Someone should have said “every really good idea can be summarized in 30 seconds.” To whom shall we attribute that: Lincoln? Einstein? Twain? Jefferson? Jesus? Round up the usual suspects, indeed.
The School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania sponsors a series of lectures — some topic distilled down to 60 seconds.
These are geographies of human thought. A map of what to think, sans details. Here, we get the history of humans in 60 seconds (plus a few), from April 19, 2006:
Alan Charles Kors
George H. Walker Endowed Term Professor of History
- First, tribes: tough life.
- The defaults beyond the intimate tribe were violence, aversion to difference, and slavery. Superstition: everywhere.
- Culture overcomes them partially.
- Rainfall agriculture, which allows loners.
- Irrigation agriculture, which favors community.
- Division of labor plus exchange in trade bring mutual cooperation, even outside the tribe.
- The impulse is always there, though: “Kill or enslave the outsider.”
- Gradual science from Athens’ compact with reason.
- Division of labor, trade, the mastery of knowledge, plus time brought surplus, sometimes a peaceful extended order and, rules diversely evolved and, the cooperation of strangers – always warring against the fierce defaults of tribalism, violence, and ignorance.
- No one who teaches you knows what will happen.
You can find video here : Kors, Human History, high bandwith; low bandwidth.
A couple dozen such lectures, from 2006 and 2007, here.
Tip of the old scrub brush to Dr. P. M. Bumsted.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 