Jan. 14, 2025 – When we Almost Got it Right – Societies that Worked
As we hear distressing stories of violence and oppression from around the world, we may benefit from reminding ourselves of times and places when human beings did organize themselves into durable just societies.
In this talk Dr. Reimers discusses some of these times and places: from the world’s first cities in 4000 BCE, to the Indus Valley civilization, widely revered as the most advanced society of 2000 BCE, to the small democratic city states in Central America, which held off the encroachments of the Aztec empire for centuries, to the peaceful coexistence among Christians, Jews and Muslims in 12th-century Andalusia which lit the spark for the European Renaissance a century later.
Dr. Reimers further discusses what principles and strategies they used to organize their societies, how they ended, and how their experience may inform our ideas of justice today.
Dr. Mark Reimers is a quantitative neuroscientist who has worked at the National Institutes of Health, the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, and Michigan State University. He was the leader of the Richmond Humanists in Virginia and UU forum in Lansing Michigan. He has lectured on a wide variety of scientific, humanist, religious, and behavioral subjects.
