I think you’re taking too provincial approach to this. Also, even if things are about to get much worse (with USAID going away, etc.), they still may be better than they were in 2015 or whatever.
In some ways I think they are worse than ever. In my lonely opinion I have always felt that self-actualization was probably the best measure of success. This is entirely relative to the persons own unique experience. There was a time in my life when being a good husband, father and provider and being respected by my peers was enough. After the kids grew up and the wife went for greener pastures, I realized that was not enough. Now as a senior citizen I find myself longing to validate my existence and strengthen my legacy. I should have accomplished this 40 years ago. I always felt lost in the crowd. Excelling at my trade gave me some relief, excelling in my hobbies also gave me some relief but I never had that solid feeling of being established at something that defined my existence. It is very difficulat in these times.
Sure. Which people is an important part of the question as well.
Times might be good for me and bad for you. How do you answer the question “are times good for Eonwe and Der_Trihs”?
To be honest, I think that if the question “are times good” is to have any meaning, we’ve got to be able to abstract away some of the demographic refinement that is 100% important when asking other questions.
Or, to put it another way: if times are good for population X, but are not great for population Y, it doesn’t necessarily follow that times are not great for population (X +Y).
As far as people being wrong… I’m not married to this idea, but yes, I’m saying that people can’t be wrong: if you can poll the population is that is in scope for the question, and can refine those answers into some kind of average, that tells us the quality of the times.
Though, while that works for any given moment, I suppose it’s not a very effective way to compare times against other times, particularly if they were experienced by different people. So maybe there are two concepts at play? One that is “how do I/we feel about the moment we’re in” and “how are we doing on a particular set of quantifiable metrics (one of which could be the answer to the first concept) over time?”
Both are valuable, but I’d suggest that the first is much more important. Because people’s happiness is kind of the point of everything. And the best way to know if we’re moving the needle on the right things is if, in the end, it makes us more content.
If I recall what Pinker said in his book, his timeline is measured in centuries and millennia. His basic point is that there’s far less violence than there was, say, 1000 years ago.
There seems to be some misunderstanding of what Pinker said. He wasn’t comparing times now to a few years ago, or even a few decades. He was comparing times now to the situation centuries ago.
While this might be true, so what.
Americans still don’t have universal health care, though we do fund it for foreign nations.
The US has spent about $945 per Ukrainian to support this pointless war, and spent $700 per household in Hawaii after the fires in Lahaina.
Steven Pinker can argue all he wants that Americans are racist to feel angry about that.
Yes, he definitely compares the present to a few decades ago. For example, he compares modern murder rates with the 1990s.
The $700 disaster relief is just the first emergency payment that victims of hurricanes, fires, etc receive. It’s meant to cover food and medical costs. The victims often receive much more aid for months afterward.
Has Pinker argued that Americans are racist to be angry about aid to Hawaiians vs aid to Ukraines?
Also, Ukraine is in a fight for survival. How can a fight for survival be pointless?
Since when? American foreign aid isn’t (or rather wasn’t) even all that large, it certainly wasn’t about supplying “universal health care” anywhere. And often used for leverage or a tool of persecution as much as anything else.
I feel like it’s much like driving in the mountains. There’s a general upward trend, but not a straight slope - sometimes you go up steeper than others and even temporarily downward on some stretches.
Pinker is absolutely correct, and its more obvious the farther back in history we compare the present day with.
I think that we are living at the peak.
I feel many people don’t know enough history to understand how bad things were in the not so distant past. If you go back less than two hundred years, a majority of people were agricultural peasants. You spent your life working hard to produce a small amount of food on a small piece of land. That was your entire existence. It was your ancestors’ existence and you expected it would be your descendants’ existence.
Here’s what broke up the monotony. Sometimes the crops would fail and you’d starve. Sometimes you’d get sick and you’d die because there was no medicine. Sometimes you’d have an accident and you’d die because there was no medicine. Sometimes you’d be living in the wrong place and you’d be killed by some passing army. Or maybe you would experience a non-lethal version of one or more of these events and you’d suffer for a while but you’d survive until the next time.
This was what life was like for the average person throughout most of human history. It’s only very recently that a normal average person began to live an interesting life with a reasonable expectation of growing old.
And I said this was the peak. I don’t see how people can sustain this level of civilization. We discovered how to use fossil fuels as an energy source and that energy is the foundation for our level of civilization, including food production. And we only have a finite supply of fossil fuels. We’ve probably already used up more than half of it.
