920
Lectures Watched
Since January 1, 2014
Since January 1, 2014
- A History of the World since 1300 (67)
- History of Rock, 1970-Present (50)
- A Brief History of Humankind (48)
- The Modern World: Global History since 1760 (35)
- Chinese Thought: Ancient Wisdom Meets Modern Science (33)
- The Bible's Prehistory, Purpose, and Political Future (28)
- Introduction aux éthiques philosophiques (27)
- Roman Architecture (25)
- Jesus in Scripture and Tradition (25)
- Sexing the Canvas: Art and Gender (23)
- Descubriendo la pintura europea de 1400 a 1800 (22)
- Introduction aux droits de l'homme (19)
- Buddhism and Modern Psychology (18)
- Calvin: Histoire et réception d'une Réforme (17)
- The Ancient Greeks (16)
- The French Revolution (15)
- À la découverte du théâtre classique français (15)
- Christianisme et philosophie dans l'Antiquité (14)
- Key Constitutional Concepts and Supreme Court Cases (14)
- Letters of the Apostle Paul (14)
- Egiptología (12)
- Western Music History through Performance (10)
- Phenomenology and the Conscious Mind (9)
- Human Evolution: Past and Future (9)
- Greek and Roman Mythology (9)
- Alexander the Great (9)
- The Great War and Modern Philosophy (9)
- The Rise of Superheroes and Their Impact On Pop Culture (9)
- Villes africaines: la planification urbaine (8)
- Masterpieces of World Literature (8)
- Programming Mobile Applications for Android (7)
- Introduction to Psychology (7)
- Fundamentos de la escritura en español (7)
- MongoDB for Node.js Developers (7)
- Pensamiento Científico (7)
- Greeks at War: Homer at Troy (7)
- Lingua e cultura italiana: avanzata (6)
- A Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behavior (6)
- The Emergence of the Modern Middle East (6)
- Reason and Persuasion Through Plato's Dialogues (6)
- Fake News, Facts, and Alternative Facts (6)
- Karl der Große - Pater Europae (6)
- The Rooseveltian Century (6)
- Exploring Beethoven's Piano Sonatas (5)
- Dinosaur Paleobiology (5)
- Understanding Einstein: The Special Theory of Relativity (5)
- L'avenir de la décision : connaître et agir en complexité (5)
- Designing Cities (4)
- Problèmes métaphysiques à l'épreuve de la politique, 1943-1968 (4)
- The Kennedy Half Century (4)
- Introduction to Public Speaking (4)
- Emergence of Life (4)
- War for the Greater Middle East (4)
- Postwar Abstract Painting (3)
- Découvrir l'anthropologie (3)
- Analyzing the Universe (3)
- The Music of the Beatles (3)
- La visione del mondo della Relatività e della Meccanica Quantistica (3)
- Initiation à la programmation en Java (3)
- Formation of the Universe, Solar System, Earth and Life (3)
- History of Rock and Roll, Part One (3)
- La Commedia di Dante (3)
- Devenir entrepreneur du changement (3)
- Moons of Our Solar System (3)
- Orientierung Geschichte (3)
- Paleontology: Early Vertebrate Evolution (3)
- Western Civilization: Ancient and Medieval Europe (3)
- Russian History: from Lenin to Putin (2)
- L'art des structures 1 : Câbles et arcs (2)
- Art History for Artists, Animators and Gamers (2)
- Introduction to Classical Music (2)
- Galaxies and Cosmology (2)
- The Science of Gastronomy (2)
- The Fall and Rise of Jerusalem (2)
- Søren Kierkegaard: Subjectivity, Irony and the Crisis of Modernity (2)
- Philosophy and the Sciences (2)
- Understanding Russians: Contexts of Intercultural Communication (2)
- The European Discovery of China (2)
- Our Earth: Its Climate, History, and Processes (2)
- Découvrir la science politique (2)
- Introduction à la programmation en C++ (2)
- Introduction à la philosophie de Friedrich Nietzsche (2)
- Géopolitique de l'Europe (2)
- Gestion des aires protégées en Afrique (2)
- Lingua e letteratura in italiano (2)
- The Changing Landscape of Ancient Rome (2)
- Materials Science: 10 Things Every Engineer Should Know (2)
- Highlights of Modern Astronomy (2)
- La Philanthropie : Comprendre et Agir (2)
- The Science of Religion (2)
- Advertising and Society (1)
- America Through Foreign Eyes (1)
- Superpowers of the Ancient World: the Near East (1)
- The Art of Poetry (1)
- Bemerkenswerte Menschen (1)
- Big History: From the Big Bang until Today (1)
- Controversies of British Imperialism (1)
- Age of Cathedrals (1)
- Christianity: From Persecuted Faith to Global Religion (200-1650) (1)
- Narratives of Nonviolence in the American Civil Rights Movement (1)
- Constitutional Law - The Structure of Government (1)
- Contagious: How Things Catch On (1)
- Care of Elders with Alzheimer's Disease (1)
- The American South: Its Stories, Music, and Art (1)
- Programming Mobile Services for Android Handheld Systems (1)
- Animal Behaviour (1)
- From the Big Bang to Dark Energy (1)
