Commentary
Nature, according to Aristotle, abhors a vacuum.
The old Stagirite, writing in his “Physics,” was thinking about how the physical universe operates.
But a cognate idea can be found in many who later noticed that what we might call political and social reality operates according to a similar economy.
Readers of Rabelais’s “Gargantua and Pantagruel” will find a social “horror vacui” in evidence throughout those books.
I thought of that reality when contemplating the chummy meeting between two of the world’s chief despots, China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
The chief item on the agenda was the war in Ukraine, which Putin started a year ago and which Xi seems to be supporting with material as well as moral support….