Tuesday 27 February 2007

Statement concerning the crisis watch page

The crisis watch site is intended to keep track of evidence for a coming dark age by monitoring signs of disintegration, disorganisation and discohesion in today's world. At this point, we wish to remind readers that the term "dark age" is not to be understood not in the sense of some (quasi-)religious end-time but as

"an extended period of significantly reduced (political) integration, (economic) organisation and (social) cohesion."

However, since some readers appear to have misunderstood the term "dark age", we have decided, for the time being, to rename the successor site of the "dark age watch" into crisis watch.

The difficulty consists in deciding which developments are merely part of a short-term fluctuation and which suggest the kind of larger transformation that might constitute a dark age. For example, an individual car bomb may be a disintegrative event, but in itself it proves nothing about the way history is heading.

It is therefore important to keep in mind the long term context - not just how, for example, a particular war is developping today, but how the ability of leading nations to supply peace to the world compares with the situation fifty or a hundred years ago. When the structural similarities seem striking, attention is also devoted to empires and civilisations in ancient times. Whilst we focus on western societies, we do include news from all over the world in order to collect evidence of trends that could either foreshadow a worsening outlook in the west or counter our working hypothesis (e.g., the hopes of many people with regard to global economic prosperity seem to rest on Asia these days).

The picture is confirmed by correlations between the three categories of change, especially where developments in one area might reinforce developments in another area (e.g. declining social cohesion might have a harmful effect on economic organisation).

The attempt is admittedly open to criticism. Our observations are based on the theory of dark ages which itself might be faulty. Moreover, theories with a vast scope can perhaps too plausibly accommodate a multitude of diverse observations.

The impressionist approach also lacks the quantitative methods and systematic rigour necessary to call the undertaking scientific in the modern sense of the word. Though, to be fair, many of those methods have often failed to generate meaningful predictions within mainstream social science, where they have been extensively applied.

Even so, the characterisation of dark ages is based not on our prejudices but on the way that historians and others write about the past. For example, we consider disintegration (disorder, fragmentation) as an aspect of soccietal decline, not because we ourselves 'like' or 'dislike' such developments, but because historians themselves usually judge disorderly, fragmented societies in a such way.

Of course, individual historians in fact assess the world in different ways. Nevertheless, there is a broad consensus about which were dark ages and which were ages of prosperity and stability, and a general recognition that say rising crime rates and falling incomes denote the less successful phases of a society's history.

The crisis watch site overall tries to imagine how today's events will seem to far-future historians, who will think in terms of the big picture and will not be absorbed by the detail as those of us are who happen to be living through this time.

The bottom line: moral, normative and political statements are neither a goal nor do they form a basis from which we operate.

The difficulty consists in deciding which developments are merely part of a short-term fluctuation and which suggest the kind of larger transformation that might constitute a dark age. For example, an individual car bomb may be a disintegrative event, but in itself it proves nothing about the way history is heading.

It is therefore important to keep in mind the long term context - not just how a particular war is going today, but how the ability of leading nations to dominate and supply peace to the world compares with the situation fifty or a hundred years ago.

The picture is confirmed by correlations between the three categories of change, especially where developments in one area might reinforce developments in another area (e.g. declining social cohesion might have a harmful effect on economic organisation).

The attempt is admittedly open to criticism. Our observations are based on the theory of dark ages which itself might be faulty. Moreover, theories with a vast scope can perhaps too plausibly accommodate a multitude of diverse observations.

The impressionist approach also lacks the quantitative methods and systematic rigour necessary to call the undertaking scientific in the modern sense of the word. Though, to be fair, many of those methods have often failed to generate meaningful predictions within mainstream social science, where they have been extensively applied.

Even so, the characterisation of dark ages is based not on our prejudices but on the way that historians and others write about the past. For example, we consider disintegration (disorder, fragmentation) as an aspect of decline, not because we ourselves 'dislike' such developments, but because historians themselves judge disorderly, fragmented societies in a negative way.

Of course, individual historians in fact judge the world in different ways. Nevertheless, there is a broad consensus about which were dark ages and which were golden ages, and a general recognition that say rising crime rates and falling incomes denote the less successful phases of a society's history.

The crisis watch site overall tries to imagine how today's events will seem to far-future historians, who will think in terms of the big picture and will not be absorbed by the detail as those of us are who happen to be living through this time.

The bottom line: moral, ideological and political statements are neither a goal nor do they form a basis from which we operate.

Saturday 24 February 2007

In this post, I have left out the title...

Test post

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