Tacitus - In Our Time review

The widely acclaimed BBC radio program and podcast In Our Time is going to have its summer recess. Until the end of September we will have to make do with what can be cherished in the streams of the on-line archive. There is much to be found there.

What is left as a podcast, is the latest edition, which is about Tacitus. Host Melvyn Bragg writes in his newsletter: "I fear I’ll be accused of being the man who asked three women scholars to talk about the finer, or rather the grosser, details of Roman sexuality. I’m sure you’ll accept that I simply did it in the interests of a fuller description of what Tacitus was meaning! And that’s true (no exclamation mark)." However, this is a very minor detail in the program and the guests storm through it admirably.

What remains is the historian who delivers us the template for Gibbon's Decline and Fall, the first sources about the tribes in Central Europe and the intricacies of being a senator in Rome. Even if Rome is eternally in decline, it never seems to fade and stop standing as a measure for western civilization.

More In Our Time:
John Donne (The Metaphysical Poets),
The Arab Conquests,
BBC's In Our Time (podcast review),
General review of In Our Time,
Library of Nineveh.

Canada and New Zealand - EH podcast review

The Environmental History Podcast has, in its 19th edition, two interviews about two more environments and how they were changed by man: New Zealand and Canada.

Once upon a time, New Zealand was covered by rain forest, but then came the Maori, who began to take down the forests and after them the Europeans (a lot of Scots and Irish among them) who continued with the deforestation. They turned the islands into pastures for especially sheep, acquiring a stronghold in the market for wool and mutton.

Also in Canada the Irish and Scots arrived to find forests to the size Europe had not had until centuries ago. The scale of for example forest fires was something they could hardly grasp. The podcast tells of the great forest fires in the 19th century and how they made headlines back in Britain. As a side note, there is also mention of the eruption of the Tambora in 1815 in Indonesia and its effect on the climate in Canada.

After this, host Jan Oosthoek projects what is ahead for the 20th edition and announces he is going to address the general question what environmental history is. It turns out that this choice of subject is a reaction to this blog, where it was stated that this definition remains somewhat unclear. In passing Oosthoek pays a compliment to Anne is a Man. You can hear it in the closing minutes of the podcast where he says this blog is

one of the sharpest and smartest podcast reviewers on the web.

More Environmental History:
Environmental history,
Climate Change in recent history,
Urban Air Pollution,
Apartheid and Environmental History,
Environmental History and South Africa.

Rousseau - Philosophy Bites

Sometimes philosophers, culture bearers and educators make this assumption explicit: that there is progress in history. That the herders were better off than the hunter gatherers, the farmers better off than the herders and that urbanized society is basically a kind of evolutionary pinnacle. Implicitly, this belief is very strongly embedded in our view of the world. Yet, there has always been a counter position as well. Philosophy Bites pays attention to one philosopher of this nostalgia or this critique of civilization: Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Hosts Nigel Warburton and David Edmonds invited Melissa Lane to speak on Rousseau in last week's issue of their podcast. He thinks our psychology and morals have been corrupted by civilization, because of both a dependence of others and a competition with others, not just materially, but also in pride, esteem and such. Once man is engaged in dealing with this dependence and competition, he loses his inner autarkic quality and his pure strive for personal survival deteriorates in an unbounded necessity for expansion. He did not idealize the toughness of the state of nature, but he deplores the unhealthy, unnatural development.

Even though we persist to think in terms of the superiority of civilization and persist to believe in progress, critics such as Rousseau have a profound effect and we see this return in thinkers such as Marx and Freud and in lines of thought in Feminism, Ecologism, Conservatism and on and on.

More Philosophy Bites:
Life on the Scales,
David Hume,
Several issues of Philosophy Bites,
Free rider problem,
Humanism.

Prosody -TWN podcast review

For a long time I haven't paid attention to The Word Nerds, the language podcast. It doesn't come out so frequently, less than a month and I have been concentrating on history podcasts in the past months. The Word Nerds, however, is one of my all time favorite podcasts. The makers have turned really nerdy language subjects into wonderfully entertaining shows of radio quality.

