We believe that, for the first time in recorded history, human culture has produced at the least an outline of all the capacities required for us to begin to consciously direct our own cultural evolution for the better.

Methodenstreit mischten sich zahlreichenamhafte Historiker und andere Geisteswissenschaftlerein. Warburg leistete keinen direkten publizistischen Bei-trag, nahm jedoch, wie der Zettelkasten belegt, als passi-ver Beobachter intensiv an der Debatte teil.359

51:20 - [Aby] Not until art history can show51:22 that it sees the work of art51:23 in a few more dimensions than it has done so far51:27 will our activity again attract the interest of scholars51:31 and of the general public.51:36 Every serious scholar51:37 who has to venture on a problem of cultural history51:40 reads over the entrance to his workshop Goethe's lines:51:43 "What you call the spirit of the age51:46 "is really no more51:47 "than the spirit of the worthy historian51:49 "in which the age is reflected."51:57 In my role as psycho-historian,51:59 I tried to diagnose52:00 the schizophrenia of Western civilization52:02 from its images in an autobiographical reflex.52:10 May the history of art and the study of religion,52:13 between which lies nothing at present52:15 but wasteland overgrown with verbiage,52:18 meet together one day in learned and lucid minds,52:22 and may they share a workbench in the laboratory52:24 of the iconological science of civilization.

In each case, a small population produced a star-burst of pioneers who permanently changed our way of thinking. Genius erupted in groups as well as in individuals. It seems likely that these bursts of creative change were driven by a combination of cultural with biological evolution. Cultural evolution was constantly spreading ideas and skills from one community to another, stirring up conservative societies with imported novelties. At the same time, biological evolution acting on small genetically isolated populations was causing genetic drift, so that the average intellectual endowment of isolated communities was rising and falling by random chance. Over the last few thousand years, genetic drift caused occasional star-bursts to occur, when small populations rose to outstandingly high levels of average ability. The combination of imported new ideas with peaks of genetic drift would enable local communities to change the world.

Wells's biggest work is Outline of History, published in 1920, a picture of cultural evolution as the main theme of history since the emergence of our species.

I’m reminded of an old poem by Bertolt Brecht, which my Viennese grandmother, the daughter of a lifelong socialist and union man, taught me. It’s called “Questions From a Worker Who Reads”:

Because I am as interested in the attitudes and assumptions which are implicit in the evidence as in those which were explicitly articulated at the time, I have got into the habit of reading against the grain. Whether it is a play or a sermon or a legal treatise, I read it not so much for what the author meant to say as for what the text incidentally or unintentionally reveals.

von neumann was furious at him furious that he would waste precious machine time 00:04:20 doing the assembly that was clerical work that was supposed to be for people right and so we saw the same story happened just a little bit later when john backus and friends came up with us idea they called fortran this is so call high-level language where you could write out your formulas as if your writing mathmatical notation you could write out loops and this was shown to the assembly programmers and once again they just 00:04:46 they weren't interested they don't see any value in that they just didn't get it so um I want you to keep this in mind as I talk about the four big ideas that I'm going to talk about today that it's easy to think that technology technology is always getting better because Moore's law because computers are getting always more capable but ideas that require people to unlearn what they've learned and think in new ways there's often 00:05:10 enormous amount of resistance people over here they think they know what they're doing they think they know a programming is this programming that's not programming and so there's going to be a lot of resistance to adopting new ideas

evolution works on a much longer time scale right than than 00:35:09 any given life and so we need to we rely pretty heavily on helpful social norms right these cultural norms that actually teach us the right way to engage with each other and that can transcend any 00:35:22 one generation um and you know we worked really hard um in the west you know not just i mean this has happened everywhere but it you know we're where we're from um to acquire norms from from that we would 00:35:35 have called you know liberal democracy right that tolerance and respect and and these things and individual rights and you know it you see those things start to erode now and you start to see some of that base 00:35:48 nature taking back over the tribalism and the seeing the other as the enemy um the outgrouping of people and it we know from history it doesn't end well there right like the erosion of these norms 00:36:02 not only will continue to exacerbate collective illusions they i i think they're the biggest threat to free society that we face in a very long time yeah yeah you made a very convincing case for that

By exam-ining how movement toward equality has actually been produced, wecan learn precious lessons for our future and better understand thestruggles and mobilizations that have made this movement possible,as well as the institutional structures and legal, social, fiscal, educa-tional, and electoral systems that have allowed equality to become alasting reality.

Historians are aware of all this. Yet the overwhelming majority stillconclude that even when European authors explicitly say they areborrowing ideas, concepts and arguments from indigenous thinkers,one should not take them seriously. It’s all just supposed to be somekind of misunderstanding, fabrication, or at best a naive projection ofpre-existing European ideas. American intellectuals, when theyappear in European accounts, are assumed to be mererepresentatives of some Western archetype of the ‘noble savage’ orsock-puppets, used as plausible alibis to an author who mightotherwise get into trouble for presenting subversive ideas (deism, forexample, or rational materialism, or unconventional views onmarriage).11

Seeking to address the reductive opposition both between written and oral texts and between script and print in the Early Modern period, Fernando Bouza, one of Spain's most influential cultural historians, makes an elegant case for the equality and complementary natures of the various modes of communication.

social evolution

The Virginians needed labor, to grow corn for subsistence, to grow tobaccofor export. They had just figured out how to grow tobacco, and in 1617 theysent off the first cargo to England. Finding that, like all pleasurable drugstainted with moral disapproval, it brought a high price, the planters, despitetheir high religious talk, were not going to ask questions about something soprofitable.

Thus we can roughly define what we mean by the art of reading as follows: the process whereby a mind, with nothing to operate on but the symbols of the readable matter, and with no help from outside, 0 elevates itself by the power of its own operations. The mind passes from understanding less to under­standing more. The skilled operations that cause this to hap­pen are the various acts that constitute the art of reading.