2023-07-20
42 分钟Today we're going to be talking to Michael Bess.
Let me just read off my clipboard all of this man's incredible accolades.
Michael Bess is chancellor's professor of history at Vanderbilt University, where he's been teaching for the past 34 years.
This man has been teaching for longer than I've been alive.
He's the author of five books.
Michael Bess is a specialist in 20th and 21st century Europe with a particular interest in the interactions between social and cultural processes and technological change.
So today I want to discuss with him how technology has impacted our quality of life over the past few centuries.
I also want to discuss the way that we romanticize the past.
A lot of us look at the eighties and say, I should have been born then, but instead I was born in the two thousands, where there's just too many iPads everywhere.
And last but not least, I want to discuss how the Internet impacts our perception of our current times and how that's possibly very damaging and much more.
Just sit back, relax, and enjoy my conversation with the incredible Michael Bess.
I want to first start by discussing sort of the quality of life over the past hundred years, because I think a lot of us look at the past and see it with rose colored glasses, and we don't really think about what it was actually like to live even just 100 years ago.
But I'm curious, what's like a realistic sort of description of what it was like to live, say, 100 years ago?
Well, if you were rich 100 years ago, you could live pretty well.
Of course, back then they were facing really big challenges.
You go back to 1920, they just lived through World War one.
When I lecture on World War one in my class, I look around the room, I say, well, if this were in 1920, most of the young men would not be in this room because they'd been decimated during that war.
When you look at objective measures of quality of life, they've just been getting better and better over the past 300 years, and with a special acceleration in the past hundred and even faster acceleration after World War two, it was because of science and medicine and also new kinds of social programs and things that were not even dreamed of back then, or were dreamed by a few, but were very far from reality.
Would you say the point in which things really started to get more comfortable for humans in a way that was significant?
Washington, maybe around the 1920s, or where do you think that point was?