I’m amazed that wars nowadays don’t kill millions of people since our weapons are orders of magnatude more powerful than they were 50 years ago. I think most of that is due to a departure from the tactics of sending tens of thousands of armed men swarming against each other. Sure I could eventually take out an M1 Abrams tank if I send a hundred men against it on a suicide mission. Or I could just leave a bomb in the road on it’s way home.
Well, at least until we all become genetically engineered cyborgs.
Ultimately I think the future will just be different. Better in some ways, but maybe worse in others depending on your point of view.
One of the biggest problems isn’t with technology, it’s with people. Every advancement allows us to support more of them so our population continues to expand to the limits of what the system can support.
It’s undeniable that many people tend to despise those who suffer the health consequences of obesity or inactivity, saying that they bring such illnesses on themselves. In a truly primitive society, it’s likely that many would similarly despise those whose are inept at hunting for reasons of congenital handicap, nearsightedness, lameness or what have you. Such people might not be thought fit to live, for example geronticide that was occasionally practiced in some Inuit communities.
(GERONTICIDE: KILLING THE ELDERLY. Mike Brogden. London:. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2001. p61)*
Gat has done some interesting work on this, and these people really are “smart guys”, though in truth it’s probably not deliberate. It’s an adaptive social trait brought about by two simple factors. 1: If population growth is left unchecked, people will be affected by starvation in a HG society. 2: People take a very long time to reach maturity compared to other animals.
So left to their own devices these groups will experience mass starvation, but the effects of that starvation will be random, it will be just as likely to wipe out productive 20 year olds a to wipe out an infant and it will make the young people weak and stunted due to childhood malnutrition.
So any group that kills the infants to maintain population has a competitive advantage over its neigbours insofar as it retains greater knowledge, has larger and healthier adults and retains more reproductives to exploit aby additional resources.
So infanticide becomes the population control method of choice.
Now which children to kill?
If you kill children at random then you will end up with slightly more women than men, because men and boys die at much higher natural rates in HG societies. That’s not good because you have fewer men to defend the territory an the women. And because one man can achieve maximal fertility with around five women, you also have a population structure that leads to maximum sustained reproduction and necessitates even more infanticide and the associated waste of resources.
If you kill of the male children, you have much the same problem of maximal population growth, unless you kill off 90% of male children. But then you have a severe problem of a lack of defenders.
So you preferentially kill off the female children. That way you retain the maximum number of defenders while minimising the sustained population growth rate.
So killing off the female infants and then fighting over those remaining is actually the optimal solution from a Darwinian point of view. It no doubt sucks for the individuals concerned, but evolution doesn’t give a shit how you feel. It only cares how many kids you have.
That’s my point. There’s nothing *uniquely *leftist about that Noble Savage crap. Yes, certain strains of the Left embrace it, but then so do certain strains of the Right. So for Blake to repeatedly associate it exclusively with the Left is disngeneous.
Children’s play is still precisely that. Being an adult means a vast array of opportunities now so child’s play is more diverse, but it’s remains a matter of trying on and experimenting with roles, skills, and attributes they see in the adults around them.
Because the problem never was a lack of technology.
Yeah, if you’re hungry or cold, then sure, you benefit from having your physical needs addressed.
But what then?
I realize it’s a delicious luxury to wrestle with that problem, but most of us aren’t succeeding.
How to be more than mere animals is the question, and technology can’t “solve” that, it merely gives us more means for behaving badly.
Now, thanks to technology, we annihilate virtual people, for fun.
What does that make us?
I almost hate to say it, but I think the answer is in religion. Although that’s a flawed vessel, too, as people use God for certainty and demand specific answers to soothe their pain and justify their hatred for their neighbor.
Maybe it needs a different name, some other word to represent the exhilaration of making music and art, and rooting for your team as they perform amazing feats, and cuddling your children as you stroke their impossibly soft skin.
The Unabomber reminds me of Oliver Wendell Holmes quote, “Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.”
In a truly primitive society, such people would likely be an unacceptably high drain on the tribes resources. Our modern society is more productive and can support a greater number of people who aren’t productive, however an unhealthy lifestyle is still a drain.
And not to mention from a personal happiness standpoint, being obese and physically unfit reduces your quality of life.
Three, which is about 2.8 more than my father could at my age (50), as he grew up a generation before physical fitness became cool. We’ve had to adapt to the more sedentary occupations brought on by Information Age techology, and we’re getting there. I’d rather sit behind a desk all day and run on my own to stay fit, rather than to get fit by working behind a plow. In any case, fitness is only one aspect of health.
I’m moved to make another remark about the Industrial Revolution, even though nobody has brought it up yet, because I know the image is lurking in people’s minds: Yes, Children Worked in Factories. They worked long hours in hard, hot, dangerous jobs. This is the first thing many people think of when they hear the words “Industrial Revolution”.
And do you know what children did before that? Do you think they were lolling in Renaissance Faire Day Care Centers? Before factories, they worked on farms–long hours in hot, hard, dangerous jobs. When people started working in factories, it seemed the most natural thing in the world to bring children along. (What else would you do with them?) Children didn’t work because of the Evils of Technology, they worked because in a low-productivity society they had to work.
Before agriculture, children lived as hunter-gatherers, and had to keep up with the pack during the miles and miles of daily peregrinations to find food. If they couldn’t keep up due to malnutrition or illness, they were left to die so that the group might live.
Only our modern, technology-saturated society has been able to nurture a notion of children outside of the labor force and protected from the worst ills of the adult world.
What does cuddling children have to do with religion? Or making music and art? As for teams, sorts can do that with less bloodshed and tyranny.
Religion makes humanity worse, not better.
Christianity is inhuman; anti-life and anti-happiness. A champion of misery, tyranny and death. And it is anything but moral; it is one of the greatest evils in human history. Probably the single greatest evil.
I wish you’d said 18th, so I could accuse you of invoking Goethe’s Law…
Anyhoo, a government should only be “stern” with people who actually hurt others, not those who don’t practice mindless rituals and pointless superstitions.
Just to be clear, disease stopped being the #1 cause of death in war not because of the increasing power of weapons, but because of antibiotics, vaccines, using sterile medical instruments, etc. It’s almost unheard of for any soldiers from first world nations today to die from typhus, cholera, malaria, etc.
For every Torqumada Christianity has it has had humanitarians like Mother Theresa. Besides it is believed by many historians (and no not just Christian fundamentalist ones) that Christianity with it’s concept of God as the Architect of the Universe encouraged scientific advancement compared to Greco-Roman paganism.
Actually, the value of what Theresa accomplished is dubious. The people who were poor before are just as poor now, and there are more of them.
Even if true (and this would be a fairly generous read), we have much better mechanisms for pursuing science now. Regressing to a Christian theocracy is fine, if you’re content with a 14th-century level of science.
She was vermin, not a humanitarian. She sacrificed other people, condemned them to suffering and death so she could mentally masturbate over her religious issues. No better than Torquemada, in her own way.
Nonsense. That encouraged conformity, the destruction or suppression of “unchristian” knowledge, the elevation of dogma over reason and inquiry, and on and on. The fundamental intolerance and falsehood of Christianity discourages any kind of serious critical thought; considering god to be the “Architect of the Universe” means that you aren’t supposed to think about the universe. Just believe what you are ordered to believe.
Religion is a disease of the mind. It is never a good thing.
I got it.
Bryan