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The Hartmann Report

IS CIVILIZATION OUR GREATEST ACCOMPLISHMENT OR WORST MISTAKE?

The Hartmann Report

Thom Hartmann

Thom Hartmann, Congress, News, The Hartmann Report, Debate, Democracy, Economics, Climate Change, America

4.38 Ratings

🗓️ 19 June 2021

⏱️ 58 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Christopher Ryan PhD joins the show to speak on his newest book, Civilized to Death which counters the idea that progress is inherently good.  Arguing that the “progress” defining our age is analogous to an advancing disease.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

This is the Tom Hartman program.

0:15.4

Welcome back, Tom Hartman here with you on the line with us is Dr. Christopher Ryan, PhD,

0:23.2

author of five books, including his latest civilized to death.

0:27.3

The price of progress is website Chris Ryan, CHRIS, R-Y-A-N-P-H-D dot com.

0:35.2

And his Twitter handle is that Chris Ryan, only know that Chris Ryan, hey Chris, welcome

0:40.3

to the program and congratulations on this book civilized to death I've bought at least

0:45.5

a dozen copies so far.

0:47.6

I think you did a great, great job of going down a path that I started down back in 1996

0:54.2

of my book last hour as an ancient sunlight, about a third of the book is devoted to ancient

0:58.3

civilizations or pre-civilizations and hunting gathering and all this kind of stuff.

1:03.0

And you have taken it so much farther and done so much on it, it's just brilliant.

1:08.2

And I wanted to thank you for that and get you on.

1:12.0

So let's dig into it.

1:13.8

You've got some great points and I love your civilized to death cocktail party cheat sheet.

1:19.9

Let me just run through some of this stuff, you know, Thomas Hobbes told us famously

1:25.2

when he published Leviathan back in 1634 as I recall, that prior to the civilization

1:33.6

before humans had to deal with the iron fist of church or state, that the natural state

1:39.4

of mankind of humankind was terrible, that there was no arts, no letters, no communication,

1:46.2

no transportation.

1:47.7

If it was nasty, short and brutish, what say you?

1:52.2

I say that Hobbes was wrong on every point and, you know, we don't necessarily need to blame

1:58.6

him because he didn't have any archeological or anthropological data to work with.

...

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