200,000 Years of Staggering Human Population Growth Shown in an Animated Map

in Health, History, Life, Science | December 9th, 2016

Last night, during a talk on his new book Raising the Floor, longtime labor leader and current senior fellow at Columbia University Andy Stern told the story of a king and a chessmaster engaged in pitched battle. “If you win,” said the overconfident king, “you may have anything you desire.” Lo, the chessmaster wins the game, but being a humble man asks the king only to provide him with some rice. The king smugly agrees to his eccentric conditions: he must place a grain of rice on the first square of the chessboard, then double the amount of each successive square. Once he reaches the middle, the king stops and has the chessmaster executed. The request would have cost him his entire kingdom and more.

Stern used the story to illustrate the exponential growth of technology, which now advances at a rate we can neither confidently predict nor control. Something very similar has happened to the human population in the past two-hundred years, as you can see illustrated in the video above from the American Museum of Natural History.

Evolving some 200,000 years ago in Sub-Saharan Africa, and migrating across the globe some 100,000 years ago, modern humans remained relatively few in number for several thousand years. That is, until the technological breakthrough of agriculture. “By AD 1,” the video text tells us, “world population reached approximately 170 million people.”

After a very rapid expansion, the numbers rose and fell slowly in the ensuing centuries as wars, disease, and famines decimated populations. World population reached only 180 million by the year 200 AD, then dwindled through the Middle Ages, only picking up again slowly around 700. Throughout this historiographic model of population growth, the video infographic provides helpful symbols and legends that chart historic centers like the Roman Empire and Han Dynasty, and show major world events like the Bubonic plague.

Then we reach the world-shaking disruptions that were the birth of Capitalism, the Atlantic slave trade, and the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, when “modern technology and medicine bring faster growth.”

That’s quite the understatement. The growth, like the grains of rice on the chessboard, proceeded exponentially, reaching 1 billion people around 1800, then exploding to over 7 billion today. As the yellow dots—each representing a node of 1 million people—take over the map, the video quickly becomes an alarming call to action. While the numbers are leveling off, and fertility has dropped, “if current trends continue,” we’re told, “global population will peak at 11 billion around 2100.” Peak numbers could be lower, or substantially higher, depending on the predictive value of the models and any number of unknowable variables.

Andy Stern’s research has focused on how we build economies that support our massive global population—as machines stand poised in the next decade or so to edge millions of blue and white collar workers out of an already precarious labor market. The American Museum of Natural History asks some different, but no less urgent questions that take us even farther into the future. How can the planet’s finite, and dwindling, resources, with our current abuse and misuse of them, support such large and growing numbers of people?

It may take another technological breakthrough to mitigate the damage caused by previous technological breakthroughs. Or it may take an enormous, revolutionary political shift. In either case, the “choices we make today” about family planning, consumption, environmental regulation, and conservation “affect the future of our species—and all life on Earth.”

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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George Orwell Tries to Identify Who Is Really a “Fascist” and Define the Meaning of This “Much-Abused Word” (1944)

in History, Politics | December 7th, 2016

Image via Wikimedia Commons

Two neologisms, “Post-truth” and “Alt-right,” have entered political discourse in this year of turmoil and upheaval, words so notorious they were chosen as the winner and runner-up, respectively, for Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year. These “Orwellian euphemisms,” argues Noah Berlatsky “conceal old evils” and “whitewash fascism,” recalling “in form and content… Orwell’s old words—specifically some of the newspeak from 1984. ‘Crimethink,’ ‘thoughtcrime,’ and ‘unperson’.… They even sound the same, with their simple, thunk-thunk construction of single syllables mashed together.”

“The sheer ugly clumsiness is supposed to make the language seem futuristic and cutting edge,” Berlatsky writes, “The world to come will be utilitarian, slangy, and up-to-the-minute in its inelegance. So the future was in Orwell’s day; so it is in 2016.” As in Orwell’s day, our current jargon gets mobilized in “defense of the indefensible”—as the novelist, journalist, and revolutionary fighter wrote in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language.” And just as in his day, the euphemisms pretty up constant, blatant lying and racist ideologies. We can also draw another linguistic comparison to Orwell’s time: the widespread use of the word “fascism.”

