Paul Cooper
speaker
254 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 5 Jun
Paul Cooper’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
This is because children were easier to control.
That's right, yeah.
But I would contend that that does have echoes in the modern gerontocracy that seems to be taking over in places like the United States, right?
You know, Ronald Reagan used to joke that Soviet premiers kept dying on me, I think he said.
But it was true.
In the Soviet Union, they had a problem with gerontocracy, with passing on power to the next generation.
Power became incredibly encrusted in these men who were in the 70s and 80s and 80s.
the society really didn't have a healthy mechanism for passing that power down.
We now see that same situation developing in the United States, where the election before last saw Donald Trump and Joe Biden contesting the presidency, you know, both of them in their 70s.
And it's that inability to pass on power to the next generation that I think has echoes in something like the Imperial Court of China.
Yeah, it's an undeniable resonance with today that in a very large number of the stories we've looked at, there has been some element of environmental change that has struck these societies.
Some crucial examples are the Sumerian society, which flourished in the third and second millenniums BC in the Valley of Mesopotamia.
Yeah, they were one of the earliest city-dwelling civilizations to really create what we would think of as an empire.
Multiple walled cities connected by trade networks going up and down the rivers Tigris and Euphrates.
As you say, the first examples of writing in the world are found in Mesopotamia in the city of Uruk.
But as we get to the end of the third millennium BC, so around the year 2200 BC, we get a small localised climate shift that had kind of tendrils happening elsewhere in the world.
But in general, this was a kind of Eurasian shift, perhaps a change in currents going over the Sahara Desert, a drying of air around the Mediterranean.
And it must be underlined that this was a very minor climate shift compared to what we're looking at in the coming century.
But nevertheless, this caused a period of drought and aridity in the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East.
This meant that crops that were flourishing, like wheat, were suddenly being replaced by hardier, more drought-resistant and salt-resistant crops, like barley.
Showing 61–80 of 254 · page 4 of 13
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