Looking Historically

Well, it's good to see that the new blog address is up and running. If statistics are true, and I have no doubt that most of them are, then it is about one out of every thousand blog readers who will actually muster the courage to post a comment. I'm pretty sure that with a blog as heady and intellectual as this one, the numbers are even higher.

By simple extrapolation, that means that this blog's readership is already well into the thousands. Congratulations, world, and welcome to a place of intelligence and big ideas!

Of course, not everyone who reads this blog really can understand all that it is about. A cursory scan of the comments for the last post will reveal that.

In my last entry, I brought in a little history and explained the reference to Sokrates, one of the ancient world's greatest thinkers and scientists.

Unfortunately, some readers took this a little too seriously and started conjecturing on history and historical figures.

Now history is definitely an interesting hobby, and I'm sure that there are many "historians" out there who enjoy the escapism provided by reading about musty and old events.

But studying the past isn't going to do much to help us understand and confront the big ideas and problems of the present and future. In fact, paying too much attention to mistakes made in the past may well encourage people to repeat those mistakes.

So please leave the history to the amateurs who know what they are talking about, and try to stay focused on the big ideas.

Because these ideas of the present, and this blog, will be what historians of the future will study as their own past.