Bad news surrounds us. Russia invading Ukraine. Fascism in Italy. Catastrophic floods in Pakistan. The criminalisation of abortion in parts of the USA. Melting glaciers. Bolsonaro (though hopefully not for much longer). Coming on the back of the worst pandemic in a century it’s hard to avoid the feeling that the world is entering a truly nasty period.
The science fiction writer Cixin Liu describes a civilisation on a planet orbiting two suns, trapped in what physicists call the three body problem – the chaotic, unpredictable motion traversed by three masses orbiting each other, radically different from the smooth path followed by a simple co-orbiting pair like the Earth and our sun. When the planet is relatively close to just one sun they enjoy a Stable Era – life evolves, civilization advances. But because of the three body problem, it is impossible to predict how long this will last before the onset of a Chaotic Era: the planet is either pulled close to both suns, burning all life to ashes, or drifts away from both suns, freezing all life in the cold of open space.
For Liu, these unpredictable catastrophes are a metaphor for China’s Cultural Revolution, as chaotic and unpredictable as it was destructive. Today many of us feel the Stable Era of the 1990s to 2008 – or perhaps even since the 1950s – is over, and we are about to be either fried in a nuclear conflict, or frozen as we can’t afford to pay sky-rocketing energy bills this winter.
At least, that’s how I and many of my friends and acquaintances feel. But if we’re honest, we’re hardly representative. Everyone is entitled to complain about their own burdens. Yet if we want to make a judgement about the state of the world – and people often do – then we need to take the time to look at some data. When we do that, our current downtick hardly makes a dent on the improvements in human well-being of the last half century. Child mortality, literacy, early deaths, it’s hard to find an indicator of global human well being that hasn’t improved in the last 10 years, and improved massively in the last 50.
It’s easy to find these data. Google “world bank” with the variable of your choice, and usually the first hit will be a graph of its global trend from that institution’s databank. (Try “infant mortality world bank”; type in a country to zoom in.)
Looking ahead, we face a very real threat from climate change, and we ought to be devoting much larger resources and efforts to mitigating it. But that’s no reason to downplay the fact that the annual number of under-5 deaths has fallen 60% over the last 30 years, despite global population growth of 50%. That’s 7.6 million fewer children dying, every year.
Progress is more than material, and it’s also over a much longer period than those graphs typically indicate. In the UK, relatively progressive by international standards, homosexuality was decriminalized only in 1967, and only in 1968 did it become illegal to refuse someone housing or a job on the basis of their race. The number of countries that have legalized abortion has grown dramatically in the last half-century. True, there are probably more sex-selective abortions today than half a century ago, but even those have also come down since the early 2000s.
While too many people ignore these facts, it’s also not uncommon to draw the wrong conclusions. The academic and popular science author Steven Pinker has been criticised for claiming that progress is due to ‘enlightenment values’. Whatever ‘enlightenment values’ might mean, the fact is that progress has been achieved in many different countries with very different institutional and cultural settings. It has been driven by a combination of scientific and institutional developments (including in public health and education systems), and today probably the only globally-significant opposition to this progress comes from the Republican Party of the USA. You know who really loves science and its application to improving the human condition? Communists. The Soviets loved science. The Chinese Communist Party loves science.
Polyannish complacency is equally unwarranted, as Our World in Data’s Max Roser notes. People need to stop confusing levels and trends. (Also stocks and flows, but that’s a topic for another day.) The fact that things have been improving for decades or longer doesn’t mean that things are now good. It just means that things used to be worse. (John Gray’s critique of Pinker quite rightly points out that there is still a lot violence in the world, but gives no reason at all to doubt the data showing that it used to be much worse. This paper argues that we can’t make statistical inferences from the observed decline, but doesn’t cast doubt on the observed decline itself.)
Indeed the reason those communist parties were so keen on science and progress is because they arose out of movements driven by a recognition of the depth of human suffering. The conditions of life were profoundly shit for most people, due to disease and drought, war, and economic and social inequalities that kept majorities oppressed and materially even poorer than they needed to be.
The great Harvard historian Jack Womack used to teach that throughout the twentieth century, people in Latin America suffered a chronic version of post-traumatic stress disorder. Poverty and hunger. Natural disasters. Disruption and dislocation caused by economic instability, and repeated social and political upheaval. Domestic violence, gang violence, violence from paramilitaries, violence from the state.
