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"Tradition?? The only good traditions are food traditions. The rest are repressive."

"There are two ways to think. The first is to trust to your ancestors, your religious leaders, or your charismatic professors. The second is to question, to challenge, to explore history for meanings, and to analyze issues. This latter is called Critical Thinking, and it is this that is the mission of my web site. "

Dr. Laina Farhat-Holzman  

August 2023

The World America Made (1 of 2)


We take it for granted that our world today is the inevitable benefit of evolution. Comparing today with any other century in the past, and we can see that most human beings are freer, have more choices, than our ancestors. This is certainly true for technological changes. Modern energy (replacing fire and the horse); travel (train, plane, car, ship) is better than horse and carriage; medicine (vaccines, drugs, surgery) is light years better than the barber/surgeon; even how we treat wo more...

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Technology Consequences

Human beings are the only species not fully governed by natural instinct. Because we are designed with brains and many choices, we have evolved civilizations, ways of living very different from our first emergence as humans. In our beginnings, we looked much like our related ape species: we hunted and gathered and migrated.

But over the millennia, we devised technologies that made our lives far more complex, and in many ways, better. Over each technological leap, however, the bene more...

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April 2022

Good and Evil Debate


Good and Evil are biblical terms that make the secular among us uncomfortable. Most human behavior lies somewhere in the spectrum between absolute good and absolute evil. There are exceptions, of course, people who are "wired" differently. There are a very few who cannot feel physical pain, which makes it impossible for them to imagine what pain is. (Such people make perfect torturers, if given the opportunity and are not taught differently.)

There are others wired on the more...

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Status of Women Around the World

January is a good time to see how women are doing around the world in the past year. The status of women has changed more in the past century than it had in 10,000 years. But these changes for the better (recognition that women are citizens, not property), has not changed in many of the darker, religious, backward places outside of the English-speaking world and Western Europe. Elsewhere, even with cautious new changes, there is unfortunate backsliding in recent years.

The backsli more...

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December 2021

Celebrating Food in History

At this time of year, we all celebrate some sort of food feasts to commemorate the past. These are not just meals, but are nostalgia for the past, a gift to our own families and friends.

For me, as an unapologetic historian (which includes food history), this is an opportunity to feast with respect for foods that have played a much longer role than just our families in what makes us human and civilized.

First, we are the only creatures who cook our food, a skill ear more...

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September 2021

The Two Faces of Religion


Religion is a basic institution that shapes a civilization. Our ancestors, like ourselves, had many questions about phenomena that they did not understand. We see this in children, as young as three, who ask "why?"

The basic definitions of religion always mention belief, belief there are gods or a god (divine source) that govern human society. These deities require sacrifices and prayers if they are to intervene on a person?s or a society?s behalf. This belief provides com more...

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Census Analysis (2 of 2)


In the 1990s, an alarmist but popular program was the need for zero population growth. Warnings were circulated that population growth was reaching disaster proportions, with the collapse of civilization imminent. This alarm was mostly ignored, especially in the lesser developed world, with many women having seven or more children. Civilization did not collapse, but overpopulation certainly did make the lives of many very unpleasant. Food crises were met quickly by the United Nations Foo more...

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Afghanistan Dilemma

The United States is just one more great power to leave Afghanistan after twenty years of trying to fix it. Unfortunately, Afghanistan has never been fixable, even before it became an actual country. It has a problem that was perfectly illustrated in a political cartoon on the Santa Cruz Sentinel: a map of Afghanistan divided equally into two parts: the west in the 21st century, the east in the 15th. It is two countries, and a third country, Pakistan, helping the 15th century part. How can we f more...

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What Is Infrastructure?

Many eyes glaze over when the word "Infrastructure" requires our attention. Most people think of such things as potholes in the street, bridges and tunnels collapsing, and power-shutdowns. We need a much more detailed discussion to understand what the upcoming Biden bill on infrastructure rebuilding is designed to address.

President Biden himself defined the term as he is using it: anything that helps people lead productive or fulfilling lives. That seems too broad a definition fo more...

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Violence Against Women (1 of 2)


One of the greatest historic mysteries to me is the global tradition of violence against women. Why would a man, who had a mother who cared for him, and later a wife and daughters who depended on him to love and protect them, hate women? Why do so many around the world beat and even kill their wives and sometimes their daughters?

This ancient practice has become socially unacceptable in every educated modern society today, supported by laws that protect women from the sti more...

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Rethinking Education (1)

Human beings are the only species that deliberately passes knowledge and remembrance of events to its young. Even the most primitive of our ancestors, once they developed language, used ritual and stories to bring the young into the collective memory of the group. Once writing was invented, history and learning became systematized. History was the first human educational discipline.

In some early civilizations, numbers and counting developed earlier than written words. Trading, wh more...

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Dumbing Down History Pajaronian

Human beings are the only species capable of contemplating and preserving memories of past events. All human cultures revere some form of history, initially by story-telling, and later through sculpture and visual arts, along with writing. Of course, when it is by memory only, as in pre-literate societies, each generation tends to edit the memory. People get a word wrong, an idea flipped, and lose an entire history when a society suffers plague or invasion.