Berlatsky uses the word without defining it (when he talks about “whitewashing fascism”), except to say that “fascism thrives on falsehoods.” That may well be the case, but is it enough of a criterion for an entire political and economic system? The word begs for a cogent analysis. Even Umberto Eco, who grew up under Mussolini’s rule, felt the need for clarity, given that “American radicals,” he wrote in 1995, abused the phrase “fascist pig” as a pejorative for any authority, such that the word hardly meant anything thirty years after World War II.

But surely Orwell—who fought fascism in Spain in 1936, and whose ominous postwar dystopian novels have done more than any literary work to illustrate its menace—could define the word with confidence? Alas, when we look to his work, even before the war had ended, we find him writing, “‘Fascism,’ is almost entirely meaningless.” His short 1944 essay, “What is Fascism?” does not, however, push to abolish the word. He calls instead for “a clear and generally accepted definition of it” against the tendency to “degrade it to the level of a swearword.”

But Orwell (being Orwell) is not optimistic. One reason a definition had been so difficult to come by, he writes, is that any group to whom it is applied would have to make “admissions” most of them are not “willing to make”—admissions as to the real nature of their ideology and objectives, behind the euphemisms, lies, and double-speak. If no one is a fascist, then everyone potentially is. Even in the 40s, Orwell wrote, “if you examine the press you will find that there is almost no set of people—certainly no political party or organized body of any kind—which has not been denounced as Fascist.”

He enumerates those so accused: “Conservatives, Socialists, Communists, Trotskyists, Catholics, War Resisters, Supporters of the war, Nationalists.…” What of the textbook examples just on the other side of the front lines? “When we apply the term ‘Fascism’ to Germany or Japan or Mussolini’s Italy,” Orwell concedes, “we know broadly what we mean.” But appealing to these extreme governments does little good, “because even the major Fascist states differ from one another a good deal in structure and ideology.” Umberto Eco is content to say that fascism adopts the cultural trappings of the nations in which it arises, yet still shares several constant, if contradictory, ideological traits. Orwell isn’t so sure he knows what those are.

So what can Orwell say about the word, one he is eager to hold on to but at a loss to pin down? Though he believes it must name a “political and economic” system as well, Orwell finally opts for an ordinary language definition, to which we “attach at any rate an emotional significance.” Whether we “recklessly fling” the word “in every direction” or use it in more precise ways, we always mean “roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal, and anti-working class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist.’” Those today who are not bullies—or unapologetic fascist sympathizers—and who don’t need euphemisms for these words, would likely agree.

You can read “What is Fascism?” here. You can find the short essay published in this volume, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell.

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George Orwell Explains in a Revealing 1944 Letter Why He’d Write 1984

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Why Making Accurate World Maps Is Mathematically Impossible

in History, Maps | December 5th, 2016

Jorge Luis Borges once wrote of an empire wherein “the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province.” Still unsatisfied, “the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.” But posterity, when they lost their ancestors’ obsession for cartography, judged “that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters.” With that enormous map, in all its singular accuracy, cast out, smaller, imperfect ones presumably won the day again.

With that well-known story “On Exactitude in Science,” Borges illustrated the idea that all maps are wrong by imagining the preposterousness of a truly correct one. The Vox video “Why All World Maps Are Wrong” covers some of the same territory, as it were, first illustrating that idea by slitting open an inflatable globe and trying, futilely, to get the resulting plastic mess to lie flat.

“That right there is the eternal dilemma of mapmakers,” says the host in voiceover as the struggle continues onscreen. “The surface of a sphere cannot be represented as a plane without some form of distortion.” As a result, all of humanity’s paper maps of the world–which in the task of turning the surface of a sphere into a flat plane need to use a technique called “projection”–distort geographical reality by definition.

The Mercator projection has, since its invention by sixteenth-century Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator, produced the most widely-seen world maps. (If you grew up in America, you almost certainly spent a lot of time staring at Mercator maps in the classroom.) But we hardly live under the limitations of his day, nor those of the 1940s when Borges imagined his land-sized map. In our 21st century, the satellite-based Global Positioning System has “wiped out the need for paper maps as a means of navigating both the sea and the sky,” but even so, “most web mapping tools, like Google Maps, use the Mercator” due to its “ability to preserve shape and angles,” which “makes close-up views of cities more accurate.”