Again, the fact that most of these problems have improved for most people does not by any means imply that things are all fine. Case in point: it’s not that having the vote is so fantastic – just look at some of the governments that people have voted in! But not having universal suffrage is clearly worse.
Those who lament the collapse of the Stable Era and fear the onset of a Chaotic Era aren’t wrong in seeing, and fearing, the chaos. They’re wrong in ignoring the fact that life has always been chaotic, oppressive, dangerous for the 93 percent (or thereabouts) of the world that isn’t straight white male in a rich country. For the vast majority of people – not all, but yes the vast majority – the present chaos is substantially preferable to the historical chaos.
There is much suffering in the world, but it used to be much worse. This is a powerful argument in favour of coordinated efforts to improve it. Our present problems are caused by us, and can be solved by us. To the conservative refrain that progressive reform is doomed to failure, we can respond: we know we can make life better, because we already have, again and again. History is on our side.
{ 40 comments }
engels 10.21.22 at 10:21 am
life has always been chaotic, oppressive, dangerous for the 93 percent (or thereabouts) of the world that isn’t straight white male in a rich country
Yes indeed: ask Carlos Slim or Gina Haspel.
engels 10.21.22 at 10:50 am
Or indeed Liz Truss, Kwasi Kwarteng, Suella Braverman, Rishi Sunak, …
nastywoman 10.21.22 at 12:20 pm
YES!
LFC 10.21.22 at 3:43 pm
I agree with a good deal of this. The decline in early-childhood and infant mortality (both of which are still much too high) is well-known but perhaps not often enough commented on.
I think it’s not correct however to say that “the only globally-significant opposition to this [scientifically etc. driven] progress comes from the Republican Party of the USA.” Boko Haram, ISIS, the Taliban, the Iranian regime, Orban etc., are also “globally significant.”
Robert Weston 10.21.22 at 6:27 pm
I suppose the question is whether ISIS, Boko Haram, or the others, have anywhere near the power of the Republican Party to thwart, say, international action on climate change, or global trends of the kind the OP is listing.
William Meyer 10.21.22 at 9:26 pm
The fact that some elements of life have gone a bit better in the past 100 years is nice, but clearly the widespread nature of humanity’s problems over the past 20,000 or so years suggests that the last 100 years is no guarantee of further good luck.
I guess the expression “good luck” sums up my fundamental skepticism about this post. Is our recent run of progress just random or does it suggest that some kind of positive feedback loop is at work? For many years I would have strongly argued that a belief in science and technology and economic cooperation (personified, as it were, by large corporations and large scale internati) suggested such a positive feedback loop. However, in the past 20 years the insane responses to the 9/11 attacks, the failure to apportion the benefits and costs of globalization, the pathetic delay in responding to the problem of global warming — a problem fully understood more than 30 years ago — and the complete cock-up of our response to Covid, have left me dubious about human “progress.”
I wish I were far more optimistic, but the very real limitations of our status hierarchy ape “nature” seem to stand out far more vividly at this point in my life. Bummer.
politicalfootball 10.21.22 at 9:39 pm
I can’t work out how you transition from an appropriate acknowledgment of the Three-Body Problem to this:
Sure, I think it’s helpful to have a bit of historical context. In the US, we feel bad about the descent into oligarchy and autocracy, but it would probably be more accurate to lament the abortive attempt to rise out of authoritarianism.
Still, the whole point of the three-body problem (as you explain) is to acknowledge dangers that are discontinuous with history. Are we better off with improved medicine and social policy if we also have greenhouse gases and nukes? Stay tuned …
Omega Centauri 10.21.22 at 10:15 pm
C Liu’s three body problem bothered me -from a physics problem. True the 3-body problem has no solution that is good forever, like the 2-body problem. But, for any any realistic planetary situation orbits can be closely approximated for several hundred to millions of years, so not be a civilizational problem.
Of course our secular progress could be rapidly and rudely reversed. The current situation is worisome.
John Quiggin 10.21.22 at 11:03 pm
I broadly agree, but the recent past (roughly, since the Global Financial Crisis) is not nearly so encouraging. For example, US life expectancy peaked around 2010 and is now back to 1996 levels, growth in income per person has slowed (or reversed) nearly everywhere, democracy is in full retreat. It’s easy to see things getting worse before they resume getting better.
