The Meliorism Thread

Great Debates
1

There’s been a lot of doom and gloom on the boards lately, notably in this thread. There seem to be a lot of people thinking that war, famine, and pestilence are right around the corner. I’d like to offer a different view – namely, that things are better than they have ever been, and are getting better still.

I would argue like this: You could make a simple count of the countries in crisis, or the countries that make life miserable for other countries, and that count would be considerably lower than it was even a generation ago. Since I was a kid, there are dozens of nations that have joined the first world. For example, in Eastern Europe, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, the Baltics – all have joined the first world. In Asia, the same story – Korea and Taiwan are now first-world nations, with Malaysia and Thailand coming along. Meanwhile, Asia’s two most populous nations, India and China, are manifestly better off than they were 30 years ago. In the Americas, same deal – Chile and Argentina are doing much better, and are closing in on first-world levels. The overall point is this: going from the second or third world to the first world is a one-way street. I can’t think of a single example of a nation falling back.

And as the number of first-world nations increases, there’s more attention, and more resources, to be directed to fewer countries. Plus you get a few incidental benefits – for example, the risk of war goes way down.

I don’t want to minimize the problems humanity faces – global climate change, war and instability in Africa, AIDS – but the good thing is that some of these (global warming, for example) are very susceptible to technological fixes. And with more of the world prosperous than ever before, we have more money and people to devote to the problems than we’ve ever had before.

So what do you all say? And just to make this interesting, I’ll wager that only one out of ten people posting to this thread agrees with me.

(And incidentally, I’m using the word “meliorism” in a kind of general, non-technical way. Let no one tell me it doesn’t mean what I think it means.)

2

I agree that it is getting better right now. The world is still nearly at its peak oil production, and demand for oil has not as of yet outstripped supply.

Just because no first-world country has regressed to third-world before, doesn’t mean it can’t happen. All that will take is for a first-world country to be deprived of the energy it needs to sustain its population. The big question is, can we make the transition to alternative energy sources before we run out of oil. Personally, I’m optimistic, but there are a lot of experts who disagree with me.

3

I’ll bump this just once, so no one can accuse me of not caring about my own thread. I’m afraid I’ve scared people off with the wager in the OP, so please ignore it. I’m really curious about whether people think we’re going to hell in a handbasket, or if things are really looking brighter for us as a species.

4

But, you’re threatneing to take away one of the few things that the right and left agree on–that the world is going to hell in a hand-basket in 6.2 days!

I agree with you, so you now need nine nay-sayers to break even!

Hell-in-a-handbasket is a rhetorical device. If we were honest about the consequences of most of the policies that we debate, we’d say, “If we pursue policy X, we’ll slow economic growth by a tenth of a percent”; or “If we pursue policy Y, there may be one or two additional terrorist attacks next year.” Makes for a rather dull argument.

As I see it, the fundamental challenge facing humanity is simultaneous over- and under-population: worldwide over-population, which exhausts non-renewable resources, and Western (especially European and Japanese) under-population, which puts unbearable strain on the model of social democracy practiced in those countries.

However, I have no reason to think that those challenges will be any more unsolveable than the problems of war, pestilence, famine, Nazism, and Communism with which humanity has coped in the past.

I do take issue with one point:

I can–Russia, Zimbabwe, North Korea. Absolute national decline is not unknown. Relative decline is much more common, and often creates the perception of absolute decline and hell-in-a-handbasket coming down the pike.

5

Lack of clarity on my part. I meant, “I can’t think of a single example of a first-world nation falling back.”

I generally agree with you that hysteria is much more fun, and adds spice to arguments that would otherwise be rather dull.

6

If things are going to hell in a handbasket, then who would volunteer to go back to the way things used to be.

When exactly was this golden age? I mean, for most people who were alive back then?

Today we are more free, more healthy, more entertained, more wealthy, more safe, more educated, more informed, and more enlightened than any other time in history. And this trend is very likely to continue. Even given terrorism, war, religious fundamentalism, nuclear proliferation, new diseases, and resource depletion.

Bottom line, we’re winning. And by “we”, I mean the forces of good.