Grand Strategy always tries to get at the big picture, whether discussing politics, economics, warfare, religion, or philosophy. For this reason, Grand Strategy has evolved into a focus on civilization, which is the largest social construct yet contrived by human beings. The consideration of civilization, both from a theoretical and empirical point of view, leads to the consideration of the future, space exploration, and occasionally, yes, even grand strategy as it relates to the most notable social structures and movements of our time. Below is an overview of content. This table of contents is highly selective as I have made almost 2,500 posts across several different blog platforms. I will continue to add to this, and comments are most welcome for the structure of the outline or any other information that might be helpful.
Civilization
Theory of Civilization
● The Study of Civilization as Rigorous Science
● Addendum on the Study of Civilization as Rigorous Science
● Addendum on Suboptimal Civilizations
● A Metric for the Science of Civilization
● Science, Knowledge, and Civilization
● The Incommensurability of Civilizations
● Addendum on Incommensurable Civilizations
● Teleological and Deontological Conceptions of Civilization
● Narrow and Broad Conceptions of Civilization
● Comparative Concepts in the Study of Civilization
● Civilization States and their Attempted Extirpation
● Savagery, Barbarism, and Civilization
● A Copernican Conception of Civilization
● The Future Science of Civilizations
● The Terrestrial Eocivilization Hypothesis
● Infinitistic Historiography and Terrestrial Eocivilization
● The Principle of Civilization-Intelligence Covariance
● The Very Idea of Higher Civilization
● Miserable and Unhappy Civilizations
● Civilization in the Wilderness (from Argentina)
● The Heroic Conception of Civilization
● A Nietzschean Conception of Civilization
● The Clausewitzean Conception of Civilization
● Failed States and Failed Civilizations
● Addendum on Failed Civilizations
● David Hume and Scientific Civilization
● The Relevance of Philosophy of Science to Scientific Civilization
● Types of Scientific Civilization
● Folk Concepts of Scientific Civilization
● Invariant Properties of Civilization
● Temporal Structures of Civilization
● Axialization and Institutionalization
● What comes after civilization?
Case Studies in Civilization
● The Seriation of Western Civilization
● The Nation-State: a Sketch of its Origins
● Genocide and the Nation-State
● A Political Theory of Genocide
● Revolution, Genocide, Terror
● The Emergence of the Universal Surveillance State
● The Metaphysics of the Bureaucratic Nation-State
● Comte de Maistre’s Finitistic Political Theory
● The Principle of Autocracy and Spheres of Influence
● Appalachia and American Civilization
Industrial-Technological Civilization
● The Industrial-Technological Thesis
● Industrial-Technological Disruption
● The Open Loop of Industrial-Technological Civilization
● Chronometry and the STEM Cycle
● The Institutionalization of the STEM Cycle
● Philosophy for Industrial-Technological Civilization (related: A Fly in the Ointment)
● Addendum on the Iterative Aspects of Industrial-Technological Civilization
● Technophilia and Evolutionary Psychology
● Crony Capitalism: Macro-Parasitism under Industrialization
● Technical Civilization and its Discontents
● Industrialized Civilization and its Accidents
● How industrial accidents shape industrial-technological civilization
● Counterfactual Conditionals of the Industrial Revolution
● Modernism without Industrialism: Europe 1500-1800
● Innovation, Stagnation, and Optimization
● The Oldest Lesson of New Technology
● The Role of Science Fiction in Industrialized Civilization
● Civilization and the Technium
● The Genealogy of the Technium
● Automation and the Human Future
● Addendum on Automation and the Human Future
● Technological Employment and the Future of Humanity
● “…a temporary phase of maladjustment…”
● Autonomous Vehicles and Technological Unemployment in the Transportation Sector
Everyday Life in Industrial-Technological Civilization
● Ratepayers: Everyday Life in Late Industrialized Capitalism
● Our Less Than Optimal Labor Market
● The Extinction of the External Proletariat
● The Re-Proletarianization of the Workforce
● Compensating Losers in a Winner-Take-All Economy
Agrarian-Ecclesiastical Civilization
● The Agrarian-Ecclesiastical Thesis
● Addendum on the Agrarian-Ecclesiastical Thesis
● Some Rough Notes on Agricultural Civilization
● The Telos of Agriculturalism
● Cognitive Dissonance in Agrarian-Ecclesiastical Civilization
● The Pastoralist Challenge to Agriculturalism
● The Argument for Pastoralization
● Satisfactions of Life in a Subsistence Economy
Planetary Constraints upon Civilization
● Planetary Constraints 1 (Introduction to Constraints)
● Planetary Constraints 2 (Planetary Boundaries)
● Planetary Constraints 3 (Constraint Summary)
● Planetary Constraints 4 (The Spatial Constraint)
● Planetary Constraints 5 (The Temporal Constraint)
● Planetary Constraints 6 (The Gravitational Constraint)
● Planetary Constraints 7 (The Agrarian Constraint)
● Planetary Constraints 8 (The Population Constraint)
● Planetary Constraints 9 (The Energy Constraint)
● Planetary Constraints 10 (The Material Constraint)
● Planetary Constraints 11 (The Ontic Constraint)
● Planetary Constraints 12 (The Endemic Constraint)
● Planetary Constraints 13 (Tangential Ideas)
● Planetary Constraints 14 (Variations of Constraints)
● Planetary Constraints 15 (Constraints Beyond the Planetary)
Spacefaring Civilization and Exocivilization
● The Moral Imperative of Human Spaceflight (2011 100YSS)
● Existential Risk and Far Future Civilization (Centauri Dreams)
● Deep Time, Big History, and Existential Risk (Centauri Dreams)
● SETI, METI, and Existential Risk (Centauri Dreams)
● Cosmic Loneliness and Interstellar Travel (Centauri Dreams)
● Stepping Stones Across the Cosmos (Centauri Dreams)
● Extraterrestrial Dispersal Vectors (Centauri Dreams)
● What Kardeshev Really Said (Centauri Dreams)
● What Kardashev Really Said (Tumblr comment)
● Hero’s Steam Engine and the Apollo Space Program
● The Infrastructure Problem (Centauri Dreams)
● How We Get There Matters (Centuari Dreams)
● How We Get There Matters (Tumblr Comment)
● SETI Under Conditions of Constraint for Spacefaring Civilization
● A Needle in the Cosmic Haystack (Centauri Dreams)
● The Interstellar Imperative (Centauri Dreams)
● Who will read the Encyclopedia Galactica? (Centauri Dreams)
● Who will read the Encyclopedia Galactica? (Tumblr comment)
● Five Ages of the Universe Graphic
● Addendum on Degenerate Era Civilization
● The Finite Record of Classical Antiquity
● Transhumanism and Adaptive Radiation (Centauri Dreams)
● Transhumanism and Adaptive Radiation (Tumblr comment)
● Hybridization: The Take-Away Lesson
● A Half Century of Human Spaceflight
● Cosmic Hubris or Cosmic Humility?