Then there’s the ever-present, and currently very high, risk of nuclear catastrophe.
Alex SL 10.22.22 at 12:21 am
Not really sure what this kind of argument is good for. Yes, homosexuality has been decriminalised in many countries, but there is war in Ukraine. Yes, there is war in Ukraine, but homosexuality has been decriminalised in many countries. It is like saying, yes, management closed down the entire social sciences faculty, but one of our mathematics professors won the Fields Medal! Is the idea is to stop trying to improve the bad stuff because there is unrelated good stuff somewhere else? Don’t people have a right to complain loudly about the bad stuff?
That being said, when considering prosperity, how equitably you distribute it and how sustainable it is cannot be separated from societal prosperity overall. Yes, extreme poverty and all its consequences have been much reduced over the last few decades, but our collective economic development has largely been built on the exploitation of non-renewable resources (most obviously fossil fuels, but also fertile soils, ground water reservoirs, fish stocks, and various others that may renew but only over thousands of years), and at the same time inequality has increased to frightening levels. Progress will all turn to ash if parts of the world where 2-3 billion people live turn uninhabitably hot and arid or flooded within decades, or if nothing is done about the stranglehold a handful of billionaires have on the media and public policy (with the second ensuring that the first comes to pass).
This doesn’t mean that I suggest playing activism for minority rights and lower child mortality off against activism for more renewable energy – one should be able to chew gum and walk at the same time – but rather that congratulating each other how comfy and luxurious our bus has become may turn out to be of little long-term value if it is currently barreling towards a cliff at 120 km/h.
I also honestly don’t think that people are happier and more mentally stable at 2020s societal wealth but as insecure gig workers and, as they say, “locked out of the property ladder” than they would be in a stable job with benefits and career prospects and a decent state pension in line and owning an apartment but at 1970s societal wealth. There is indeed more to progress than material wealth, and feeling economically secure is right there at the top, and fewer and fewer people have that luxury even as they now have a shiny cell phone and wide screen TV that they wouldn’t have had in the 1970s.
John Quiggin 10.22.22 at 2:50 am
For poor countries, particularly in Africa and South Asia, there was progress on most measures (like Sustainable Development Goals https://sdg-tracker.org/) before Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, but hard to know how big an impact those disasters have had.
LFC 10.22.22 at 3:42 am
Another thing that should be mentioned is the scale of the current migration/refugee/displaced-persons crisis, which doesn’t show many signs of getting better any time soon. Food insecurity, worsened in some places by conflict and effects of climate change, also seems higher than it’s been in a while, though I realize the statement is impressionistic (see, e.g., Chad, South Sudan, Ethiopia/Tigray, Somalia).
And Bangladesh, acclaimed until recently as something of an economic “miracle,” has also hit bumps in the road lately. See here (though I’m not necessarily endorsing the whole analysis).
rivelle 10.22.22 at 4:36 am
It’s difficult to see how this point necessarily helps your case. It also seems oddly unnecessary. But perhaps may be illuminating.
“There was systematic political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union,[1] based on the interpretation of political opposition or dissent as a psychiatric problem.[2] It was called “psychopathological mechanisms” of dissent.[3]
During the leadership of General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, psychiatry was used to disable and remove from society political opponents (“dissidents”) who openly expressed beliefs that contradicted the official dogma.[4][5] The term “philosophical intoxication”, for instance, was widely applied to the mental disorders diagnosed when people disagreed with the country’s Communist leaders “
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry_in_the_Soviet_Union
How different from the Soviet misuse of psychiatry is Pinker’s advocacy of “debiasing” as methods to suppress and destroy political dissent and social discontent? How different is both from Jonestown brainwashing? Pinker is not alone. Political dissent as mental illness that can programmed out of the mind of the sufferer is gaining traction.
