Apple's iTunes service has added many TV shows (at the great price of two bucks per show, no ads), amongst them the biography channel.
I have not watched TV now for a couple of years, and I love not having it. Even with TiVo, you're still a bit slave of it.
One of the few things (that you can't get on DVD) I miss though is the biography channel. I am just watching the bio of Michelangelo.
Talking about Renaissance, it is not just a hard word to spell, it is also an interesting concept. Why would a renaissance occur? I doubt anybody knows.
But I think we are having one right now. Possibly an even greater one than the one half a millennium ago. It is harder to spot, because it is planetary rather than limited to a small spot in Italy, but I really think we have unprecedented expansion spiritually, intellectually, and artistically right now for humankind. It is indeed Interesting Times, in all the ways that term can be understood.
5 comments:
Haven't we sort of been constantly in a Renaissance since the last big renaissance? Or since industralisation? Things really started rolling then and just seem to continue to expand exponentially....
I think that could be argued, yes.
Though something definitely happened in the late eighties to speed it up.
No, I think it went the other way around.
For European History only. There was the cultural flowering of European art, science, and liberation, generally called "The Renaissance," which happened roughly in the 14th, 15th, and 16th Centuries of the Christian Era in Europe.
Then there was another important era, The Enlightenment (in my opinion, simply an inevitable offshoot of The Renaissance) of roughly the 18th Century. The Reign of Terror ensuing amid the French Revolution was the worst outgrowth of said Enlightenment. Antibiotics were the best. :)
To me, it's all been downhill since The Englightenment. Yes, we have some technical advances. But none have improved quality of life, in the overall whole sense. We have improved MATERIAL wellbeing (though, only at the expense of community, time spent at work, and freedom of expression; not to mention economic depression and worldwide disaster and genocide). But we have not improved ANY spiritual or mental wellbeing. Humans aren't happier, just fatter and warmer.
Quoting Zonker: Au contraire, my dear chap.
Well, au contraire then, and also, I'm just speaking about European history. I can't make claims to knowing enough about, say, the way things have gone in the Ganges Valley, or Upper Volta.
(OK OK, Burkina Faso.)
The reason I was first spurred to respond is that, quite consistently, I get annoyed by a general assumption that "things were awful" in the European Middle Ages. Bad water, evil Cardinals, cruel executioners, everyone stuck inside an Iron Maiden for farting, poo on the streets, nothing for dinner but hard black bread and you got to throw it at one another when the King wasn't around to chop off your head.
These things weren't all true, or all of them true all the time, or even for all the population. So I like to disabuse "the general populace" of this typical misapprehension. I do see advantages to living nowadays -- especially the antibiotics, I like those -- but I see so many disadvantages too.
So I'm not really sure I could defend either proposition. I just want us to remember some historical accuracies. The best example, I think, is that of the common human work-for-wellbeing exchange. A hunter-gatherer puts forth on average about 16 hours a week (so I've read). After the Industrial Revolution, a common European would render sixty, which has since been whittled to fifty, and now an "official" forty that, unfortunately for me, actually turns out to be about 55. Especially if you include "necessaries" (things I wouldn't do, except that work requires it) like dry-cleaner runs, maintaining the car, etc. For what? Antibiotics, I guess.
I certainly can't defend the idea that we're worse off now than we would have been in the height of the social ills of the English Industrial Revolution of the early Nineteenth Century. But I could make a good case for a European existence from before industrialization, I think. At least, knowing what I know about it. At least, a case for "quality of life" not having improved or deteriorated significantly.
Naturally, it would all depend on what you meant by "quality of life." Somewhere in there, the right to spiritual development and personal freedom would have to be a concern. And antibiotics, of course ...
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