Owl & Ibis, Meet Fox & Hedgehog!

Image: ChaptGPT

I stumbled onto the writings of Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) a few years ago. His ideas about the fact of global cultural pluralism and the logical necessity for a certain level of tolerance of others made sense. Not long before, I had read the major works of Martin Buber (1878-1965), especially his I and Thou (1937) giving attention to his insistence that understanding people required considering and accounting for their relations with each other. At that time, I was writing my two-volume book Cultural Evolution: Caught in the Devil's Bargain. It took five years of exhileration and exhaustion, and at times disgust but I published it, in places unpolished, in late 2024. I spent the early part of 2025 decompressing. I have since been restlessly adrift searching for my next mind project, but nevertheless reading and archiving many books, articles, essays that strike my fancy.

Then, a few months ago, I read Berlin's 1953 book The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History. This is a book of exploration of the Tolstoy's vacillating ideas about the purposes and possibilities of writing history, as expressed mostly in his novel War and Peace. In his book, Berlin diverges from Tolstoy's vacillating take on writing history - to generalize, being a hedgehog, or just sticking to the multitude of facts, a fox's vidw - to consider which approach was best for understanding and describing human thinking and behavior, scientifically and humanistically. H&F's Introduction by Michael Ignatieff led me read Berlin's The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas (1990, 2nd ed. 2013).

In late 2025, I became like the person who bought a new car and suddenly realized how many other people had the same make and model. Or, like the carpenter with a new hammer, everything looked like a nail. I was finding hedgehogs and foxes everywhere!