The best record of pas more...

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Dumbing Down of America


It is obvious that America has been "dumbed down." When one quarter of us do not have the smarts to believe the reliable information sources trusted by the other three-quarters of us, we are in trouble. Are they too dumb to wonder why the Conspiracy Networks (Fox and QAnon) told them that former President Trump would be inaugurated on March 4, followed by executions of all the "traitors" who did not support him?

All election officials and all law courts (including the more...

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Pandemics in History, Part 1


The history of pandemics, going back to the first documented event, the Bubonic Plague, fascinates historians. We Americans have a pretty short attention span, in accord with our short history as a country (short when we compare ours with China?s, for example). We have revisited the strange history of the Spanish Flu pandemic that followed World War I, a deadly plague that killed millions of people worldwide, yet vanished in memory almost immediately afterwards. We have paid much more at more...

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December 2020

Missing: A Common Culture


Our founding fathers disagreed with each other on many things, foremost among the arguments was that of slavery. But they all shared a common culture, a common language, a common body of scholarship in which they were all educated.

The founders comprised of what was then the elite ruling class: all of them property owners, most of them college educated, except for George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, who were self-educated.

They were all products of the more...

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Perspective on History of Slavery


Much current discussion of the history of slavery ignores the larger picture. Slavery was universal, still exists in parts of the world, and was only finally abolished in the 19th century by England (1833), Russia (emancipating serfs in 1861), and by the United States in 1864. These emancipations were unique to the West, not the rest of the world, which still practices domestic slavery (women as property) and in some places in the Islamic world, sexual, agricultural, and mining slavery. more...

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September 2020

Putin?s Hit List


In the 11th century, a Persian (Iranian) Shiite cult leader, Hassan-e Sabah, holed up in a mountain top castle (Alamut) and recruited a fanatical cult of young men and women to assassinate enemies of the cult anywhere in the known world of the time. One Caliph was actually murdered at prayer in a mosque, hundreds of miles from Alamut. Nobody was safe from the Assassin Cult, which continued its deadly work for 135 years until a stronger force of killers, the Mongols, rampaging the world, more...

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Global status of Women


I generally do an annual "status of women around the world" column, and this year is an important year to see some progress. Historically, in every civilization from the first ones in Sumeria, women have been oppressed, deprived of any autonomy, and doomed to lives of drudgery if poor or being ornamental playthings, if rich.

Despite this, some bold and lucky women throughout the centuries have had power---either as rulers or with husbands whom they could manipulate. One e more...

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All Countries Have Underbellies

For the past 10,000 years, since our ancestors gathered into settled communities based on farming and trade, the pecking order of power was: rulers (or one ruler) on top, priests dealing with the gods, soldiers defending the community under the leadership of the ruler, merchants and traders bringing in the money, and laborers doing the heavy work of farming and digging irrigation systems or roads. Below that last group were women and slaves (mostly the same thing). India?s ancient caste system i more...

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December 2019

Food?s Place in History


We are now in a festive season when food plays a major part in family celebrations. As a history buff, I never pass up an opportunity to entertain with food and with history. This column will put food into its historic origins, showing how it influenced human development.

For thousands of years, our ancestors were hunter-gatherers, migrating to find foodstuffs good for eating and medicine. Women were the gatherers, and despite the bragging of men as hunters, the women prov more...

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America?s Founding Sin

Many American historians refer to the institution of slavery as America?s founding sin. There is no doubt that despite the Civil War and the much-delayed emancipation of slaves, the Black population has continued to fall behind in sharing America?s progress and road to prosperity. This is so, despite the number of Black professionals, college graduates, who have, in the past few decades, entered the mainstream. Just watch television sometime without looking at the screen and you will not be able more...

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America?s Gift to the World


When everything that the US has done to create and support a global world order is being challenged, both here and abroad, it may benefit us to review exactly what we accomplished. Knowing this might help us restore it after the next election.

Political scientist Michael Mandelbaum published a book in 2005: The Case for Goliath: How America Acts as the World?s Government in the 21st Century. Mandelbaum claims that the US has functioned as a de facto world government from more...

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America?s Gift to the World


When everything that the US has done to create and support a global world order is being challenged, both here and abroad, it may benefit us to review exactly what we accomplished. Knowing this might help us restore it after the next election.

Political scientist Michael Mandelbaum published a book in 2005: The Case for Goliath: How America Acts as the World?s Government in the 21st Century. Mandelbaum claims that the US has functioned as a de facto world government from more...

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Do We Know What Makes People Evil?


What could make a nice Middle-Class Norwegian murder 74 people because he hated his government? Or make an American Baptist college student convert to Islam and murder soldiers at an Arkansas recruitment center? Or a 19-year-old slaughter innocents at a Garlic Festival? Does human evil come from our genes (nature) or from our upbringing (nurture)? The debate is unresolved.

Genetic advocates can show that certain things in brain chemistry can create impulsiveness, hot tem more...