● Spacetime Constraints and Possibilities
● Addendum on Extraterrestrialization
● The Fundamental Theorem of Astropolitics
● The Law of Trichotomy for Exocivilizations
● SETI as a Process of Elimination
● Why the Fermi paradox must be taken seriously
● Addendum on the Fermi Paradox
● Formulating an Anthropic Principle Worthy of the Name
● The Halos of Vanished Civilizations
● Methodological Naturalism and the Eerie Silence
Civilization and Warfare
● Civilization and War as Social Technologies
● Toward a Dialectical Conception of War
● Civilization, War, and Industrial Technology
● A Century of Industrialized Warfare (A Series on the First World War)
o A Blank Check for Austria-Hungary
o Serbia and Austria-Hungary Mobilize
o Austria-Hungary Declares War on Serbia
o The Second Hundred Years’ War
● Axioms and Postulates in Strategy
● Maintaining the Distinction between Strategy and Tactics
● Existential Lessons of the Cold War
● Existential Threats and Wars of Extermination
● Formal Strategy and Philosophical Logic: Work in Progress
● Deep Battle and the Culture of War
● Cosmic War: An Eschatological Conception
● The Generational Warfare Model
Civilization and Religion
● Settled and Nomadic Religious Experience
● Religious Experience in Industrial-Technological Civilization
● Religious Experience and the Future of Civilization
● Addendum on Religious Experience and the Future of Civilization
● Responding to the World We Find
● Transitions in Forms of Religious Experience
● What is a religious observance?
● Europe Returns to its Roots (Nov. 2013)
● Is Society Existentially Dependent on Religion?
● The Neurotic Misery of Islamic Civilization
● The Philosophical Basis of Islamic State
● Ash Wednesday and Identity Politics
Civilization and Ecology
● Braudel in Ecological Perspective
● Addendum on Ecological Temporality
● Ecological Temporality and the Narrative Paradigm (related: The Totemic Paradigm)
● Addendum on the Origins of Time
● Metaphysical Ecology Reformulated
● The Stratigraphy of Civilization
● Symmetry and Ecological Succession
● Hobson’s Choice, Evolution, and Civilization
● Local Extinction, Existential Risk, and Human Refugia
● Intellectual Niche Construction
● Sagan on Extinction, and on the Extinction of Civilizations…
● Ecological Succession in Cultural Geography
● The Conversion of the Terrestrial Power Grid
● Some Remarks on Environmentalism
● A Short Note on Marxism and Environmentalism
● The Ecological Conception of Nature
● Addendum on the Ecological Conception of Nature
Civilization and Urbanism
● The Rational Reconstruction of Cities
● Modernization, Industrialization, Urbanization
● Transit Disoriented Development
Futures and Destinies
● The Idea and Destiny of Europe
● Manifest Destiny: Roman and American
● Akhand Bharat and Ghazwa-e-hind: Conflicting Destinies in South Asia
● Another Future: The New Agriculturalism
● Predicting the Human Future in Space
● Futurism without predictions
● Fear of the Future (related: The Philosophy of Fear)
● Why the Future Doesn’t get Funded
Philosophical Reasoning
Studies in Formal Thought
● One Hundred Years of Intuitionism and Formalism
● Doing Justice to Our Intuitions: A 10 Step Method (related: How to Formulate a Philosophical Argument on Gut Instinct)
● The Church-Turing Thesis and the Asymmetry of Intuition
● Saying, Showing, Constructing
● Unpacking an Einstein Aphorism
● The Overview Effect in Formal Thought
● Simplicity, Mathematics, Symmetry
● A Question for Philosophically Inclined Mathematicians
● A Visceral Feeling for Epsilon Zero
● Fractals and the Banach-Tarski Paradox
● A Note on Fractals and Banach-Tarski Extraction
● Kierkegaard and Russell on Rigor
● A Leibnizian Conception of Rigor
● Aristotelian Science and Leibnizian Rigor
● What is the relationship between constructive and non-constructive mathematics?
● Constructivism without Constructivism
● The Vacuous Identity Principle
● Intuitively Clear Slippery Concepts
● Adventures in Geometrical Intuition
● Geometrical Intuition and Epistemic Space
● Epistemic Space: Mapping Time
● Precisification: Calibrating our Concepts
● Valéry’s Anti-Formalism (related: To see is to forget the name of thing one sees, Of Seeing and Forgetting…, To paint is to forget the name of the thing one paints.)
● Permutations of Infinitistic Methods
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Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon 