Musings on hearing somebody with problems (on telly) bemoaning ‘the world we live in’ as a dark and terrible place…
Actually, much brighter than it’s ever been. 1) We now have national borders that have one helpful use: they advise people where the expected manners change, they make it clear that invasions are not welcome in our little cabbage patch or suburban plot, and in general they attempt to keep pests and problems out. 2) Exposure of nasty little situations doesn’t mean the whole world is like this: in fact, it wouldn’t be news if it was. Exposure gets people worked up to try to fix it.
Where was scientific advice when our European forebears chopped down every last tree on the Isles north of Britain?
Where was international concern when armies swept through ancient China on an annual basis?
Where was World Health when the Bubonic Plague killed 50% of the population of Egypt and so decimated Europe that in some districts you couldn’t get a plow fixed because the blacksmiths had died and you couldn’t record a death because the priest had died. The death figure was something like 75 million people, and that doesn’t count the Southern Med or Central Asia, where it also existed. Not only that, it wasn’t one event: it occurred from 1300 to 1700 AD, and may have had one prior fling around 700 AD. Health care has definitely improved, and if you’re going to catch the plague, so much better to do it now.
Lifespan is longer; you rarely see (outside the third world) 3-5 successive marriages, as each wife dies trying to give birth. Literacy is common. And in the third world today (and believe me, there was a third world of supreme misery in the 1000’s AD…)there is advancing medical care—[populations just died out entirely in the old days], social attitudes are responding to the light of international attention, and changing with better education. In much of the world if you have to give birth, get sick, take a trip, acquire property, or settle a dispute with a neighbor or total stranger, you are likely to survive all these eventualities, which was certainly not a likelihood in times past for very much of the world at all.
Do we have pockets that need cleaning up? We certainly do. But we also have something else our predecessors (except the wealthiest) didn’t have—leisure time, indoor lighting, indoor plumbing, communication, and spare resources—not only that, there, dawning around the globe, the vision of what can be had, and what one can aspire to. Mediaeval thinking still persists; in a few places, Dark Ages thinking; but we’re slowly gaining on it. We glitch back a few ticks; but warlords are increasingly unpopular in most of the world.
Global conditions are now being investigated, scientifically, sociologically, medically—we’re not t-rex looking up at the light in the sky and wondering dimly if that’s a problem. Sure, we’re inundated with news out of the world’s trouble spots, and we worry about them, and a waitress in Kansas City is really worried over the plight of children in central Africa…and let me say, has a lot more accurate information about that situation than her great-grandmother would have had…but over all, civilization is perking along better in most places than it’s ever been, we’re working on fixes for our screw-ups and for what nature may do, and I think we need to quit beating the drum for how bad it all is, inject our young people with a dose of history and a sense of optimism and mission about the general trend of the world.
If you weren’t here, at this time, what epoch would you choose—if you couldn’t choose your gender or race or social class, or what area of the world you landed in—what were your odds, then versus now?
Here and now is a whole lot better than the average of your choices, in my own opinion.
If I wasn’t in this era, I’d be dead, age four, of measles. So I do appreciate the times I live in (and only wish I could live longer, ’cause I’m sure it’s only going to get better and more interesting.)
I once witnessed a woman, very angry, decrying the present day and wishing very hard out loud that she could live in a medeival setting like the heroine of the fantasy novel in her hand. My thought: Um, chick? You’re asthmatic. You do NOT want to live on a farm, ever. Even with anti-histamines. And that’s just for starters.
But hey, she was getting clear satisfaction out of bewailing the prevailing evil that is modern life, so who was I to pop her bubble for her?
Allergies, me. Broken forearm, both bones. I wouldn’t have liked to be a Hun with those problems. Or a Mayan, with measles. Rome was pretty good—best thing for centuries around; ancient Egypt had its moments. Greece was the pits if you were an Athenian woman. I’ve read enough about the lives of some of my own ancestors to know that I’m very glad to be standing here, instead of Neustria (Merovingian France) or in Gloucester during the First English Civil War.
I’d be long dead. Allergies, measles, mumps, whooping cough, chicken pox, broken bone or so, tick bites in my scalp ….
Everything you say is correct, nevertheless, I am not optimistic about the future. Our current first-world lifestyle, if extended to the entire world population, is not sustainable. I can’t see how we will avoid either war, or massive extreme oppression, or ecologic as well as economic collapse, or all of them in combination.
Much of our current lifestyle *would be* sustainable if we made an effort not to be wasteful.
We can generate energy, which takes care of things like refrigeration, cooking, transport, computing.
We, as a society (though that is changing) often choose not to, but that can change and often *is* changing. Witness the low packaging revolution in Germany as a consequence of making producers of rubbish recycle that rubbish. When it started, people would stand in shops, unpack their produce, and leave a pile behind. Supermarkets were livid and put pressure on manufacturers. In no time at all, you got products with minimum packaging.
Support for green energy is starting to have similar effects. Provision of public transport means that people find it more convenient to take a bus/fast train than a car/plane. Etc etc – but you need to provide, not forbid.
We can produce an awful lot of stuff from recycled or renewable materials – we, as a society, often choose not to, but that, too, is changing.
It’s *NOT* a choice between a comfortable life and being green. That’s what the oil and nuclear industry want you to believe. They’ve got a vested interest that you do.
Living now is fine by me. I would have died of scarlet fever at age three had I been born earlier in the century. And what about penicillin? I’d prefer not to have died from the myriad of horrible things penicillin cures.
That being said, I agree with the idea thrown around recently about not having all eggs in one basket and expanding the space program and humans off world. We are one evil scientist away from biological terrorism at the best of times and have proven over the years we don’t have a problem with pooping where we sleep, to use an animal notion. Radioactive boars. Look it up.
I’m definitely a believer in Not All Our Eggs in One Basket…
I also believe, being a part of the world that has gobbled up resources wholesale, we now owe something to the planet—like using the internet, the computers, the electronic net—to solve some of the problems and makes sure the 3rd world won’t have to use the same path we have.
That’s part of what Foreigner is about—among other things. Avoiding the same mistakes. Taking the left-hand path and doing things better.
If we hadn’t discovered what oil and coal can do, we’d have cut down every tree west of the Mississippi and created a nationwide dustbowl, plus changed the climate. Now we’ve discovered what ELSE oil can do and need to shift…which we are doing, in the way of mass movements: untidily, slowly, and with many glitches, but we are starting the messy process of change.
If we hadn’t had oil, we wouldn’t have advanced this fast: if we hadn’t advanced this fast, we’d still be lunking along in the 1850’s when the next climate change (which honestly I believe we were already headed for in the natural rhythm of the planet, and just exacerbated like crazy)—hit us. If that had happened with 1850’s tech, we’d be in deep kim chee. Right now we have the space program, which gives us the on-high view of the planet, its lifesupport research gave us an understanding of our planetary biosystems, we simultaneously saw what we were doing, realized we had a problem—THEN started researching ice cores, and got the whole picture. All this since 1957.
Now we don’t agree what caused it, but we all know we’d better start doing something…if we have any sense; and part of it is helping the third world go with alternate energy sources.
If we’re not careful, we’ll find our infrastructure obsolescing about the time Utter Outeria has built their new energy systems, and WE’LL need to devote some serious energy to fixing things…but I hope we’re smarter than that: that Congress will get out of the circular firing squad formation and start looking at the need to do something.
The comforting thing is, there are other researchers, other countries, and many are doing research on this. So if a short-sighted poke-fun-at-science idiot gets one of our productive programs cancelled—we have a chance that our scientists will just go overseas and see to it we’re buying our technology from, say, France, or Sweden, or wherever. You break up the research teams due to not funding them—they do go other places.
Radioactive boars, eh?
Yep. That’s interesting. Not utterly surprised. The world learned something from that one.
It’s nowhere near as scary now as in the 50’s, when 99/100ths of the planet didn’t understand why a cobalt bomb wasn’t a good idea. Now almost everybody knows that, on a planet, as in an aquarium, goes-around comes-around, and your nuclear blast will inconvenience you, too, and make your neighbors very upset with you. I lived in the fallout path for the atomic tests, even in Oklahoma—they came out and told us kids not to make snow ice cream any more. And one hopes we can dissuade the ignorant from really making a bad mistake. But I lived through the age when Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) WAS the peace plan.
Just being born female is enough to make me glad I was born where and when I was. Yay for indoor plumbing, hot water, refrigeration, sanitation and information.
I may not see the answer to our various problems, but I do think that not only are people paying attention, they’re doing things about them. For instance, diminishing oil supplies. Yes, they’re diminishing–I’ve seen the stats from the inside of an oil company. They started investing in wind power last year, and they weren’t the first to do so. We still need oil–as Jaws from Scrivenor’s Error pointed out, once upon a time, there is no substitute for the kind of lubricants we get from oil. Not yet, anyway, so we still need oil. But oil for gasoline? Electric cars, for city living, are getting more common, and the varieties they’re coming in are getting wider and more interesting. In short, where there’s a shortage, there’s a market.
I do not understand the people who whine that ‘our way of life must be preserved’!!1!(Emphatic emphasis ad infinitum)! No one’s way of life has been preserved… not from my childhood to the present, and not for anyone else, either. Change means the loss of some things, like buggy whips, but it also brings other things, like bumper stickers… and more people use the latter than ever did the former. I’d posit that’s an improvement, for someone.
…Tho’ I do have a friend who owns a buggy whip. She uses it as a cat toy. The cats LOVE it.
Haa, the good old days weren’t all that great even recently.
It’s easy to get nostalgic surrounded by thousands of invisible
things we take for granted. Most of them are products of science
and tech that few take the time to become aware of and even fewer
want to understand.
So far the warfare has been pretty low key stuff compared to the
“good old days”, I doubt this indicates a greater level of sanity.
Chomsky seems to think the 60’s civilized some of the world by
increasing peoples awareness into a global view. I for one am
glad to have survived an era that promised us a future of dying
gloriously on a battlefield where fusion, fission and tactical
nukes were the chosen arsenal. Insane was more like it, the whole
MAD idea left people in the military age group with absolute
proof that the leadership was four cans short of a sixpack in the
brains department.
That part hasn’t changed, the chattering and posturing, and dung
throwing that constitutes international diplomacy is still the
same bunch at it.
I love the fools who harken back to the 50’s and 60’s as the golden
age. There was good stuff then but it certainly wasn’t enough to
outweigh the stifling mindset of provincial ignorance and pius
bluster that covered the gaping sores of a frightened populace
cringing under the fear of mushroom clouds and inferior groups
who might upset the wonderful facade.
Afraid of their children, afraid of their science, afraid of the
world while they built the ridiculous television and the even
sorrier Disneyland vision of a golden future right along with the
B-36s.
The Rus were paranoid clowns who were afraid as well. The truth was it
was a country whose major population resource was widows. Their
leaders were afraid of their own shadow, and all we did was imagine
that they were going to swarm over us at any minute.
Every so called golden age is like that. This is the golden age right
now and as long as we work to make things better they will get better.
I know you can live without indoor plumbing, electricity, and telephone.
You can also work like mad during the season to get enough put away to
survive the coming winter. You got a pretty heavy dose of good and bad
mixed together, the one thing you hoped for was not any bad luck in the
mix.
I made it to the doctor less than a day before walking pneumonia finished
me off, a huge penicillin shot and three weeks off let me survive with
scarring you could still see in the x-rays five years later.
I have watched people die from radiation poisoning, felt a nuclear weapon
from over a hundred miles away and seen the results of fallout spread over
years on a community.
Our schools need some serious overhaul if people think that there was some
special era that was superior. Just ask yourself how many people you know
who have a steel plate in their head from being kicked while harnessing
a draft animal. It was a common injury at one time. What superceded it was
the broken arm from cranking an auto or tractor.
GRIN the hot bath is reason enough to prefer a reasonable level of civilization.
Soap too, highly useful stuff.
My major complaint is that once you leave the planet, resources are over
abundant, energy is far too easily available and all you hear about is the
squabbling over the scraps here on the ground. We have everything we need
except a minimal level of leadership. Here in USA we need someone who isn’t
a candidate for prison or impeachment or both to get on top of the corporations
and the bureaucrats long enough to steer them into a more reasonable course
and make it stick.
We live in interesting times and it isn’t just a curse it is also opportunity.
Live without the Net, you must be joking of course. I just found a copy of
R W Chambers “Maker of Moons” 1902 edition on archive.org by reading about it
on a fanzine at Bill Burns repository of the zines.
Pre Net it would have been impossible, it took me over twenty years to find
Sword of Rhiannon and I already knew it existed…GRIN
Science just turned up an enormous new archeological site near a set of known
Roman works. Now they have a massive task to do digging it.
Expansion of the known just creates a bigger perimeter of the unknown.
Here’s another interesting tidbit. A man who was sent to a TB
recuperative facility at a young age, noticed that the pessimists
died and the optimists got better.
There is no entrance fee for joining the people who think we can
still be around a thousand years from now.
It does help to examine the source if you feel things are really
bad. Are those bad things you have experienced yourself in your
own life or seen with your own eyes happen to your neighbors?
Happy to hear that document recovery is going reasonably well.
I am of an age when childhood diseases were common, and polio, and strep and, and ,and. If I did not die from a strep infection I could have died in childbirth, or from Lyme. (Ever seen what untreated Lyme does to an individual?)
The fifties were *not* golden. Think of Joe McCarthy, segregation, a ‘woman’s place’ was in the home. This country disliked immigrants as much then as now. The first immigration laws were passed way back when to keep the Irish, Italian and other Catholic populations from ‘overrunning the country.’
I’ve done the whole back to the land thing. You can live without running water or electricity, and it is even kind of fun when you are young. But it gets harder with age. And finally it becomes a question of how I value my time and how I want to use it.
Change is hard, but by changing we adapt and become stronger.
This is a great thread; lots of food for thought here. 😀
I’m quite happy in the age I was born. I was born DEAD. My cord was wrapped 3 times around my neck when I was yanked out of my mom who had a emergency C-Section. They actually had to shock me twice before my heart started to tick. Then I came down with pneumonia and massive infections in my lungs due to me being 3 months premature. My mother didn’t get to hold me for 6 weeks, she almost didn’t survive the emergency C-section herself.
So no thank you. I’ll stay in my current epoch and not complain.
plus we’ve got the great thing humanity has invented. The Internet. enough said.
I’m now a happy 6’2 foot male, slightly over weight 26 year old 🙂
yes, we are having a lovely series about the Norman conquest and it’s results and the mediaevals in general on the Beeb, it does make one think! I am reading the Paston ( they lived around where I was brought up) letters – mediaeval correspondence between wife and husband in an upwardly mobile family – went from peasant farmer to top lawyer married to the heir of John Falstaff in 2 generations, next generation married a royal relative, then the wars of the roses came along …..family extinct by the 1700’s after being on the wrong side in the next civil war. nasty brutish and short, life tended to be then …
ugh it’s – I KEEP doing that!
oh, by the way, as well as being glad I live now, I am really really glad I do not live in Pakistan or China, or Africa – or – the list goes on …. we are a very lucky lot and we misuse it terribly …
All very, very true!
I’m an optimist, so I’m only sorry that I wasn’t born a couple of centuries later! I guess I’ll have to wait until my next life…
Let me imagine what people will be saying about our own society, a couple of centuries in the future:
– In the early 21st century all their food was full of horrible, disease-producing additives, chemicals and hormones. It’s nauseating even to think about it.
– They didn’t even know that cancer was caused by —– and ——, much less knowing how to cure it. They had crude, brutal, cruel treatments for cancer, like radiation, poisonous chemicals, and cutting whole organs out of the body – which weren’t even effective.
– People were feeble with old age, and senile with Alzheimers, when they were only in their 90s. And they put their old people in these disgusting institutions.
– Their cities were permanently covered in clouds of noxious fumes from fossil-fuel automobiles. Everyone breathed it in every day and thought nothing of it.
– They had these crude, clunky computers, and they thought that a few terabytes of storage was a quite a lot. How quaint!
– They had to do all the housework and menial jobs themselves, or use human servants, since they didn’t have any robots to do it.
– Their low-resolution, 2-D TV broadcasts are so full of hate speech, ignorance and prejudice that they make me shudder.
– Movies from the early 21st century are silly, boring and predictable. Their old-fashioned language and quaint slang is difficult to understand. They are almost unwatchable today.
– Even the most developed nations wasted trillions of dollars, a huge proportion of their national income, on useless armaments and silly wars, while single mothers sometimes worked at two menial, low paying jobs (if they could get them) to survive.
– The huge corporations and the investment bankers exploited and oppressed the ordinary people, and manipulated them with propaganda. They made profits of hundreds of billions, and wasted it, and polluted the environment, while ordinary people struggled hard just to make a living. People could even be thrown out of their houses or denied medical care or food if they didn’t have enough money. Imagine living in a society like that, if you weren’t one of the wealthy elite.
That reminded me of this:
http://xkcd.com/771/
Nicely put, Green Wyvern!
Bravo, Green Wyvern! 😉
I’d eagerly second the votes for indoor plumbing (clean running water, hot and cold, and waste disposal!) and indoor lighting (electricity is a wonder for more than lights), and communications (cell phone and internet access are real lifelines for me).