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September 2019

When Foreign Policy Gets It Wrong: Afghanistan



How the United States deals with the rest of the world is determined by our foreign policy. Centuries before we became a country, foreign policy was the business of kings, who had relationships with other kings, and diplomats who were dispatched abroad with the dual purpose of representing their kings and collecting data on the foreign country (spying).

A diplomat representing England?s Queen Elizabeth I, was in France where he witnessed an organized slaughter of F more...

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The Clash between Law and Religion


Throughout human history, religion and law had a sometimes uneasy relationship. Kings expected their laws and rules to be obeyed, even when they sometimes clashed with the religion of their subjects. In the ancient Greek play Antigone, the king ordered a dead rebel prince unburied, left for the jackals. Antigone, the dead man?s sister,
secretly buried the body in obedience to her religion, not the king?s law. She paid with her life, but the king was definitely in the wrong, as the more...

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Women?s Uneven Progress Globally



The treatment of women from the beginning of our species has been shaped by biology: female humans generally smaller than males, physically weaker, and hampered by childbirth and lactation. Even hunter-gatherer tribes, whose survival depended upon mobility, learned to space between births. A woman on the move can carry only one or two children.

After agriculture replaced hunting/gathering, when humans settled in villages, towns, and city-states, spacing childbirth more...

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The Future of Feeding the World

When our ancient ancestors gave up hunting and gathering to begin growing crops and taming livestock, our numbers grew. But even in the hunting/gathering phase, these ancestors did what no other creatures could: they tamed fire and began to cook their food.

Growing crops, a practice that began in river-watered lands (the Fertile Crescent, Egypt, and China) required another innovation, replacing dependence on rainfall with irrigation. Again, population growth exploded.

more...

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Sticks and Stones: Words Matter


"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never harm me." This saying was aimed at children, to arm them against verbal bullies. It is also linked to our First Amendment, freedom of speech, even when people to say things that we hate, but protect their right to say them.

Such freedom, however, ends with speech that can endanger life: falsely crying "fire" in a crowded theater, or urging riot in the public square. "Let?s go kill the?.aristocrats" during the Fr more...

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Darwinian View of Women


It has taken thousands of years in which human beings struggled to evolve into the extraordinary beings we are today. Over that time, certain assumptions were widely accepted about the capabilities and values of women, the smaller and physically weaker of the two genders. Women were expected to provide sexual pleasure to men, to bear children and rear them, and to be free domestic and farm labor. Men were able to maintain this system through brute force, and later, religion and law.
more...

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The Pros and Cons of Tolerance


That famous bastion of intellectual freedom and tolerance, Universities, have lately been accused of hypocrisy: tolerant only of those ideas believed by the majority and unwilling to give ear to opposing views. The terminology covering this has given rise to a new term: political correctness. Only certain ideas are correct and all others are false.

Voltaire is attributed to have said: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." To more...

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The Limits to Growth


The economic system that has done so well by us is Capitalism, a system that encourages competition and innovation, its excesses moderated by government regulations that protect the public from the abuses of the system?s earlier century. This delicate balancing act has depended on growth: population growth, productivity, and seemingly limitless innovation.

But now there is a problem for this system. Nothing in the biological world has unlimited growth. Things are born, li more...

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Coincidence or Collusion?

My head reels to learn the FBI is exploring if our president is a willing agent of a foreign country? Surely this can?t be true, can it? Are we seeing a coincidence: that President Trump just happens to believe the same things that Vladimir Putin does? Or do the Russians have something secret and embarrassing over him?

Until the Mueller report is released, we cannot know for certain which of these scenarios is credible. Many in Trump?s base are prepared to believe anything he says more...

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November 2018

What?s Happening to the Global Islam Project?

Islam as a global religion is having a crisis. Despite years of propaganda that began with the Iranian Islamic Revolution, the boast that Islam is on a roll around the world needs to be revised.

I have long rejected the mantra that "Islam is the world?s fastest growing religion," the illusion that people are rushing to convert. We really do not have any reliable numbers on how many people belong to a faith (modern censuses do not ask this question) so we must get the numbers from more...

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July 2018

Clash of Civilizations


Western Civilization does not have all the answers to those wanting a perfect society. Even the excellent American Creed (everyone is an equal citizen under the law) does not have all the answers, but both are far better than any other older, traditional civilizations.

Modern intellectuals do not like to repeat what seems to be the arrogance of 19th century Europeans and Americans who looked down on all other cultures. We shudder at the notion that only White people of No more...

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Clash of Civilizations


Western Civilization does not have all the answers to those wanting a perfect society. Even the excellent American Creed (everyone is an equal citizen under the law) does not have all the answers, but both are far better than any other older, traditional civilizations.

Modern intellectuals do not like to repeat what seems to be the arrogance of 19th century Europeans and Americans who looked down on all other cultures. We shudder at the notion that only White people of No more...

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Public Education and Democracy

The recent widespread teachers? strike was the first time in years that we had to think of public education in terms other than cutting taxes. The teachers in many states are terribly underpaid, and the strikes gave them the first pay boosts in decades. But the teachers were striking for more than their own wages: they wanted funding restored for infrastructure, books, and materials. Strikers showed us outdated textbooks held together by tape, and no money for paper and pens.

Asi more...

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