“The methods they teach come from cognitive behavioural therapy, which Lukianoff credits with having saved his life when he suffered from depression. He and Haidt argue that student demands for social justice are expressions of “cognitive distortions” that CBT can correct, and that the problems that young people and their parents worry about are not as grave as they think; they are simply, as Steven Pinker writes, “problems of progress”. Despite the title, which suggests cultural or civilisational diagnosis, the checklists and worksheets distributed throughout this book make clear that its genre is self-help.”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/20/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind-review
rivelle 10.22.22 at 4:38 am
“Why then, you may wonder, write such a long book to defend progress when it works so well on its own? It is because, like all seemingly inevitable historical trends, progress risks being sabotaged by people who spread false ideas about it. Enlightenment Now is a long indictment of the cultural ills that risk derailing the course of progress according to Pinker. The list is long, but essentially it can be summed up by the “demonization of science in the liberal arts programs” (401),14 the Marxist professors who teach these programs (403), the authors they assign (Pinker gets particularly animated when it comes to Foucault, Walter Benjamin, Frantz Fanon, Friedrich Nietzsche, Theodor Adorno, and a few others…)”
(…)
the only real obstacle to progress, according to Pinker, has nothing to do with impending environmental catastrophe, social upheavals, wars, and the like: it is located in the humanities and their “clerisy.” Yet, this can be fixed too: cognitive “debiasing programs” can help put students back on the right path (378). And the humanities, which suffer from the self-inflicted wounds of “postmodernism,” “obscurantism,” “relativism,” and “political correctness” (406), can be saved by becoming a subset of the cognitive sciences: for does everything not originate in the brain? Cognitive psychologists, behavioural geneticists, and neuroscientists could thus help “innumerate” political theorists or impaired literary scholars think better about “human nature,” which is what political theory and literature are about (407). “What would happen over the long run if a standard college curriculum devoted less attention to the writings of Karl Marx and Fanon and more to the quantitative analyses of political violence?” Pinker asks candidly (405). One wonders indeed, but Enlightenment Now gives us a taste of what this sorry state of affairs would look like: not only would the measure of political violence become meaningless, for lack of a historical understanding of its changing nature, but some of its specific forms would become entirely invisible.”
(…)
“Under this new regime, data points and factoids gleaned on the internet, evidence
and visual effects, scientific proof and a TED Talk, and validity and celebrity often risk getting hopelessly blurred. There is nothing wrong with “evidence-based” research, which is why Steven Pinker should be held to its demanding standards, including the very Kantian one of understanding its limitations (Kant called it the “critical” use of reason—something Pinker does not seem to like very much). Not all important questions can be answered in such terms. Evidence is not always easy to define, nor is it always quantifiable. Bringing the issues of life and death, war and peace, population and poverty, race and inequality into a PowerPoint-like narrative of universal and linear human progress that dispenses with the complexities of history and politics is meaningless. Suggesting that these complexities must be dispensed with because they prevent us from seeing progress is a fraud. Yet, one quickly realizes that Pinker’s Enlightenment is made of plasterboard and that the progress that runs through it is one mile wide only because, like Enlightenment Now, it is one inch deep.”
https://issforum.org/essays/PDF/CR1.pdf
rivelle 10.22.22 at 4:56 am
Paul Segal’s Whiggish appeal to a type of historical eschatology or teleology has more of the hallmarks of religious faith than of social or natural scientific history. It’s notable that Segal fails to address the problems that currently afflict us that have grown worse with the passing of historical time. This is the very concept of the Anthropocene and the great Holocene extinction that we are in the midst of, and that cannot be expected to leave the human species unscathed anymore than it afflicts all other forms of life on Earth. Amongst the worst effects is not only climate change but the clearly observable failure of any form of Enlightenment reason of the type that is needed to divert us from the paths that we have grown accustomed to hitherto. On climate change alone, we are past the tipping point and inexorably headed for catastrophe.
See e.g. Ugo Bardi on the “Seneca Effect”
“The Seneca effect, or Seneca cliff or Seneca collapse, is a mathematical model proposed by Ugo Bardi to describe situations where a system’s rate of decline is much sharper than its earlier rate of growth.”
(…)
“One of the model’s main practical applications has been to describe the resultant outcomes given the condition of a global shortage of fossil fuels.[1] Unlike the symmetrical Hubbert curve fossil fuel model, the Seneca cliff model shows material asymmetry, where the global rate of decline in fossil fuel production is far steeper than forecasted by the Hubbert curve.[4]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seneca_effect
https://www.senecaeffect.com/
I’ll attempt here to provide a necessarily brief summary of the more detailed thesis put forward by Bardi in his book entitled “The Seneca Effect”. Also informing the following is Joseph Tainter’s “The Collapse of Complex Societies”. Also of relevance are the reports of the IPCC.