But I’d also vote for refrigeration and heating, both for keeping food fresh (oh my, safe food, free of disease and spoilage), and for keeping our living places cool in summer and warm in winter. Good, much safer cooking methods. (Far less risk of burning down the building just to cook a meal.)
Go back only one and two generations, and both sides of my family were small farmers. Go back a few generations, and one side may have been a big more large-scale, but still farmers and craftspeople. Then, of course, there are the not-so-noble (but neither ignoble) and not-so-savage (at least as “civilized” as their quarrelsome neighbors American Indian ancestors. — Go back further, and who knows what’s in the mix. — What does that mean? It means they lived as close to nature and the land (and feast or famine) as it’s possible for human beings to live. They were the vast majority of people: agricultural, settled people, that is. (True of the Five Civilized Tribes too.) — Self-sufficiency and a certain measure of independence were expected.
—–
Well, the trouble with “the good old days” and with the “good modern times” (aren’t we so advanced, yay us) is that we still have the very human problems of competing ideologies and short-sighted thinking and doing. (And blast it, I’m not any more immune than anyone. Darn the luck.) — Our very free and varied society still faces the quite real threats from within and without. What the Founding Fathers (and Mothers) called “factionalism” (party politics, partisanship, divisionalism) and plain old prejudices and selfish thinking — or wanting to control and change or eliminate or cast out the other guy… dangerous ways of living. That’s as true of one brand of fundamentalism or extreme conservatism as any other… or of extreme liberalism, for that matter. — The damage a single idiot or lunatic (or a group of like-minded idiots or lunatics) can do in the name of their brand of thinking can do… ugh.
I am very, very glad that, for the most part, my particular corner of the world is still free and independent and values differences of opinion; again, for the most part. Compared to other places on the planet, right this moment, I am better off than my fellow humans or my ancestors. This is undeniable, and I’m truly grateful and fortunate.
Yet, I have my share of problems and woes to overcome. Will I be able to overcome them? Good question. Between my own strengths and follies, those of my community members, and the vagaries of “Mother Nature” and whatever/whoever God really is (assuming one believes in any such) — whether I overcome the obstacles is rather up in the air, every single day. — That I somehow make it, day in and day out, though imperfectly, is a testament to… well, to something, perhaps sheer cussedness, haha.
I muddle through. Hopefully, when the bovine stuff hits the oscillating device, as it does often enough, I, like my neighbors or like the people halfway around the planet, muddle through.
And if we are very fortunate, perhaps a little bright, and open to it, we actually improve and change. Yes, it does happen. Wonder of wonders, we humans are capable of change — for better or for worse is within our grasp IF we want it badly enough to strive for it.
What a challenge that is. And if there’s a Creator, then he/she/it is surely ornery in insisting we find our own way, crawl or fall on our own power, like the child-species we still are.
—–
Hah, no matter what I say — I’m lucky to be here. If I’d been born even ten or twenty years ago, chances are, I would not have made it. I was born prematurely, which is also why I’m vision-impaired, aside from any unknown genetic factors. Even today, my birth and survival would’ve been no sure thing. But that’s beyond the historical accident that my dad was kept in hospital while nearly the rest of his unit was shipped to Korea, where most didn’t make it past the beach landing. (My dad had had pneumonia without knowing it, while doing a long routine hike, and was still in hospital days later when they got the news their unit was to be shipped out.) So there are a few alternate realities in which I’m not around. Then again, there are probably quite a few where I was born full-term with normal vision. *shrugs* The universe is a strange place.
—–
Hurricane Ike gave me a fine appreciation of modern conveniences, when the fourth largest US city went overnight from the 21st century to essentially 19th century pioneer conditions, almost a giant refugee camp, complete with quiet but present martial law, until public services (electricity, water, communications, hospitals, grocery stores, gasoline, etc.) were restored. Hah. I made it through that, with a very obstinate grandmother nonetheless. So…I suppose I’m tougher than I think. 😉
I think the Middle Ages and the Ancient World are fine places…to visit. Heheh.
Let me cast yet another vote for indoor plumbing, electrical conveniences, and definitely modern medicine. DH needed brain surgery, not once, but 3 times for a genetic defect that probably would have killed him shortly after I met him. 25 years later, he is healthy and the AVM shows no sign of returning. In prior eras, I shudder at what the treatment might have been, and almost all of them would have resulted in early death. Myself, I’ve always been healthy as a horse 😀 aside from a broken wrist once, but who knows what nasties I might have succumbed to without modern vaccines and medicines?