Posted in History on Feb 15th, 2012 Comments
Rising star historian Faramerz Dabhoiwala describes how the permissive society arrived in Western Europe, not in the 1960s as we like to think, but between 1600 and 1800. It began in England and is now shaping and challenging patterns of sexual behaviour all over the world.
For most of western history, all sex outside marriage was illegal, and the church, the state, and ordinary people all devoted huge efforts to suppressing and punishing it. This was a central feature of Christian civilization, one that had steadily grown in importance since the early middle ages. Three hundred years ago this entire world view was shattered by revolutionary new ideas – that sex is a private matter; that morality cannot be imposed by force; that men are more lustful than women. Henceforth, the private lives of both sexes were to be endlessly broadcast and debated, in a rapidly expanding universe of public media: newspapers, pamphlets, journals, novels, poems, and prints.
In his account of this first sexual revolution, Dabhoiwala argues that the creation of our modern culture of sex was a central part of the Enlightenment, intertwined with the era's major social, political and intellectual trends. It helped create a new model of Western civilization, whose principles of privacy, equality, and freedom of the individual remain distinctive to this day.
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President Jimmy Carter is a Nobel Prize winner, author, humanitarian, professor, farmer, naval officer and carpenter. In this special Intelligence² interview with Jon Snow from Channel 4 News at the Royal Festival Hall, President Carter will talk about his career as president, and the past three decades as a senior statesman and ambassador for the Carter Center.
Jimmy Carter was U.S. President from 1977 to 1981. His administration's main foreign policy achievements include the Panama Canal treaties, the Camp David Accords, the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, the SALT II treaty with the Soviet Union, and the establishment of U.S. diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China. After stepping down, he decided to establish the Carter Center along with his wife Rosalynn in 1982 to wage peace, fight disease and build hope worldwide. He was a pioneer in what has now become the widespread practice of putting prestige and status to good use in the world. The Center’s programmes have operated in 76 countries to resolve conflicts, advance democracy, human rights and economic opportunity, prevent disease, improve mental health care and teach farmers to increase crop production.
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Posted in Sociology, History on Jun 14th, 2011 Comments
Let’s face it, the French are more clear-headed on certain issues than the English. On marriage, for a start. It’s not that they have anything against it – on the contrary, their discretion when taking a lover is intended to preserve the institution's many virtues. But restrict all one’s sexual energies to just one person? Sacre bleu! "Si vous cherchez la fidelité, achetez un chien." Or so our cousins across the Channel like to have it. But are they fooling themselves? Is it possible truly to love your wife on Sunday, if on Monday you’re sleeping with your mistress? Come and hear the arguments from the Canadian owner of a dating agency for married people, a best-selling Australian author and comic talents from Iran and Britain as they debate just who is fooling whom.
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Posted in Science, History on Feb 28th, 2011 Comments
Niall Ferguson is the most brilliant British historian of his generation. In his latest book, Civilisation: The West and the Rest, he asks how Western civilisation, from inauspicious roots in the 15th century, came to dominate the rest of the world. His answer is that the West developed six “killer applications” that the Rest lacked: competition, science, democracy, medicine, consumerism and the Protestant work ethic. The key question today is whether or not the West has lost its monopoly on these six things. If it has and the Rest of the world can successfully download these apps, we may be living through the end of Western ascendancy.
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Today’s middle aged workers could be the last to enjoy a leisurely retirement before their health declines – many believe that demographics and economics will force today’s young to toil on into their dotage. Should we, like the Greeks, take to the streets to fight this?
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Award winning journalist, author and academic Simon Schama compares the tension and sentiment building in Europe and the United States to that prior to the French revolution in 1789. The development from Keynesian policy to that of public sector reductions and brutal cuts in real wages and social services is a delayed trigger for anger at those responsible for the financial mess. He calls it 'a recipe for serious indignation', one that will lead to the reawakening of the long-forgotten issues of local chauvinism and militant nationalism that will feed off a perceived lack of accountability in the EU and United States. Schama ends with an analysis of one of the original 'shock-jocks', Father Charles E Coughlin, who in the Roosevelt era exploited the power of radio to deliver an anti-Semitic, anti-FDR message, and states his belief that the philosophical grandeur of the political elites clouds their ability to recognise the power of these orators.
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Historian David Starkey explores the inherent individuality of English Law relative to rival European systems.
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