Our complex society is a system which is at least 300,000 years old. This system is a self organizing system.
We, as Homo Sapiens, arose very late into the life of this system. Because it is a self organized system which has now grown nearly all inclusive, it has reached the practical limits of its organization. This means it will collapse, become disorganized.
The system is now functioning in a closed environment. For a system which has grown by increasing complexity and by driving human population growth and especially, density, this means the end.
Some argue that the system does not have to end. They point to some natural systems which seem to be in a closed equilibrium. I agree, completely, it is possible to reach a state where humans live wholly within the natural system, taking from the surplus, only.
The system did have a state of equilibrium, until about 12,000 years ago. Until that time, when our population was a few million and widely scattered, our numbers were fairly stable, though it seems that 45,000 years ago we began making life hard for cousin species in Europe and Asia.
However, back when we were in balance with nature, the world was relatively rich. Now, it is trashed.
We can not control the system, we are dependent systems, it creates our context. If we violate it, we die.
The system is dying not only because it is running out of sufficiently rich resources, particularly, energy. There is a further problem:
It will die because it has reached the reasonable end of complexity. Complexity has a cost; as the “fineness” or “detail” of complexity increases, the cost increases as well, and at some point increases exponentially. This means there is a limit to complexity.
Above all, the system will die because the climate is changing, for the worse, and rapidly. Our population, and the system which drives and requires it, began to swell most recently when the weather became relatively warm, moist and moderate. Even so, weather has made history, from our emergence from the grasslands as agrarians, to the black plague, to the defeat of the Armada. Now, of course, it is about to change history again, as the weather becomes increasingly unstable and agriculture become impossible.
I maintain there is nothing we can do about it. It isn’t politics, or philosophy, or religion, it is about energy. When the system comes apart, the population will plummet, and will continue to decrease for decades.
Of course, if the most dire predictions of climate change are true, then there will be no humans left.
engels 10.22.22 at 8:44 am
“Woke Steven Pinker” is an original intellectual niche, I’ll grant you that.
Miriam Ronzoni 10.22.22 at 8:52 am
Hi Paul,
Great post! One question: would it not be possible to agree with you on how things are statically, but also be concerned – more dynamically – that whilst the actual “burning” is mainly a first world problem, this kind of burning does not bode well for much needed global reforms that are not just a first world problem, in particular but not only with regard to climate change?
LFC 10.22.22 at 1:23 pm
I think it’s unfair to tar this post with the Pinker brush, given that the OP explicitly criticizes Pinker.
(For the record, I don’t know Paul Segal and had never heard of him before the recent announcement about his joining the roster of Crooked Timber posters.)
anon/portly 10.22.22 at 3:31 pm
You know who really loves science and its application to improving the human condition? Communists. The Soviets loved science. The Chinese Communist Party loves science.
Indeed the reason those communist parties were so keen on science and progress is because they arose out of movements driven by a recognition of the depth of human suffering.
There’s a lot I agree with in this post – grappling with the great decrease in global economic inequality of recent years is not something you see much of in progressive spaces – but this bit kind of blows my mind. The phrase “depth of human suffering” takes on a different meaning when I think of the famines of Stalin and Mao.
And what percentage of long-run “science and progress” came out of communist-era Soviet and Chinese universities? Put together, less than one Harvard or Cambridge? (This is no doubt an exaggeration, but still).
roger gathmann 10.22.22 at 4:19 pm
Yes, when we look at the data, we have to say: thank you, Communist Party of China! Or is that not the point of this post? Cause talking about the world decline of infant mortality or the world rise in income is really talking about the amazing Chinese decline in infant mortality and the amazing Chinese increase in income, plus some other countries. Yet, I don’t see Western academics recommending other nations embrace the chinese model. It is as if there are, um, other values at play in analyzing the “data”.
engels 10.22.22 at 5:28 pm
Our present problems are caused by us, and can be solved by us.
Case in point perhaps: austerity, which killed 300 000 people in Britain (a “rich country”) in the last decade (I think some of them might not have even been straight white men!) The technocratic consensus seemed to be against it yet it happened anyway and seems about to happen again. So how do “we” “solve” that?