- Configuring the World (1)
- Introduction to Data Science (1)
- Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society (1)
- The Law of the European Union (1)
- 21st Century American Foreign Policy (1)
- Éléments de Géomatique (1)
- History and Future of Higher Education (1)
- The Age of Jefferson (1)
- The Magna Carta and its Legacy (1)
- A New History for a New China, 1700-2000 (1)
- The New Nordic Diet (1)
- A la recherche du Grand Paris (1)
- What Managers Can Learn from Great Philosophers (1)
- Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1)
- Exercise Physiology: Understanding the Athlete Within (1)
- Physique générale - mécanique (1)
- Subsistence Marketplaces (1)
- Practicing Tolerance in a Religious Society (1)
- Understanding the Brain: The Neurobiology of Everyday Life (1)
- Andy Warhol (1)
- Web Intelligence and Big Data (1)
- Miracles of Human Language: An Introduction to Linguistics (1)
- Learning How to Learn (1)
- Imagining Other Earths (1)
- Vital Signs: Understanding What the Body Is Telling Us (1)
- Développement durable (1)
- Dinosaur Ecosystems (1)
- The Civil War and Reconstruction (1)
- Shakespeare: On the Page and in Performance (1)
- Introducción a la genética y la evolución (1)
- Poetry in America: Whitman (1)
- Anthropology of Current World Issues (1)
- Escribir para Convencer (1)
- Découvrir le marketing (1)
- Créer et développer une startup technologique (1)
- Frontières en tous genres (1)
- Une introduction à la géographicité (1)
- Gestion et Politique de l'eau (1)
- Theater and Globalization (1)
- Handel’s Messiah and Baroque Oratorio (1)
- Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales (1)
- From Goddard to Apollo: The History of Rockets (1)
- Miracles of Human Language (1)
- Human Origins (1)
- The Computing Technology Inside Your Smartphone (1)
- Intellectual Humility (1)
- Introduction to Italian Opera (1)
- Magic in the Middle Ages (1)
- Making Sense of News (1)
- Introduction to Mathematical Thinking (1)
- Mobilité et urbanisme (1)
- Moral Foundations of Politics (1)
- Mountains 101 (1)
- The Biology of Music (1)
- Oriental Beliefs: Between Reason and Traditions (1)
- In the Night Sky: Orion (1)
- Visualizing Postwar Tokyo (1)
- The Renaissance and Baroque City (1)
- The Rise of China (1)
- Russian History: from Lenin to Putin (1)
- Социокультурные аспекты социальной робототехники (1)
- Science of Exercise (1)
- El Mediterráneo del Renacimiento a la Ilustración (1)
- Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (1)
- The World of the String Quartet (1)
- Switzerland in Europe (1)
- The Talmud: A Methodological Introduction (1)
- William Wordsworth: Poetry, People and Place (1)
- Wine Tasting: Sensory Techniques for Wine Analysis (1)
- The World of Wine (1)
Hundreds of free, self-paced university courses available:
my recommendations here
my recommendations here
Peruse my collection of 275
influential people of the past.
influential people of the past.
View My Class Notes via:




Receive My Class Notes via E-Mail:
Contact Me via E-Mail:
edward [at] tanguay.info
Notes on video lecture:
Three Theories on the History of Happiness
Notes taken by Edward Tanguay on May 17, 2014 (go to class or lectures)


Choose from these words to fill the blanks below:
convincing, Islam, suffering, touch, farm, scientific, equilibrium, 19th, bliss, catastrophe, romantic, collective, alienation, spiritual, worse, correlation, mechanistic, Africa, alleviate, better, increased, necessarily, dogmatic, famine, misuse, industrial, child, transformed, less, dark, short, disease, fantasies, plague, point, annihilation, urban, European, diet, agriculture, cruelty, cautious, miserable, enslaved, psychology
much of humankind today enjoy a wealth that used to be the stuff of and fairy tales
science and the revolution have given humans superhuman powers and practically limitless energy
many aspects of human life have been completely
the social order
daily life
politics
human
but are we happier?
did the wealth that humankind accumulated over the last few centuries translate into human happiness
do the seemingly inexhaustible stores of energy open up for us inexhaustible stores of ?
did the 70,000 years of human changes and revolutions make the world a place to live in?
if the answer to this question is in the negative
what was the of all these changes?
historians rarely ask these questions
e.g. if the rise of made the Egyptians more pleased with their lives?
did the European collapse of empires in make people there happier or more miserable?
what is the purpose of all these changes if it does not make people happier?
