In this book you'll find empirical studies and research ideas, embedded within their conceptual contexts and historical backgrounds. It is based on quantitative research complemented by qualitative analysis of events relevant to the topics analyzed. In this sense it attempts to transcend the quantitative-qualitative schism within the social sciences, providing quantified insights into manifold events that are of importance and merit investigation.

Preface   I was able to answer the dentist's question about my profession few seconds before his drill ended the conversation: 'I teach statistics' I said. He replied: 'Everybody hates statistics.' From Disraeli's 'Lies, damn lies, and statistics,' to Huff's How to Lie with Statistics...sub sole, nihil novis. However, statistics does not have to be hated, boring, deceptive, and devoid of meaning.

Sic et non  Pearson's conceptualization of the coefficient of correlation dawned the opening of the new age, when the Aristotelian, categorical Sic et Non was transformed into the stochastic, graded and quantified concept. However, with the passage of time, the initial excitement that accompanied the Galton and Pearson's introduction of the coefficient of correlation was soon dampened by skeptics who ridiculed it with anecdotes about a positive correlation between the number of stork's nests and the number of live births with the moral that statistics proves that storks deliver babies. Statistical textbooks, separated from logic, repeated the mantra that 'correlation does not imply causation,' neglecting to add that the correlation is also the constant companion of causal relationships, i.e., that the correlation is necessary, but per se not sufficient determinant of causality.

Sir Ronald Fisher (1890-1962)
Obfuscation  Then came the time when Sir Ronald Fisher, Balfour Professor of Genetics at Cambridge, started the gradual obfuscation of the discipline, maintaining that  "smoking does not cause lung cancer," and replacing theoretical concepts with computational mnemonic such as the 'sum of squares' and 'mean square,' that are readily grasped by clerks, but detract from the conceptual understanding of data analysis. This in the long run resulted in textbooks where a single formula, replete with summation signs and abundant subscripts, sometimes spanned several pages. This progressive conceptual degradation of the discipline followed the jester's advice

To make a name for learning
When other ways are barred
Take something very easy
And make it very hard

Search for meaning For centuries, the philosophical controversy between the rational and religious conceptualizations of reality was the driving force of liberal education that cultivated the intellect and society. The separation of social sciences from philosophy contributed to the emergence of social niveau dominated by taboos with textbooks where nothing is controversial, so nobody is offended and everybody is bored. This book is an attempt to reintroduce philosophy to statistics by defining visual statistics as a modern successor of epistemology in search for meaning, to liberate statistics from its conceptual degradation, and to promote visualization of data structures that before the advent of virtual reality could only be imagined.

Les chiffres sont les signes de Dieu (Statistics are signs from God)

Les chiffres sont les signes de Dieu Data for the studies described in this book were gathered from many sources. Aside from databases collected during my teaching and research at academic institutions scattered throughout countries on three continents, the major database utilized was one collected by Quincy Wright during his lifetime project on the frequency of wars and published in his monumental book A Study of War. Another invaluable source of data was the Book of World Rankings, periodically compiled by the New York based Facts on File Corporation and the World Model Group. This compendium is prefaced with the saying, Les chiffres sont les signes de Dieu, a notion we readily subscribe to. This book contains original research into psychological, sociological, cultural, and religious phenomena within the framework of Eastern and Western cultures. It describes some aspects these cultures that have potential to improve the quality of our lives, promote harmony within our society, and lessen the probability of armed conflicts. By Eastern culture we understand the classic Chinese cultural sphere, encompassing much of the area of the present China, Japan, Korea and Southeast Asia and dominated during most of its existence, spanning millennia, by the Confucian philosophy. By Western culture we understand cultures of Europe, Americas, and the Middle East with their dominant Judaist, Catholic, Muslim and Protestant traditions, humanistic traditions of the Enlightenment, and traditions of the open systems of philosophic and scientific inquiries. There are many possible narratives describing the complex social phenomena. The narrative of this book, based on multivariate analyses of empirical data, attempts to provide quantified perspectives at some of these problems complemented by related relevant studies and by added historical perspectives.