This happened again in the last edition with the subject prosody. That word, to begin with, is for me a term I have to look up, but did not need to as it was so well explained on the show. Prosody is about how we 'sing' our language; how we make pauses, emphasis, intonations and all such methods that make natural language sound natural, as opposed to computer voices, for example, that even today, still, sound very artificial.

It is also with prosody, that show hosts Dave and Barbara discussed the metrum and various rhythmic schemes in poetry. I remember this stuff from high school and at the time it sounded all so artificial, over the top and far out. I have grown up by now and I got the sympathetic and less threatening introduction by Dave, and this allowed me to open up and not only get stuff like iambic verse, but also recognize and appreciate it. Now that is The Word Nerds for you!

Previous reviews of TWN on this blog:
Rhetoric,
Silence and Speechlessness,
Religious Words,
Nicknames,
Public Speaking.

The bad news about good work

Big Ideas is a TVO lectures program that is accessible through the internet in video as well as audio. The audio is published as podcast and thus I get to pick various lectures. What I have found is that most of the time, one is not missing out on too many visuals and the podcast works quite well.

The lecture by Howard Gardner has a few visuals at the beginning which may make you feel shut out a bit, but from what I have seen in TVO's video stream, it is not so visible on there either and eventually, the visuals are abandoned altogether and we are presented an excellent lecture about the mind set we need for the future. (This lecture build largely on a recent book by Gardner: Five minds for the Future.)

Gardner calls them five minds, I am inclined to call the five principles, but no matter how you call it, the proposal is to have an integrated mind which succeeds in balancing these five qualities: The Disciplinary Mind (a honed, crafty mind), The Synthesizing Mind (a mind that understands and combines ideas), The Creating Mind (a mind of renewal), The Respectful Mind (a mind appreciative of the other) and The Ethical Mind (a mind inclined to the good). Gardner has done a lot of research on how people work and hence he applies these principles on work, calling it good work. It is in many ways an optimistic lecture, thinking in terms of what we can achieve, but there is one element I'd like to pick up and that is, unfortunately, the negative finding. The bad news about good work as it were.

In the bad news we see how those five principles, are not as easily balanced as we might think. This is shown in research when you ask people whether they want to work (live) ethically and ask why they don't even if they want to. The problem they perceive is that ethics gives them a disadvantage and will give their peers the edge in the rat race within society. And that piece of bad news is a very big problem for our culture to solve.

Previously on Big Ideas:
History.

Wise Counsel - psychology podcast review

A great podcaster is Dr. David van Nuys. He makes two psychology podcasts (Shrink Rap Radio and Wise Counsel) that rank among the best of podcasts by all accounts. They are of great educational  value in the realm of psychology. They are a great form of information and entertainment for a wider public on account of their accessibility. And last but not least, they are great podcasts in general with a good balance of the right music, a phenomenal radio voice and all such elements that mark professional radio quality.

Here I would like to draw your attention to two recent issues of Wise Counsel that I can warmly recommend.

1- An interview with Natalie Rogers, on expressive arts therapy. Rogers very effectively explains the quality of creative energy, as opposed to rational energy. The advantage in therapy is that the client is not just met on the rational, verbal level, but in a more complete way that allows more healing effect. An interesting dimension to Natalie's career is that she is the daughter of the famous psychologist Carl Rogers and even if there are differences in her approach, she still feels she elaborated on her father's work.

2- An interview with Marc Kern about various approaches in therapy for addiction. Notably Kern proposes alternatives to twelve step programs which are the dominant stream in specifically the US. He sees a couple of disadvantages in these programs in that that they instill guilt upon relapse. Relapse, however is perfectly normal in the way out of addiction and one needs not feel so bad about that. In addition, twelve step programs aim at abstinence, whereas Kern claims people can lead a normal life with moderate intake of substances, also those that have a history of excess. In that respect he thinks it to be more realistic and healthier to aim for damage reduction than elimination altogether.

More Wise Counsel:
Irvin Yalom,
David H. Barlow,
Richard Heimberg,
Tony Madrid,
Francine Shapiro.