On the scale of a City, in more Borgesian words — and probably on the scale of a Province and even the Empire — Mercator projection still works just fine. “But the fact remains that there’s no right projection. Cartographers and mathematicians have created a huge library of available projections, each with a new perspective on the planet, and each useful for a different task.” You can compare and contrast a few of them for yourself here, or take a closer look of some of the Mercator projection’s size distortions (making Greenland, for example, look as big as the whole of Africa) here. These challenges and others have kept the Disciplines of Geography, unlike in Borges’ world, busy even today.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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A Whiskey-Fueled Lin-Manuel Miranda Reimagines Hamilton as a Girl on Drunk History

in Comedy, History, Television, Theatre | December 2nd, 2016

Back in July of 1804, when Vice President Aaron Burr fired a fatal round into the abdomen of former Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, I wonder which scenario would have seemed more implausible: that these political rivals would one day be resurrected in the form of a black guy and a Nuyorican, or as two young women in revealingly snug breeches, above.

Time moves on. These days, your average Hamilton-obsessed pre-teen may have trouble accepting that there was a time—January 2015, to be exact—when most Americans couldn’t say what the guy on the ten dollar bill was famous for.

I confess, until quite recently, I was far more confident in Arrested Development’s fictional Bluth family’s exploits than any involving Hamilton and Burr. This explains, in part, why I’m so drawn to the casting instincts of Derek Waters’, creator of Drunk History.

The most recent episode features Alia Shawkat, one of my favorite Arrested Development players as a sardonic, potty mouthed Hamilton.

No worries that Drunk History, which bills itself as a “liquored-up narration of our nation’s history,” is the latest in a long line of Johnny-Come-Latelys, eagerly bellying up to the Hamilton trough.

Before Shawkat imbued him with her trademark edge, Drunk History’s Hamilton exuded the befuddled sweetness of Shawkat’s besotted Arrested Development cousin, Michael Cera, who originated the part in a video that gave rise to the series, below.

That one’s far sloppier, and not just in terms of production values. The inaugural narrator, Mark Gagliardi, was rendered a good deal more than three sheets to the wind by the bottle of scotch he downed on a sagging brown velour couch.

America would not want to see its current sweetheart, Hamilton’s playwright and original leading man, Lin-Manuel Miranda in such a condition.

Whereas Gagliardi seemed dangerously close to needing the bucket Waters thoughtfully positioned nearby, a whiskey-fuelled Miranda seems merely the tiniest bit buzzed, sitting cross legged in his parent’s living room, fleshing out Hamilton’s story with bits he didn’t manage to cram into his Pulitzer Prize-winning musical, such as a bewigged Tony Hale (aka Buster Bluth) as James Monroe.

On the other hand, he does describe the Reynolds Pamphlet as “Dick 101” (and failed to recall FaceTiming various friends post-recording) so…

You’ll need a Comedy Central subscription to view the complete episode online, but Shawkat’s earlier Drunk History turn as Grover Cleveland’s “It Girl” wife, Frances, is free for all, here.

Alexander Hamilton: Hip-Hop Hero at the White House Poetry Evening

Watch a Witty, Gritty, Hardboiled Retelling of the Famous Aaron Burr-Alexander Hamilton Duel

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play Zamboni Godot is opening in New York City in March 2017. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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An Animated Introduction to George Orwell

in History, Literature | November 28th, 2016

When his short and (by his own account) often miserable life came to an end in 1950, could the English political writer Eric Arthur Blair have known that he would not just become a household name, but remain one well over half a century later? Given his adoption of the memorable nom de plume George Orwell, we might say he had an inkling of his literary legacy’s potential. Still, he claimed to choose it for no grander reason than that it sounded like “a good round English name,” and would have loathed the pretense he sensed in the use of the phrase “nom de plume,” or, for that matter, any other of conspicuously foreign provenance.

The attitudes that shaped the author of Animal Farm and 1984 come out in this animated introduction to Orwell’s life and work, newly published by Alain de Botton’s School of Life. In explaining the motivations of this “most famous English language writer of the 20th century,” de Botton quotes from the essay “Why I Write,” wherein Orwell, with characteristic clarity, lays out his mission “to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”

Orwell hated his fellow intellectuals, whom he accused of “a range of sins: a lack of patriotism, resentment of money and physical vigor, concealed sexual frustration, pretension, and dishonesty.” He loved “the ordinary person” and the lives led by those “not especially blessed by material goods, people who work in ordinary jobs, who don’t have much of an education, who won’t achieve greatness, and who nevertheless love, care for others, work, have fun, raise children, and have large thoughts about the deepest questions in ways Orwell thought especially admirable.” Though raised middle-class and educated at Eton, Orwell eschewed university and believed that “the average pub in a coal-mining village contained more intelligence and wisdom than the British Cabinet or the high table of an Oxbridge college.”