few have studied in a way the long-term history of happiness
but we all have some vague conception of the history of happiness
theories
1. PROGRESSIVE VIEW OF HAPPINESS
the more power humans gain over their environment, the more happier they are
human capabilities have throughout history
since humans usually use their power to misery and fulfill their aspiration, we must be happier having more power than, say, our Medieval ancestors, and they, in turn, must have been happier than stone age hunters and gatherers
not very since:
more power and new kinds of behaviors and skills do not make life better and happier
e.g. when humans learned how to , the collective power of humankind to shape the environment increased
but the living conditions of individual humans was in many respects
peasants had to work harder than foragers and received in return a less nutritious diets
far more exposed to than their hunter and gatherer ancestors
e.g. spread of empires increased the collective power of humankind
but this was hardly good news for the millions of Africans who found themselves by the Europeans
given the human tendency to power, it seems very naive to believe that there is a direct correlation between power and happiness
2. REGRESSIVE VIEW OF HAPPINESS
more power leads to happiness
as humans gained more and more power, this created a cold and world which is ill-suited to the real needs of homo sapians
evolution molded our minds and bodies for the life of hunters and gatherers
the transition first to and then to industry, condemned human beings to live unnatural lives that cannot give full expression to our inherent instincts and cannot satisfy our deepest yearnings and needs
life may be easier today, but nothing in this comfortable life in the middle class can approach the wild excitement by a forager band on a mammoth hunt
this is, of course, a very view of happiness
this romantic insistence on seeing the side of every invention and development in history is as in the inevitability of progress
it may be true that we are today out of with our inner hunter and gatherer, but it is not all bad
e.g. over the last two centuries, modern medicine has decreased mortality from about 33% to less than 5%
surely this increased the collective happiness of human beings
3. PROGRESSIVE HAPPINESS SINCE THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
only since the scientific revolution have increases in power led to increases in happiness
until the scientific revolution, there was no clear between power and happiness
medieval people may indeed have been more than our hunter/gatherer ancestors
but throughout the scientific revolution in the last 500 years, humans have increasingly learned to use their power wisely to create more happiness
modern medicine including vaccines
steep decline in violence
recent disappearance of international wars and their likelihood
elimination of large-scale
but this, too, is an oversimplification
this view bases its optimistic assessment on the modern age, and so it is a small sample of years
people only began to gradually enjoy the benefits of modern medicine in the middle of the century
the significant drop in child mortality is a 20th century phenomenon
mass famines continued to much of humanity until the middle of the 20th century
international wars became rare only since 1945 largely thanks to the new threat of complete by nuclear weapons
so even if the last 50 years have been an unprecedented golden age for humanity, it is a very time, and it is too early to know if this represents a fundamental shift in the currents of history, or an ephemeral wave of good fortune
even if the last half century was a golden age, it may be that during this era we sow the seeds for future
we may be disturbing the of our planet
it may be that we are experiencing a number of good years or decades or centuries, but that we will be paying a high price for this behavior in the future
another reason to be about this optimistic view of modern happiness is our treatment of animals
we can congratulate ourselves on the modern accomplishment of homo sapiens only if we ignore the fate of other animals on the planet
much of the material wealth that we enjoy today was accumulated at the expense of laboratory animals, factory cows, and conveyor belt chickens
billions of animals over the last 200 years have been subjected to a regime of industrial exploitation whose has no precedent in the annals of history
seen from an animal rights activists point of view, modern agriculture is one of the greatest crimes in history which has caused massive for animals living on this planet
when we come to evaluate global happiness, if can only see it as a success if we only include homo sapiens
problems with all these views
they consider happiness largely as a product of material factors such as your health, your , and your wealth
according to this approach, if people are richer and healthier, they must also be happier
many philosophers, religious thinkers, and poets throughout history have indicated that social, ethical and factors have as great an impact on our happiness as material conditions
it is clear that material conditions today are much better than in the past
but if happiness does not depend only on material conditions, then it does not necessarily mean that we are happier today as people were in the past even though they had inferior material conditions
we know, for instance, that many people suffer today from and meaninglessness in their lives
Spelling Corrections:
insistance ⇒ insistence
emphemoral ⇒ ephemeral
Ideas and Concepts:
Rhetorical question of the day, via this morning's History of Humankind class: "A large percentage of humans today enjoy a wealth that was unthinkable throughout history, the stuff of fantasies and fairy tales. The global economy has grown exponentially, science and the industrial revolution have given us superhuman tools and powers to investigate other planets, communicate around the world in seconds, and cure the human body of otherwise fatal diseases. We enjoy practically limitless energy resources, and many aspects of human life have been completely transformed:our daily lives, our social orders, the way we interact, even our human psychology. But are we happier? Has the wealth that humankind has accumulated over the last few centuries translated into human happiness? Do the seemingly inexhaustible stores of energy open up for us inexhaustible stores of bliss? Have the last 70,000 years of human changes and revolutions made the world a better place to live in?"