Header image: Gauguin (1897) Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
The 2004 CBC Massey Lectures, “A Short History of Progress”
Part 1: Gaugin’s Questions where do we come from
- 3:25 Gaugin – Tahiti; he could not escape himself
- Huge painting; three questions
- 7:40 Our technological culture measures human progress progress by technology; “the club is better than the fist; the arrow better than the club, the bullet better than the arrow
- 10:23 weapons
18:43
- 27:00 the collapsing of time
- Cultural change: For most of history; the world that people were born into was the same when they died
- 30:00 putting out a rival’s fire in winter = death
- 34:30 paleo-racism Cro-Magnon
42:48
- 49:00 “tampering apes”
- We cannot live without our cultures
Part 2: The great experiment
- We know the first two
- Shaped less and less by nature, and more and more by culture: experimental creatures of our own making
- Economy; roughly a measurement of the human load on nature
- 14:00 we climbed the ladder of progress, we kicked out the rungs below