One might want to call such an intellectual a poseur or even a sort of fetishist, but Orwell backed up his pronouncements about the superiority of the working class with his years spent living and working in it, and, with books like Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier, writing about it. He praised newspaper comics, country walks, dancing, Charles Dickens, and straightforward language, all of which informed the attacks on ideology and authoritarianism that would keep his writing meaningful for future generations. The holiday season now upon us makes another work of Orwell’s especially relevant: his Christmas pudding recipe, one blow in his lesser-known struggle to, as the London-based de Botton puts it, write “bravely in defense of English cooking” — a project which would, by itself, qualify him as a champion of the underdog.

George Orwell Explains in a Revealing 1944 Letter Why He’d Write 1984

For 95 Minutes, the BBC Brings George Orwell to Life

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What “Orwellian” Really Means: An Animated Lesson About the Use & Abuse of the Term

Try George Orwell’s Recipe for Christmas Pudding, from His Essay “British Cookery” (1945)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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Watch Georges Méliès’ The Dreyfus Affair, the Controversial Film Censored by the French Government for 50 Years (1899)

in Film, History, Politics | November 28th, 2016

History resounds with events so momentous they can be conjured with a single word: Waterloo, Watergate, Tiananmen, Brexit.…

In the late nineteenth century, one simple phrase, J’Accuse!—the title of an open letter published by novelist Emile Zola—stood for a serious injustice that inflamed the political passions of artists, journalists, and the public for decades afterward, and presaged some of the 20th century’s most incredible state crimes.

Zola wrote in defense of French artillery captain Alfred Dreyfus, who was accused, court-marshalled, and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island for supposedly giving military secrets to the Germans. It was the trial of the century, writes Adam Gopnik at The New Yorker, and afterward, Dreyfus, “a young Jewish artillery officer and family man.… was publicly degraded before a gawking crowd.”

His insignia medals were stripped from him, his sword was broken over the knee of the degrader, and he was marched around the grounds in his ruined uniform to be jeered and spat at, while piteously declaring his innocence and his love of France above cries of “Jew” and “Judas!”

Two years later, compelling evidence came to light that showed another officer, Ferdinand Esterhazy, had committed the treasonous offence. But the evidence was buried, and the officer who found it transferred to North Africa and later imprisoned. The Dreyfus Affair marked a major turn in European civil society, “the moment where [Guy de] Maupassant’s world of ambition and pleasure met Kafka’s world of inexplicable bureaucratic suffering.” After a perfunctory two-day trial, Esterhazy was unanimously acquitted by a military court, and Dreyfus convicted of additional charges based on falsified documents.

Five years after Dreyfus’ conviction, his supporters, the “Dreyfusards,” including Zola, Henri Poincare, and Georges Clemenceau, forced the government to retry the case. Dreyfus was ultimately pardoned, and later fully exonerated and reinstated in the French army. He went on to serve with distinction in World War I.

Dreyfus’ accusers’ have mostly sunk into obscurity. His supporters— some caricatured above as “the twelve apostles of Dreyfus”—included some of the most illustrious men of arts and letters in France. They can count among their number the great French director and cinematic visionary Georges Méliès. During the heated year of 1899, “Méliès made a series of eleven one-minute non-fiction films about the Dreyfus Affair as it was still unfolding,” writes Elizabth Ezra,” portraying sympathetically Dreyfus’ arrest,” imprisonment, and retrial. You can watch Méliès’ complete Dreyfus film at the top of the post.

It may be difficult to appreciate the daring of Méliès’ project from our historical distance, and in the somewhat alien idiom of silent film. “For today’s viewers,” writes Ezra, “it is not always easy to discern the sympathetic elements of the films, but the abundance of huffy gesturing and self-righteous facial expressions on the part of Dreyfus make of him a dignified hero who refuses to be degraded by the accusations made against him.” (In this respect, Méliès anticipated another silent film about another unjust trial in France, Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc.)

Likewise, we may find it hard to understand the significant social import of “Méliès’ only known expression of political commitment.” But to understand the Dreyfus Affair, we must understand, as the National Library of Israel points out, that “France was already a divided country and the case acted as a casus belli.… ‘The Jew from Alsace’ encapsulated all that the nationalist right loathed, and therefore became the symbol of the nation’s profound division.” Landing in the middle of this political firestorm, Méliès’ Dreyfus series “provoked partisan fistfights,” writes Ezra.

