Thanks for such an uplifting and thorough deep dive. While I'm familiar with many of the stats you mention and how we're better off today, I love the way you've managed to bring it all together.
Though I'd like to think that we're not in as much danger of overlooking the bigger picture and becoming fatalistic, despite what some loud doomerist voices may make it sound like.
I tend to find that the entire "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short," narrative is built on a pile of lies, omissions and exaggerations. I hold that the anti-modern crowd is not so ignorant as the modernist crowd would imply, and that what the modernists call ignorance is mostly them just making false assertions.
Even ignoring outright falsehoods, yes, in the modern era we have skyscrapers and air conditioners, and we can tightly pack people into large cities where they can then spend hours commuting to work in cars and trains and planes, and then do sophisticated jobs that take lots of technical knowledge to do correctly.
In the past, good land was cheap and plentiful. You could own land in a place where it was always temperate, and air conditioning wasn’t useful or necessary, you could be productive just by taking a few steps out your door, your neighbor didn’t have to live on top of you because he could also own his own plot of land, and the work was simple so you didn’t need an education.
Education is not inherently good, rather, education typically sucks and is a miserable experience, and the only reasons anyone puts up with it is that it’s necessary to much of modern work, or worse, that bureaucracies threaten them into learning pointless trivia and/or propaganda.
Modernists love touting all the diseases that don’t exist today, but most modern diseases didn’t exist three thousand years ago either. Diseases come and go, and sure, you won’t catch smallpox today, but you wouldn’t catch AIDS in ancient Rome either.
Much of the supposed gains in life expectancy are just a reclassification of infanticide to abortion. More broadly, deaths of the very young are not as bad as deaths at your prime. Modernists continue to push changes of life expectancy while ignoring that much of this is infant mortality, and if you happen to notice yourself living in the 1800s, you’re probably not going to die at age 30, as modernists like to imply.
Similarly with slavery. Taking into account incarceration, the draft, education again, regulations and even just taxation, I am not impressed with the amount of freedom that exists in the modern era when compared to the past.
Also, living a long life in exchange for having fewer children isn’t really that great a trade off, it mostly means you’re older, less healthy and less capable.
With a billion dollars in the 1800s you can build a great family and be far more immortal than practically anyone living in the modern era, obviously being a billionaire in the 1800s is better than being average in the modern era, I find it ridiculous that this is even put up for debate.
On food, the converse increase in obesity, far outweighs any reductions of undernourishment.
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Not everything about the present is terrible. The present has lots of great features. But the past had lots of things going for it too, and I see too much of modernism being built on motivated thinking, slanted propaganda and outright slander.
The Transhumanists are obsessed with human longevity even as our global fertility rates plummet. There definately is a disconnect between dystopia and utopia and who will have access to either. I haven't met a technological optimistic who wasn't in some way privileged.
Thanks for such an uplifting and thorough deep dive. While I'm familiar with many of the stats you mention and how we're better off today, I love the way you've managed to bring it all together.
Though I'd like to think that we're not in as much danger of overlooking the bigger picture and becoming fatalistic, despite what some loud doomerist voices may make it sound like.
I tend to find that the entire "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short," narrative is built on a pile of lies, omissions and exaggerations. I hold that the anti-modern crowd is not so ignorant as the modernist crowd would imply, and that what the modernists call ignorance is mostly them just making false assertions.
Even ignoring outright falsehoods, yes, in the modern era we have skyscrapers and air conditioners, and we can tightly pack people into large cities where they can then spend hours commuting to work in cars and trains and planes, and then do sophisticated jobs that take lots of technical knowledge to do correctly.
In the past, good land was cheap and plentiful. You could own land in a place where it was always temperate, and air conditioning wasn’t useful or necessary, you could be productive just by taking a few steps out your door, your neighbor didn’t have to live on top of you because he could also own his own plot of land, and the work was simple so you didn’t need an education.
Education is not inherently good, rather, education typically sucks and is a miserable experience, and the only reasons anyone puts up with it is that it’s necessary to much of modern work, or worse, that bureaucracies threaten them into learning pointless trivia and/or propaganda.
Modernists love touting all the diseases that don’t exist today, but most modern diseases didn’t exist three thousand years ago either. Diseases come and go, and sure, you won’t catch smallpox today, but you wouldn’t catch AIDS in ancient Rome either.
Much of the supposed gains in life expectancy are just a reclassification of infanticide to abortion. More broadly, deaths of the very young are not as bad as deaths at your prime. Modernists continue to push changes of life expectancy while ignoring that much of this is infant mortality, and if you happen to notice yourself living in the 1800s, you’re probably not going to die at age 30, as modernists like to imply.
Similarly with slavery. Taking into account incarceration, the draft, education again, regulations and even just taxation, I am not impressed with the amount of freedom that exists in the modern era when compared to the past.
Also, living a long life in exchange for having fewer children isn’t really that great a trade off, it mostly means you’re older, less healthy and less capable.
With a billion dollars in the 1800s you can build a great family and be far more immortal than practically anyone living in the modern era, obviously being a billionaire in the 1800s is better than being average in the modern era, I find it ridiculous that this is even put up for debate.
On food, the converse increase in obesity, far outweighs any reductions of undernourishment.
-
Not everything about the present is terrible. The present has lots of great features. But the past had lots of things going for it too, and I see too much of modernism being built on motivated thinking, slanted propaganda and outright slander.
The Transhumanists are obsessed with human longevity even as our global fertility rates plummet. There definately is a disconnect between dystopia and utopia and who will have access to either. I haven't met a technological optimistic who wasn't in some way privileged.