θ All such explanations have an element of truth to them. Violence cannot be divorced from the primordial passions. But the more one studies violent action—both at the level of the state and at the level of the individual—the more instrumental it will appear.

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Scrap the Myth of Panic

15 July, 2021By The People, Community, Media, Narrative, Nature Red in Tooth and Claw, Political Theory, The Middle Kingdom, The Presidency

If there is one lesson the world should learn from the great pandemic of 2020, it is this: we must discard the myth of panic.

Or at least this is the case I make in an essay I have just published in Palladium. Fear of mass panic was key to delayed action against the epidemic in the PRC:

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Everything I Got Wrong in 2020

06 January, 2021Cognition, Complex Systems, Domestic Politics, Epidemiology, Nature Red in Tooth and Claw, The Middle Kingdom

What did I get wrong in 2020? What did I change my mind about? As I have argued that the mark of a good mind is a willingness to admit mistakes and to come to terms with why one might have made them, I am now forced into the uncomfortable position of trying to live […]

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Spengler and the Search for a Science of Human Culture

14 December, 2020Books and Literature, Culture, History, Nature Red in Tooth and Claw, Political Theory

Several months ago I wrote a few reflections on Ross Douthat’s newest book, The Decadent Society.[1] As I noted, Douthat’s most interesting claim is that we live in an age of intellectual sterility. We cycle ever backwards to the intellectual, cultural, and political priorities of 1975. In response, I argued that complaints of cultural sterility […]

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The World That Twitter Made

10 July, 2020By The People, Community, Narrative, Nature Red in Tooth and Claw, Political Theory

Allow me to explain something important about Twitter. This something is obvious to anyone with more than 10,000 followers on the platform but not so readily apparent to those with only 500 or so. My girlfriend is in the latter category, and she struggles to understand my animus for for it. The difference […]

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Of Words and Weapons

29 January, 2019Narrative, Nature Red in Tooth and Claw, Political Theory

The original signalling theorist. There is a principle, supposed to prevail among many, which is utterly incompatible with all virtue or moral sentiment; and as it can proceed from nothing but the most depraved disposition, so in its turn it tends still further to encourage that depravity. This principle is, that all benevolence is mere […]

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The Marvelous Machiavellian Mind Reader

03 November, 2018Cognition, Nature Red in Tooth and Claw, Political Theory

Vizzinni: But it’s so simple. All I have to do is divine from what I know of you. Are you the sort of man who would put the poison into his own goblet, or his enemy’s? Now, a clever man would put the poison into his own goblet, because he would know that only a […]

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Category Archives: Nature Red in Tooth and Claw

Science Proceeds One Question at a Time

Dionysus Against the Daoists

Gaza and the Extremist’s Gambit

Scrap the Myth of Panic

Everything I Got Wrong in 2020

Spengler and the Search for a Science of Human Culture

The World That Twitter Made

Of Words and Weapons

The Marvelous Machiavellian Mind Reader

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