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/oct/05/over-330000-excess-deaths-in-great-britain-linked-to-austerity-finds-study
LFC 10.22.22 at 7:41 pm
anon/portly @19
The OP does not say or even imply that Stalin and Mao did not cause enormous human suffering. Or, removing the double negatives, the OP does not deny that they caused enormous human suffering. What the Communist movements “arose out of,” and what they did in power, are two very different things. Still, the OP probably exaggerates their commitment to science. Where science and ideology clashed, the latter tended to win; I’m thinking of Lysenkoism in particular.
Elsbeth 10.22.22 at 8:56 pm
Pollyanna wasn’t at all complacent. She was grateful. It’s actually an important distinction.
rivelle 10.22.22 at 11:52 pm
Purely for the purposes of information, is the Paul Segal who is the author of this piece, this Paul Segal?
https://sites.google.com/view/paulsegal/
Notwithstanding my criticisms of the OP, I thank Paul Segal for the OP and look forward to hearing more from him. Especially on the questions of economic inequality which is the main subject area of research of the Paul Segal of the LSE.
Barry 10.23.22 at 1:31 am
“”You know who really loves science and its application to improving the human condition? Communists. The Soviets loved science. The Chinese Communist Party loves science.“
No, they hated science. They loved technology, but brutally repressed science.
Ingrid Robeyns 10.23.22 at 9:35 am
Great to read your first post Paul, and welcome to our blogging team!
I think it’s good that the post reminds everyone of all the progress (and as a woman whose mother was forced to resign as a teacher when she married, and a friend of many LBTGQI-persons, I am totally grateful for those changes). But it nevertheless seems also important, as the OP does, to be clear of the still far distance between where we are and where we could have been, AND of possible slidebacks. I think an important regression over the last 50 years is increasing wealth concentration among (if I am allowed to use that word) members of the ruling class, as well as concentration of power in this class. It is not something one sees by the statistics that are usually shared in media. So I believe the data show that we have a mix of (1) massive moral and social progress in some areas, (2) some very significant forms of moral and social regress, in particular ecological sustainability (climate and biodiversity loss), and wealth concentration, and (3) areas/cases where the balance is unclear. While those under (2) aren not many in numbers, their social and political significance is, in my view, huge.
engels 10.23.22 at 10:11 am
“Woke Steven Pinker” = Steven Pinker but with a congratulatory nod to various Brahmin left shibboleths, which are deployed to buttress Pinker’s essential conservatism
reason 10.23.22 at 10:42 am
Bravo Barry, a very good point. And correct I think. And far too many people do not understand the distinction.
engels 10.23.22 at 11:22 am
…In the case of the western world, this roughly translates to the view that things are pretty good, which isn’t to say they couldn’t be better, and although there are threats to face, we shouldn’t burn the system down, because things could certainly be a whole lot worse, and if we can make incremental improvements, then a rising tide will lift all boats. It’s a position that Gates, in a conversation with Pinker and the New York Times, called the “conservative centre”…
nastywoman 10.23.22 at 11:56 am
As this OP made me thankful again how lucky I am that I don’t live in the Middle Ages –
even as actually I currently reside (most of the time) in a town of the Middle Ages –
where in the morning they used to empty their bed pans right outside the windows –
Okay – outside of THE BACK windows – and then – the ‘s… (hopefully) got washed away by the next rain –
So –
yeah? –
HUUUGE progress –
AND even in LA and the desert of Nevada, just last week I found out how tremendously ‘progressive’ plumbing could be… and – actually – how important compared to any other… problem like – that by stats ‘Communists and the Chinese were even able to improve their lives in the last decades in a much faster and HUUUGER way as we did AND they didn’t respond to any 9/11 attacks in any ‘insane way’ or had a ‘failure to apportion the benefits and costs of globalization or the pathetic delay in responding to the problem of global warming – or ‘a cock up response to Covid’ – while ‘in the US, we feel bad about the descent into oligarchy and autocracy’ and on the other hand: ‘Not really sure what this kind of argument is good for. Yes, homosexuality has been decriminalised in many countries, but there is war in Ukraine. Yes, there is war in Ukraine…
BUT wasn’t WW1 and WW2 on a completely different dimension?
and about: ‘Is the idea is to stop trying to improve the bad stuff because there is unrelated good stuff somewhere else? Don’t people have a right to complain loudly about the bad stuff?’
YES! –
and nowhere in the World it’s done more loudly than on ‘Meta’ and outside of Meta
in Germany – as Germany is THE COUNTRY OF ANGST –
and NOBODY has as much right as Germany to complain about the lack of progression.