At some point in the not-too-distant future we will no longer have enough energy to sustain our current level of civilization. Without that energy, we’ll be a world of around ten billion people that can only produce enough to sustain around a billion people. The resulting population collapse will drive us into another dark ages and the survivors will go back to being peasants.
It’s cool that you can tell the future. My crystal ball is cloudier than yours.
Suppose your neighbor has enjoyed, in the time you’ve been living next to them, a decent, but not extraordinarily great standard of living. Now suppose that they start making more and more extravagant purchases: a new TV, flashy car, renovations around the house, maybe a new porch, and so on. Are they experiencing their best time?
Outwardly, it might seem so: they have materially definitely more than ever before. But suppose you ask them how they’ve achieved their new-found wealth, and they reply: ‘Well, it used to be that every month, I’d only buy stuff until the number on the ATM reached zero. But then I noticed I could keep withdrawing money, and nothing happens beyond the color of the numbers shown, which are now red! So I just kept on buying stuff.’
In other words, your neighbor hasn’t found the secret of wealth, they’ve just gone deep into debt. Are they still living in their best time? Well, maybe: as long as noone comes collecting, they’re all set. But would you suggest they keep up this behavior?
That’s really the problem with such Pinkeresque arguments: there’s a conflation between our material well-being and the soundness of the means used to achieve it. Because we’re well-off now, the means by which we have achieved this must be good. But of course, we’re in much the same situation as the neighbor: every year, to keep up our level of ‘wealth’, we burn up roughly 1.7 times the resources we have available globally, and five times the sustainable amount if everyone lived according to American standards.
Of course, we haven’t always done so. Much of the origin of our—specifically, Western—wealth isn’t something as subtle as debt, but simply outright theft: it’s estimated, for instance, that Britain extracted almost $65 trillion from India during colonial rule. Since it’s become unfashionable to just fleece the rest of the globe for all it’s worth directly, we’ve found more subtle ways of exploitation, and indeed have lifted the boot of the necks of former subjugated countries enough to allow at least a modest amount of catch-up, and behold: the rising tide lifts all boats.
So really, by and large, we’re not generating lot of wealth: we’re outwardly-reformed former thieves now embezzling the wealth of the future, amassing debt we hope we won’t live to have to repay.
And additionally, who really are ‘we’? It is accepted nowadays that the well-being of all real or imaginary groups of people matters, on paper at least, but what’s the argument for stopping there? If our systems are so great, shouldn’t they at least spare some thought for the well-being of our fellow creatures? Instead, ‘we’ prosper by preying on ‘them’, but that’s OK because ‘they’ have no voice to complain.
All that, of course, disregards the manifold ways in which we’re actually living in not so great times: mental health outcomes are terrible, we’re at a loss for finding meaning and connection, and replace genuine self-actualization with mindless consumerism. In the end, we don’t even seem to have that much to show for all of our efforts: whether we’re happier, or more satisfied, or more well-adjusted than in times past is at best controversial.
Obviously, it will be worse for some individuals, but, for example, while you don’t feel you’ve self-actualized, 1,000 Africans will avoid malaria because of efforts to fight it, overall, this is still a better time than when you felt better but those Africans were dying of malaria.
Love this metaphor!
Have you read Pinker’s Better Angels…or “Enlightenment Now?
I would agree with this, it is also something I think about a lot. I would like to feel I contributed something.
I think it’s a little like saying “the lottery is a tax on people who can’t do math” to the guy who just won 800 million dollars yesterday in the Powerball.
It’s correct, in a sort of abstract, statistical sense. But it does nothing to negate or refute the real, lived experience of actual individual people today.
The fact that wars are fewer and less violent (and involve fewer people) doesn’t mean you aren’t a war refugee. The fact that the average person is healthier, wealthier and less hungry than at any time in history doesn’t mean you’re not malnourished or homeless or financially insecure.The fact that Jim Crow is long gone and the Klan a shadow of its former self doesn’t mean you didn’t experience racism yesterday, or that your unarmed black cousin wasn’t murdered by police in the streets without consequence. Et cetera and so forth.
Incidentally, this is the same sort of reasoning that makes people pine for the past, despite the many ways the past was measurably worse than today. The people who had it worse in the past are usually different people than those alive today. And even if they’re not, our past troubles went away. We got through them. We survived. Which is more than we can say about the troubles facing us today.
I tried reading Enlightenment, but unfortunately it didn’t sustain my attention.
I like what you posted, but what I took from his books was more about how the lives of the most unfortunate humans has improved over the years, decades, centuries, and millennia.