I wish I would've taken your class in person. I very much enjoyed this lecture. Very engaging and thoughtful.

Wow Professor, you blew my mind with your lecture. Please upload more. Thank you

Great story! I have several decades behind me, yet I am still discovering knowledge and wisdom.

“Big words are just a bunch of little words ganging up to intimidate you” 😂

Love it ,the way you explain it its just amazing

Public schools need to be reformed and the entire country needs to work towards promoting education and intelligence. Stupidity is winning right now, and I don’t know how long we can keep this up.

Awesome video

the lecture is amazing and very educational ....please upload more

"What are you a bunch of heathens?" made me laugh. I was expecting the Spanish Inquisition to spring out from behind the blackboard.

Thx for the excellent lecture, George. When you mentioned the depressing fact that we don't have time to read even less than 1% of all the books ever written, there's one I HIGHLY recommend to you and your students called, "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman. He has a few videos online that are good. The book is one of the most important books I think any adult (especially American) can read.

Minute 48:47 I think that has to do with the visible range of light. Humans' vision range is so small in comparison with the actual range. There is so much more than what meets the eye.

@georgebrooks7775

5 жыл бұрын

That explanation resonates well with us modern people--but do you think ancient Mayans would have been thinking along those lines? You have to read ancient myth from a universal point of view, in terms of common ideas and wisdom that all peoples of all times share.

18:03

Minute 44:30 the teacher ask if the students think the U.S. will exist in 500 years. Ask that same question today and you see if the answer has changed.

@georgebrooks7775

2 жыл бұрын

I have, actually, since I recorded this 6 years ago, and as you suspected students are a bit more pessimistic today.

Reading PV now and stumbled on your lecture while searching for presentations on the topic.... You are a great presenter and the lecture is quite engaging. Despite that i can't help but being annoyed (for lack of a less harsh word) when modern values and interpretations are thrown against ancient texts. This is the problem i had with teachers' lectures throughout many of my high school classes. Animals were created to be food of a better creature, for lacking the ability of worshiping the gods, while their communication skills were neither here nor there. Mud-people were a failure on gods' part. How unfortunate - even gods make mistakes.... Their laziness is hardly the issue. They were created so and are not to be blamed for gods' bad work. Wood people - cruel.... for hurting animals. We are talking about a society where human sacrifice was the norm. Small children, anyone??? i don't think we can remotely opine on the definition of cruelty in Mayan world. Also wondering what age are the kids in that class. Where i come from, this would be a good intro to mythology for 12 y olds. Kids that age should well know what "anthropomorphism" means. Overall good job on making this topic accessible. A like from me.

@georgebrooks7775

4 жыл бұрын

Well, I'm glad you like the lecture, despite all your rejections of the content. I'm not sure I quite understand why: I agree that in reading ancient myth one must refrain from projecting our own modern context upon it, but that is exactly why the point is to look for "universal human lessons"--all societies have ways of teaching that one must respect the gods, must be hardworking, and should avoid unethical or destructive behavior as understood by that society. The language of the story is pretty straightforward: the animals could not communicate and their fate is to kill and eat each other--an etiology explaining why animals seem to live differently than humans, lacking civilization, and promoting the insight that communication is key to establishing stable societies; the mud-men just lay about all day, doing nothing--the point is not that the gods made a mistake: that is a projection of a modern theological question onto ancient peoples who would not have even thought about that; and the wood-men...what could be more obvious? They beat their animals, burn their cooking pots, rip off tree branches, and forget the gods...the story TELLS US that that is WHY they were destroyed in a flood sent by the gods, and the ethical lessons are reinforced in stating that all the things they had abused did nothing to help them. What goes around comes around, karma, the golden rule...every society teaches that universal lesson. And it is a very outdated notion that Mayans regularly practiced human sacrifice (the Aztecs perhaps, but it is rare to find a clear example of this for the Mayans)...and even if they sometimes did, that doesn't mean that we should project that onto every person and the life they lived every day in ancient Mayan society--do you really think ordinary Mayans woke up and thought, "Gee, who should I human sacrifice today?" These notions make for alluring historical fiction, but if a rare example of human sacrifice taints an entire society, then the ancient Minoans must have just been a bunch of human sacrificing monsters as they seemed to have made this ultimate sacrifice as Thera was erupting and about to destroy them. You will also find human sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible--the story of Jepthah's daughter is one, and notice how Abraham is not terribly shocked when God asks him to sacrifice Isaac. You can find a rare example of human sacrifice in many ancient cultures--to assume that it must then be the lens through which you view every ordinary facet of that culture is an amateurish mistake. Finally, I'm glad you live in a place where 12-year-olds know the meaning of 'anthropomorphism'...I don't; and it would be a blunt error on my part to assume that the high school graduates who have found their way into an open-door institution all had a sterling public school education. I wish it were true, but as a professor you quickly learn that you have to teach the students you have, not the ones you wish you had.

@ameremortal

4 жыл бұрын

These lectures have a different meaning to a 12 year old than they do to an 18 or 38 year old. I find that the knowledge I’ve acquired over time gives me more ways to bounce around these ideas, making them much richer the second or third time around. Should we assume that all kids of a certain age already know certain things? What is wrong with repetition? What if your other teachers didn’t teach you well? Who do you know that has a perfect memory?

Existence is pain so what do I doooooooooooooooooooooo

@georgebrooks7775

6 жыл бұрын

Well, the Mayans seemed to think that corn liquor should be part of our lives...and they seemed pretty happy!

@ameremortal

4 жыл бұрын

George Brooks 😂

@ameremortal

4 жыл бұрын

I suggest suffering in quiet desperation like the rest of us.

@ameremortal

4 жыл бұрын

George Brooks We used to make that corn liquor (Chicha) using our own saliva. One of the many reasons I don’t drink.

You lost me when you uttered the words "... modern primitive tribes..."

@parallelarc3837

4 жыл бұрын

Mars Jackson he is referencing the remarkably small population of modern hunter gatherer cultures. “Modern, primitive tribes”. Maybe more aptly said as “contemporary primitive tribes”, but I don’t think contextually it was that confusing. These small populations are a gold mine for anthropologists since they allow them to eye-witness what is seen as effectively proto-culture (since we all started in small hunter gatherer tribes)

@ReneCarmonaCaimito

3 жыл бұрын

@@parallelarc3837 let's just call them citizens of the universe snapshot 12/13/2020