Change is also a factor, we are all to aware of collapsing societies where violence climbs dramatically (e.g Iraq), but there are also downturns. For example, the EU has to stand out as an unqualified success. A continent that had always been at war for centuries now enjoys the longest period of peace it probably has ever has had.

We need more research into how societies (getting away from the State concept with all the conceptual traps that entails):
(1) Can contuinue to function effectively, ie not collapse.
(2) How to re-build (restart?) societies that have collapsed in the recent past.
(3) How to build societies from the ground up where there has never been any effective functioning.

Bit too much focus on destroying and not nearly enough on research into (re) building.

Ones to watch for, from an academic point of view on the elements of success and failure:
- Iraq, after the US leaves, how does it re-build. Will it ever get back to the reasonably healthy and peacefull multi-cultural mix it had before the invasion?
- East Timor. This never had been a nation (as we know it) and is trying to build itself up from nothing with a totally poverty stricken, traumatised people.

Looking at his data for wars of M=4, and plotting the number of wars breaking out in a given year for the period 1820-1929, he found excellent agreement with a Poisson distribution for 110 wars in 110 years. Deadly quarrels of smaller and larger sizes over different time periods also fit the Poisson distribution.

His conclusions: from murder to war there is a continuum of violence. The outbreak of wars of a given size is a random process similar to radioactive decay– you can’t tell when a given unstable atom will decay, but given a large enough sample and an empirically measured half-life, the number of decays for a sample of known size can be predicted.

There’s a lot more there, but that’s a start. Implications for 4GW– not qualified to decide, but agree and disagree with Joshua Faust at the same time. Things are changing beyond recognition, but, sadly, the nature of the human species toward violence has not.

Permit the luxury of borrowing liberally from Alvin Toffler: as we move forward in history, the scales are changing at dramatically different paces. Communication is instantaneous, mass effects are instantaneous, and so on. To borrow too much jargon, we are moving into the noosphere, almost beyond the information society.

Yet institutionally, we are stuck in the Industrial Age, with large immovable bureaucracies using large immovable groups to perform large tasks. But the world isn’t large, at least in terms of conflict — the post-Cold War era has been defined by micro-conflicts. Nearly 20 years on, we see nothing but small wars, yet not a single institution of the government (hell, or of society) has changed to keep pace.

These are half-formed thoughts. But it seems, given the otherwise philosophical bent of this site, that to discuss things only in terms of 4GW is limiting. The real, underlying process is much bigger, and much more dire.
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Fabius Maximus replies: A brilliant insight, as usual.

This spiritual classic was written by Lorenzo Scupoli, a sixteenth-century Venetian priest. Immensely popular in its own day, it was ranked by Francis de Sales with the Imitation of Christ. In the general rapport between Western and Eastern Christendom, it reached Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, who first recognized its immense spiritual worth, and later, in the nineteenth century, Theophan the Recluse, both of whom edited and translated the work.

Rich in its references to the teachings of the saints and Fathers, Unseen Warfare combines the insights of West and East on that spiritual combat which is the road to perfection and the stripping away of all that militates against it. Staretz Theophan wrote in his foreword, “the arena, the field of battle, the site where the fight actually takes place is our own heart and all our inner man. The time of battle is our whole life.”

From this, we have a continuum that also takes us to Jesuits hidden in Elizabethan English country house cubbyholes, the Gunpowder Plot, the early Baroque style, and the Thirty Years War.

For those of you who want to avoid / denounce the theological implications of this, note that interpretations of “jihad” appear to resemble “Spiritual Combat”; that this combat may very well be a rehash of Manicheanism; that Plato, who in both the Gorgias and the Republic considers “might is right,” in his Phaedrus depicts a type of spiritual combat; and that the “commies” with their dialectic also believe something like this. (Sorry Fabius, but I had to work the “commies” in somehow.).

1. I take it I should read “it’s just a commponplace observation” as meaning you have no evidence, nor any desire to collect it?

2. -ie is an English diminutive suffix, similar to the Latin -ulus or the Spanish -ito. Alternatively, if you are deriving commie a different way, what way is it, and why?
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Fabius Maximus replies:
1. Quite right.
2. “Commie” has been a commonplace term in the American language for several generations. Whatever the derivation, it does not convey “smallness of the object named, encapsulation, intimacy, or endearment.” I suspect we — you, I, everyone reading this — all know the meaning of “commie.”

1) Do you have evidence for this explanation especially in contrast to, say, the Church committee and “baddie” hunts?
2) Why the use of the diminutive? Does it indicate that your statement should not be taken seriously, that you rhetorically deny Communists manhood (or womanhood?), or something else.
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Fabius Maximus replies:
1. It’s just a commonplace observation. With Bundy in 1961, the Natl Security Advisor is often as or even more prominent than the Sec State. Insider accounts since consist of comlaints about the slow speed and low quality of State’s work, and increasing reliance on the parallel NSC apparatus.
2. I do not consider “commie” a diminutive form of “communist.”