Jdsk wrote: ↑19 May 2022, 2:31pm
Cugel wrote: ↑19 May 2022, 2:19pmOr haven't you noticed yet? We British Boomers have lived through an extraordinarily pleasant place and time in human history. But don't take it as some sort of trend for the future! Just lately, that history is turning back to the normal human behaviours found throughout the centuries - internecine conflict, destruction and mass murder.
As far as we can tell the *long-term historical trend is one of lower death from violence, better nutrition, better health and longer life expectancy.
But I'm not saying that these happen in any sense automatically. And especially not in the short term. It's up to us.
Jonathan
* The exception being the transition from nomadic hunter-gathering to settled agriculture. That doesn't look so good for health, or at least not for those who reached adulthood.
Now then, have you been reading that Steven Pinker and his rather suspect stats concerning the better angels of our nature? An old school fellow of mine, John Gray, has another view.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/ ... -declining
You suggest that progressive trends of the kind you list are "up to us". Who is this singular grouping "us"? Shurely shome mishtake as there are thousands of groups, many with notions and behaviours that are conflicting, not to mention very non-progressive. In fact, the anti-progress mobs of various ilks and tittles seem currently to be in the ascendency.
Perhaps I have become too cynical and pessimistic but it seems that the various human tribes and polities are currently on the cusp of a hysteresis curve that may see us all tumble into another world war, which will be like those of the first half of the C20th but a lot, lot worse. It's been building for a while, with Ukraine just the latest in a series of prologues.
On the other hand, the various machinations of various powerful human groups may first stimulate a vast and worldwide economic collapse into a punishing "crash" 100X worse than that of the 1920s & 30s; or the ever-nearing climate catastrophe with all the human survival contests that it will bring may arrive sooner rather than later; or the next pandemic with something far worse than Covid in play.....
Being more optimistic would certainly be a balm to such fears and may even be justified, if various voices of sanity are heeded. But the shouts of the various demagogues and mobs seem so much louder, eh? The only progress I can see is the progress in making ever-more lethal technologies and the progress from civilisation to a Hobbesian war of all-against-all, even if the "alls" are organised into various nation states, ideological groups or self-defined ethnicities, races and other made-up "identities".
Cugel
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”.
John Maynard Keynes