Golden Ages
Meeting 5
In our final class we will explore how humans organized themselves after the Agriculture Revolution that forced them into contact with hundreds of thousands of other humans in large cities that evolution had not prepared them for. With two millennia to examine we will focus on bright spots called historical Golden Ages that produced relative (but not sustained) quantum jumps in the human condition, leading to the current Anglosphere.
This class was inspired and guided by learnings from the book “Peak Human” by Johan Norberg (now a senior fellow at the Cato Institute). The seven Golden Ages reviewed are Ancient Athens, Roman Empire, Abbasid Caliphate, Song China, Renaissance Italy, Dutch Republic and the Anglosphere.
This is a huge subject from which I will do my best to pull out relevant highlights to inform us of commonalities and differences in their creations and (for the first six) failures.
Besides reading the book referenced, I have not found videos of reasonable length that fully cover them all. I can recommend one video that covers Ancient Athens, which may come across as a travel promotional but is quite relevant at the beginning and end of this Golden Age. Another video (14 minutes) on the Italian Renaissance may be worth watching for those with particular interest in this era.
We will close with reflection on the current Golden Age, termed the Anglosphere, in relation to earlier ages, with a focus on similarities, differences and sustainability. Here is an interview of Norberg by John Stossel pointing to the Roman Empire and reflecting on how it and others collapsed with a tie in to our own Golden Age.
