Swerdlow’s lecture opened with an interesting anecdote-right now, there are six billion people on the planet.\u00a0 Somehow Coca-Cola calculates that these 6 billion consume 37 billion drinks a day.\u00a0 Coke sells 1 billion Cokes a day, and their stated corporate goal is to get the other 36.<\/p>\n
Creepy?\u00a0 I think so.\u00a0 Swerdlow presented six points about the state of the world as of the end of the second millenium:<\/p>\n
Therefore he presents four questions:<\/p>\n
What is culture?\u00a0 It’s the behaviors, facts, patters, etc. that people pass on.\u00a0 National Geographic decided to look at the largest\/most important cities at the years 1, 1000 and 2000 A. D.-Alexandria, Cordoba and New York respectively.\u00a0 In the first millennium, there was one main new idea changing world culture-monotheism.\u00a0 In the second, Swerdlow sees two: modern science and human equality.\u00a0 More specifically, there are four important, overarching changes going on right now:<\/p>\n
1.\u00a0 The end of the remote<\/strong>.\u00a0 The U. N. estimates that only 1\/18 of the world’s population are in indigenous cultures.\u00a0 The Nazi’s had a plan to stop the mixing and migration of people from different cultures, but they never got a chance to implement it.\u00a0 They would have laid out zones in which no one would be allowed in or out.<\/p>\n On the other hand, there are medicines known to so-called primitive cultures that science has yet to discover.\u00a0 So what makes a culture primitive?<\/strong><\/p>\n 2.\u00a0 The growth of cities<\/strong>.\u00a0 Swerdlow said that when his father was born in North Dakota, only two percent of the population lived in cities, but now 50 percent do.\u00a0\u00a0 China, he said, has 100-200 million rural people in cities looking for work.\u00a0 Cities are a human invention and most of what we call culture comes from them.\u00a0 Other human ideas that have been picked up by some cultures and not others include the wheel, spaces between words and even reading silently.\u00a0 So why do dome ideas catch on?<\/strong><\/p>\n 3.\u00a0 Modern science<\/strong>.\u00a0 Why did modern science arrive in Europe in the 1600s-1800s and not elsewhere?\u00a0 In the 1400s China had a fleet of treasure ships four times longer than Columbus’ ships, but turned away from the outside world.\u00a0 So is technology resistible<\/strong>?<\/p>\n Swerdlow could only think of three cases where it has been.\u00a0 First, of course, is the Chinese turn away from navigation.\u00a0 Not only did the government stop building boats, but people were forbidden to and books were burned.\u00a0 Second, guns were introduced in Japan in the 1500s and by 1600 they had the most sophisticated guns in the world.\u00a0 They decided the weapons were too dangerous and gave them up.\u00a0 Finally, water separated Tasmania from Australia about 10,000 years ago, but by the time Europeans arrived in the 1700s the Tasmanians had given up even stone tools.<\/p>\n 4.\u00a0 The spread of American culture<\/strong>.\u00a0 According to Swerdlow, this is one of the first times in history a culture has spread so quickly without troops.\u00a0 He was in a rural area near Calcutta during a harvest festival.\u00a0 Elsewhere the movie Titanic was playing, and though the festival drew more people, it wouldn’t be that way for long.\u00a0 So what does it mean that American culture is spreading?<\/strong><\/p>\n Swerdlow could find one theme that may be driving the spread of American culture-equality.<\/p>\n The first thing I did to find further info was check out the National Geographic site.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Swerdlow’s lecture opened with an interesting anecdote-right now, there are six billion people on the planet.\u00a0 Somehow Coca-Cola calculates that these 6 billion consume 37 billion drinks a day.\u00a0 Coke sells 1 billion Cokes a day, and their stated corporate goal is to get the other 36. Creepy?\u00a0 I think so.\u00a0 Swerdlow presented six points […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[392,387,390,391,388,389],"class_list":["post-235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-cultural-imperialism","tag-culture","tag-equality","tag-globalization","tag-national-geographic","tag-science"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=235"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":236,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235\/revisions\/236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}