Not only did the Dreyfus case introduce into the public eye a vicious anti-Semitic show-trial, but it also served as a test case for censorship and media sensationalism. Méliès’ film, says author Susan Daitch in the On the Media episode above, was the first docudrama, the “first recreation based on photographs and illustrations in weekly newspapers in France at the time.” And it proved so controversial that it was banned, along with all other Dreyfus films, for fifty years, and only shown again in France in 1974.

The film, says Daitch—who has written a novel based on the Dreyfus Affair—emerged within a partisan mass media war of the kind we’re far too familiar with today. “Both sides,” Daitch tells us, “used and altered the media,” and Dreyfus was both successfully railroaded into prison and successfully retried and exonerated partly on the strength of his supporters’ and accusers’ propaganda campaigns.

The Dreyfus Affair will be added to our list of Free Silent Films, a subset of our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

The film is considered to be in the public domain in the United States and comes to us via Wikimedia Commons.

Watch After the Ball, the 1897 “Adult” Film by Pioneering Director Georges Méliès (Almost NSFW)

Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) Gets an Epic, Instrumental Soundtrack from the Indie Band Joan of Arc

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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British Advertisers Predict in 1935 What the World Will Look Like in 2500: Wireless TV, Atomic Cars & More

in Business, History, Sci Fi | November 28th, 2016

Back before the public came to terms with the grim causal relationship between cigarettes and cancer, smoking was a jolly affair, whose pleasures extended well beyond the physical act.

Smoking was sociable. Yes, there were certain situations in which three on a match could spell doom, but a far greater likelihood that lighting an attractive stranger’s coffin nail might kindle conversation, and more.

If you were at a loss for words, you might break the ice with the trading cards manufacturers slipped inside cigarette packs, such as these mid-30s beauties that came inside packs of Greys, a now-defunct British cigarette brand, and favorite of WWI vets.

The subject is unusual. Sports, cinema stars, and military scenes were common themes of the time. The “Greys Anticipations” series took creative liberties, by imagining a (cancer-free) year 2500, in which Londoners would be privy to such innovations as solar-lighting, moving sidewalks, and wireless television…

Great Scott! Were they psychic!?

Hopefully not.

Hopefully, we’ve still got 484 years to find out…

“Picadilly, London, A.D. 2500: Roofed-in under non-conductive mica glass . . moving pathways . . rubber roadways avenued into 50, 100, 150 and 200 miles per hour . . suspended mono railways . . motors driven by atomic energy . . phonetic spelling . . wireless television . . lighted by captured solar rays . . excursions to Mars.”

I’m fine with excursions to Mars and monorails but atomic energy is as problematic as the health claims once put forward by cigarette ads.

“At the Customs House on the Roof of London, A.D. 2500: The railway train has followed the ichthyosaurus into extinction. Mighty aerial liners transport passengers in their thousands, with great cargoes of merchandise from continent to continent. Mankind, living amidst such tremendous achievements, thinks, plans, and acts with corresponding bigness.”

Hmm…I was kind of rooting for train travel to make a comeback…

“The Pleasure City, London, A.D. 2500: Pleasure-seeking has been raised to a fine art … mutitudes when the short day’s work is done find a satisfying means of relaxation in smoking “GREYS” Cigarettes and listening to the mammoth mechanical orchestra … characteristic of the music of the period … music so complex that it can be rendered only by wonderous mechanism.”

This does sound rather fun, depending on who’s doing the programming… perhaps we should just stick with headphones and a busker on every corner.

A Hive of Industry, A.D. 2500: Literally a “hive” in that it is a city unto itself … radiating from the mammoth super-factory are workers’ dwellings and associated institutes … architecture governed by the prevailing material — concrete … no smoke (other than from tobacco!) … no household cooking . . meals delivered by pneumatic tube from central cookhouse.

Um…I strongly suggest revisiting Terry Gilliam’s 1985 film, Brazil, before signing off on the whole pneumatic tube thing.

Darran Anderson, author of Imaginary Cities, took a closer look at one of the cards in the above talk about imaginary London. I share his opinion that “phonetic spelling… is the best thing that they envisaged of the future.”

