Human history - the 60-second lecture
University of Pennsylvania history professor Alan Charles Kors has summed up human history in 100 words.
Here are the first three bullet points (out of 10):
• First, tribes: tough life.Link | More 60-Second lectures• The defaults beyond the intimate tribe were violence, aversion to difference, and slavery. Superstition: everywhere.
• Culture overcomes them partially.
(Via Good Experience)
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The lectures are all wonderful -- but oh noes, they're in RealPlayer format! What on Earth? Someone needs to give a 60-second lecture on acceptable video formats.
The text format is compact, efficient and universally supported. Try it!
Not all the lectures are so good, though: the one on "The Knowable Universe" is full of nonsense of the type usually reserved for works like Wigner's The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences and the works of Aristotle (that is, proclaim that what we can understand is all that exists, and ignore all the theoretical entities--advanced waves etc--that don't show up in reality.)
I recognize that this is by its very nature a simplified version of human history, but I can't help noticing that Kors has completely skipped over the importance of fishing in his bullet points. While the advent of agriculture is clearly of critical importance in human history, the perpetual provision of nutrition by the oceans to those living near their shores seems to repeatedly get glossed. I never understand why.
Eurocentric crap.
This is surprisingly inaccurate, as anyone who's taken an anthropology course would know. Culture's always been with us, though it's changed substantially. Furthermore, I think the hundreds of thousands of people currently relying on subsistence , often swidden, agriculture would be slightly upset at the suggestion that "rainfall agriculture" discourages community. This guy needs a heads up.
I'm extremely disappointed to see this here. I could eat up pages disputing every one of these points.
Hunter-gatherers live a "tough life"? Anyone who's seen the numbers knows the truth; hunter-gatherers have it easy (until slavering hordes of "cultured" farmers slaughter them and take their land).
Culture follows agriculture? Yeah- for the tiny sliver of the population with leisure time. Hunter-gatherers have loads of time to dance, make art, and reflect on life. A lot more than an average Mesopotamian peasant.
Irrigation favors autocracy, not community. And even if it did, how does communal labor favor loners any more than a priest-king? And how does either favor a loner over a hunter-gatherer society that gives each person an average range of a dozen square miles?
I'm stopping there for now, but COME ON. This guy obviously got tenure in the Edwardian era. His "history" is dated, unscientific, biased crap. It doesn't belong on BB except as flamebait.
Video and Audio files are available on iTunesU, so no worries about having to struggle with Real Player.....not that it will make you less angry about the subject matter :)