(as long as the plumbing works)
Capisce?
(and everything gets explained in this video)
https://youtu.be/ONj9cvHCado
Peter T 10.23.22 at 11:18 pm
If we are thinking about the long run, is this solely human-centred approach the right one? The average length of time a large mammal species is around is 2 million years. We have been around for 300,000 so far, of which for 275,000 were spent as another large mammal – successful in out-competing large grazers and some predators, and in adapting our environment. We could have gone on doing that for another million or more years, telling stories and leaving handprints in caves. A fairly healthy life for most, if often violent, and by modern standards uncomfortable. Who thinks we can sustain most elements of out current way of life for another million years, or anything approaching that figure?
Omega Centauri 10.24.22 at 9:25 pm
Nasty Women. No the Chinese responded to a score or two of stabbings in Xingiang far more destructively than the US response to 9-11. Also they are funding coal/oil/gas as part of the Belt and Road. Much of their foreign investment seems to be about loading up developing countries with debt.
engels 10.25.22 at 6:04 am
the Chinese responded to a score or two of stabbings in Xingiang far more destructively than the US response to 9-11
They killed half a million civilians and destabilised a geopolitical region? I must have missed that.
https://theintercept.com/2018/11/19/civilian-casualties-us-war-on-terror/
MisterMr 10.25.22 at 1:06 pm
@Omega Centauri 32
“Much of their [Chinese] foreign investment seems to be about loading up developing countries with debt.”
By definition, if a country is a net exporter it is loading its trading partners with debt. This is what european countries did before WW1, and the reason the USA did not this is because the USA turned into a huge net importer.
The Chinese themselves probably recognise that they have a problem and that they can’t rely anymore on an export centered model (I think their government stated this publicly many times), but apparently don’t know how to increase internal consumption, or don’t want to take the necessary steps.
This is indeed a problematic situation (as it is likely the same situation that caused the race for colonies and WW1, and later WW2), but I don’t think it is fair to single out China.
LFC 10.26.22 at 1:51 am
engels @33
It’s generally agreed that the Chinese govt is committing genocide in Xinjiang, so one has to call the comparison at the least a draw, istm.
engels 10.26.22 at 12:03 pm
…For Arendt modernity is characterized by the loss of the world, by which she means the restriction or elimination of the public sphere of action and speech in favor of the private world of introspection and the private pursuit of economic interests. Modernity is the age of mass society, of the rise of the social out of a previous distinction between the public and the private, and of the victory of animal laborans over homo faber and the classical conception of man as zoon politikon. Modernity is the age of bureaucratic administration and anonymous labor, rather than politics and action, of elite domination and the manipulation of public opinion. It is the age when totalitarian forms of government, such as Nazism and Stalinism, have emerged as a result of the institutionalization of terror and violence. It is the age where history as a “natural process” has replaced history as a fabric of actions and events, where homogeneity and conformity have replaced plurality and freedom, and where isolation and loneliness have eroded human solidarity and all spontaneous forms of living together….
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arendt/
Makes you think!
TM 10.26.22 at 12:10 pm
“Those who lament the collapse of the Stable Era and fear the onset of a Chaotic Era aren’t wrong in seeing, and fearing, the chaos. They’re wrong in ignoring the fact that life has always been chaotic, oppressive, dangerous for the 93 percent (or thereabouts) of the world that isn’t straight white male in a rich country.”
What is ignored in this kind of argument is the seriousness of the ecological crisis, which is now threatening human civilization. To the extent that things have gotten better in past centuries (and I agree they have gotten better by almost any standard), it is due to the success of industrial society, which was made possible by burning fossil fuels on a massive scale, which now threatens (or has already irreversably damaged) climate stability. The past success of industrial society undermines the conditions of its further existence. That is the dilemma we are facing.
engels 10.26.22 at 8:14 pm
one has to call the comparison at the least a draw
This is a rather downbeat subdebate on the Things Can Only Better post but if it’s a “draw” then clearly it isn’t “far more destructive”.
Tm 10.28.22 at 9:59 am
Engels: Arendt‘s antimodernist tendency isn’t the most insightful (or tenable) aspect of her work.
engels 10.28.22 at 7:37 pm
Really? That’s too bad.
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