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Dystopian Literature 14 The Time Machine 106 Views
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Description:
What was life like during the writing of The Time Machine ? What was Social Darwinism? Bet you weren't expecting that to be the follow-up question, were you?
Transcript
- 00:00
Thank you We sneak in Dystopian literature The time machine
- 00:09
last month What was life like during the writing of
- 00:15
the time machine The time machine is published in the
- 00:18
eighteen nineties and this is the time of huge technological
- 00:22
innovation So we're on the brink of the twentieth century
Full Transcript
- 00:26
and think about the things that are invented in the
- 00:28
twentieth century Suddenly we're goingto have cars computers not yet
- 00:33
the computers are coming and everything in between So at
- 00:39
the end of the nineteenth century life had been getting
- 00:42
better for people and it seemed like it was going
- 00:44
to continue to get better There was increasing urbanisation people
- 00:48
were living in cities and people have been making all
- 00:51
sorts of gains in scientific knowledge This led to all
- 00:56
sorts of theories about what was going to happen to
- 00:58
society in the future and one theory that was bouncing
- 01:02
around a lot of this time Wass social darwinism What
- 01:08
is social darwinism So social darwinism is a kind of
- 01:12
misguided outgrowth of actual darwinism which is the scientific theory
- 01:17
of evolution Social darwinism argues basically that within human society
- 01:25
the buddhist among us are going to survive But the
- 01:28
fittest means all sorts of different things So the smartest
- 01:33
people the kind of most socially aggressive people and that
- 01:37
basically gives a lot of people license to trample all
- 01:40
over others assuming that they are better and fitter and
- 01:46
more deserving So this is basically a justification of inequality
- 01:51
and unequal wealth distribution so that people who thought that
- 01:54
they were strong thought that they deserved to be rich
- 01:58
And they didn't need to help people who were poor
- 02:00
because those were weak people who would die out hopefully
- 02:05
anyway So these air the ideas that h g wells
- 02:09
is playing with and he is wondering if you project
- 02:12
several thousand years in the future like what could possibly
- 02:16
come out of all of this What was life like
- 02:22
during the writing of the time machine What is social 00:02:25.72 --> [endTime] darwinism
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