He also notes that the card is about 20 years ahead of its time in promoting a mid-50s‑style vision of the future, but that it failed to predict the demise of Greys Cigarettes, by prominently advertising them on the side of a suspended monorail.

Hubris!

via Metafilter

Nikola Tesla’s Predictions for the 21st Century: The Rise of Smart Phones & Wireless, The Demise of Coffee, The Rule of Eugenics (1926/35)

Cigarette Commercials from David Lynch, the Coen Brothers and Jean Luc Godard

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play Zamboni Godot is opening in New York City in March 2017. Follow her @AyunHalliday

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How to Know if Your Country Is Heading Toward Despotism: An Educational Film from 1946

in History, Politics, Yale | November 23rd, 2016

Nobody likes a despot — even despots know it. But actually identifying despotism can pose a certain difficulty — which despots also know, and they’d surely like to keep it that way. Hence Encyclopedia Britannica’s Despotism, a ten-minute Erpi Classroom Film on how a country slides into that eponymous state. It uses the example of Nazi Germany (which might strike us today as the most obvious one but back in 1946 must have felt almost too fresh), but generalizes the concept by looking back into more distant history, as far as Louis XIV’s immortal remark, “L’état, c’est moi.”

“You can roughly locate any community in the world somewhere along a scale running all the way from democracy to despotism,” says Despotism’s standard-issue mannered narrator before turning it over to a standard-issue sack-suited and Brylcreemed expert. And how can we know where our own society places on that scale? “Well, for one,” says the expert, “avoid the comfortable idea that the mere form of government can of itself safeguard a nation against despotism.” The film introduces a series of sub-scales usable to gauge a community’s despotic potential: the respect scale, the power scale, the economic distribution scale, and the information scale.

The respect scale measures “how many citizens get an even break,” and on the despotic end, “common courtesy is withheld from large groups of people on account of their political attitudes; if people are rude to others because they think their wealth and position gives them that right, or because they don’t like a man’s race or his religion.” The power scale “gauges the citizen’s share in making the community’s decisions. Communities which concentrate decision making in a few hands rate low on a power scale and are moving towards despotism,” and even “today democracy can ebb away in communities whose citizens allow power to become concentrated in the hands of bosses.”

The economic distribution scale turns into a warning sign when a society’s “economic distribution becomes slanted, its middle income groups grow smaller and despotism stands a better chance to gain a foothold.” If “the concentration of land ownership in the hands of a very small number of people” and “control of jobs and business opportunities is in a few hands, despotism stands a good chance.” So it also does in a society which rates low on the information scale, where “the press, radio, and other channels of communication are controlled by only a few people and when citizens have to accept what they are told,” a process that renders its citizens ultimately unable to evaluate claims and ideas for themselves.

The opposite of despotism, so Despotism proposes, is democracy, a type of government explained in the previous year’s Erpi Classroom Film of that name. Germany, a republic where once “an aggressive despotism took root and flourished under Adolf Hitler,” now performs admirably on the respect, power, economic distribution, and information scales — not perfectly, of course, but no country can ever completely escape the threat of despotism. Much about the economy and the nature of information may have changed over the past 70 years, but nothing about respect and power have. Whichever society we live in, and wherever on the spectrum between democracy and despotism it now stands, we’ll do well to keep an eye on the scales. Both films were made by Encyclopedia Britannica, in conjunction with Yale University’s then prominent political scientist Harold Lasswell.

via BoingBoing

Rare 1940 Audio: Thomas Mann Explains the Nazis’ Ulterior Motive for Spreading Anti-Semitism

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George Orwell’s Final Warning: Don’t Let This Nightmare Situation Happen. It Depends on You!

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Slavoj Žižek Calls Political Correctness a Form of “Modern Totalitarianism”

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

200,000 Years of Staggering Human Population Growth Shown in an Animated Map

George Orwell Tries to Identify Who Is Really a “Fascist” and Define the Meaning of This “Much-Abused Word” (1944)

Why Making Accurate World Maps Is Mathematically Impossible

A Whiskey-Fueled Lin-Manuel Miranda Reimagines Hamilton as a Girl on Drunk History

An Animated Introduction to George Orwell

Watch Georges Méliès’ The Dreyfus Affair, the Controversial Film Censored by the French Government for 50 Years (1899)

British Advertisers Predict in 1935 What the World Will Look Like in 2500: Wireless TV, Atomic Cars & More

How to Know if Your Country Is Heading Toward Despotism: An Educational Film from 1946

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