After graduating from Harvard summa cum laude in 1967, I earned my doctorate in a program specially created to accommodate my original theory of why civilization has developed in the problematic ways it has. Published as The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution by the University of California Press (and still in print), that was the first piece in my life’s work-- an “integrative vision” of the forces at work in human civilization that must be understood and overcome for us to achieve a better human future, or indeed for human civilization to have much of a future at all. Believing this “integrative vision” has the potential to have beneficial effects, I am – at the age of 76 – playing like an NFL team, behind in the fourth quarter, determined to leave it all on the field. (Much of my life’s work is archived at A Better Human Story – Andrew Bard Schmookler.) Email: andybard [at] shentel.net
by Andrew Bard Schmookler [This is the sixth and final entry in the series I’ve offered here.] Please Permit Me to Talk as if Compelled by Truth Serum It’s an awkward position to be in. Much of what I’ve spent more than a half century creating would likely die with me if I died now.…
by Andrew Bard Schmookler Our contemporary secular worldview, though filled with knowledge and insights, is inadequately developed. It fails to provide the means for comprehending some important realities that religious perspectives — from which the secular culture has departed — were able, in their way, to provide. It is not surprising that the secular worldview…
by Andrew Bard Schmookler In the previous piece in this series, “The Discernible Reality of a ‘Force of Evil’,” I attempted to show that there is a Force – visibly operating in the world — that can reasonably be called a “Force of Evil.” (With “Evil” defined as “a coherent force that consistently works to…
by Andrew Bard Schmookler I think of that title as like a carnival barker’s come-on to get people to enter the tent. The “tent” is where I display an idea from which that statement about human history and human nature necessarily follows. That approach seems appropriate because, while the carney barker’s line is quickly understood,…
by Andrew Bard Schmookler I think a lot about the fate of human civilization these days. The subject worries me because, after a half-century of studying the destructive forces at work in the systems of civilization, my gut feeling is that it is no better than a toss-up whether, in the coming generations or centuries,…