Work, finish, publish was what Faraday used to tell his students. This Faraday's maxim can be could be augmented within the visual statistics by contemplate, experiment, visualize, integrate. The qualitative analysis should precede the research design, relevant data must be collected and analyzed, the obtained structures visualized, the results integrated with the initial phenomenological analysis, the obtained findings published, and results of the published studies integrated.

The Rosetta stone  With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the nuclear balance that kept peace for more than a half of a century disappeared and the probability of warfare, including a nuclear war, was increased. Questions such as whether wars are legitimate means for solutions of problems between nations, whether they are conceivable if certain conditions are met and then, what is the ‘just war,’ became to gain a renewed urgency.

Wars are complex phenomena that, however, consist of some preventable components. We have reached this conclusion on the basis of our longitudinal studies of the war cycles, characteristic of Western and Eastern civilizations. We observed not only that the classic Chinese civilization was characterized by markedly slower war cycles of lower intensity than the war cycles within the Western civilization, but also that during the periods when the influence of Confucian philosophy receded, the cycles of Chinese wars accelerated and began to approximate the war cycles characteristic of the Western civilization. Quantification of the different frequencies of the armed conflicts within the context of the principal civilizations of the East and West naturally lead to questions about causal determinants of this periodicity of warfare, spanning centuries. In this search, we were guided by contours of the structure of values, attitudes, opinions, practices and beliefs, developed within the general conceptual framework of our trans-temporal cognitive matching methodology, and validated on groups of subjects as diverse as American business executives and Korean Buddhist monks. It seems that this comparative research could provide us with the Rosetta Stone that could help us to unravel some of the factors of the preventable causes of warfare.

Weaving the web transcending implicit assumptions enveloping each civilization as an invisible cocoon ...

The snare and the web  Most research in the social science is carried out within the conceptual framework of its parent civilization. To transcend implicit assumptions enveloping each civilization as an invisible cocoon is difficult. This transcendence usually requires close to total immersion in other cultures and strains one's capacity for adaptation, accommodation, and adjustment. The author not only traveled in the countries talked about in this book, but lived and worked in most of them. He tried to escape the snare of ‘I have been there and therefore I know’ by carrying experiments and gathering objective data. This book is structured along a series of quantitative studies carried on during four decades in North America, Europe, Japan, Korea, and China. This original research subsumes quantified cognitions of relatively large groups of people approximating cognitions of their parent populations.

We attempted to focus the mirror and to light the lamp ...

The mirror and the lamp  Quantitative social sciences were patterned after the model provided by natural sciences. The motivation beyond most research in social sciences is the hope that modern research methods will give us control over our social environment comparable to that natural sciences afforded to us over our physical environment. However, the impact of social sciences on our societies has been small compared to that of religion. One of reasons for this is the unwillingness (or fear?) to discuss issues related to religion. This hinders our understanding of the role of preventable factors leading to warfare which may result in deaths of thousands or millions of human beings and immerse us in the cauldron of nuclear war. By contrasting the Confucian and Judeo-Christian civilizations, we attempted to focus the mirror, which helps us to better know ourselves, and to light the lamp, which illuminates our search for a better future.

I admit the difficulty of believing that in every person there is an eye of the soul ...

The eye of the soul   We might as well end with a few thoughts excerpted from Plato’s Republic (9640 HE, 360 BCE) where Socrates observes that

"Perceived phenomena are of two kinds. Some of them do not invite thought because they are obvious, while some are not what they appear to be, thus a further inquiry is needed. In this case the intellect naturally summons to its aid calculation. As intellect is to opinion, so is science to belief. I must add how charming the science is if pursued in the spirit of a philosopher and not that of a shopkeeper. I admit the difficulty", Socrates continues, "of believing that in every person there is an eye of the soul, as there are two classes of persons: those who will learn from your words and those to whom they will be utterly meaningless. Your main aim in carrying on the argument thus should be your own improvement. Leave it to others which benefit, if any, they may receive.”