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What a mediocre thought from a great mind. Generally we accept our own mortality even if we fear it, but we fear much more for our children. Most people are alt

What a mediocre thought from a great mind. Generally we accept our own mortality even if we fear it, but we fear much more for our children. Most people are altruistic, and the fear of the end of the human species and most life on Earth (ie, fear of the atomic age) is much greater than that of dying of disease or accident. Since it's not worth a separate comment - every single museum in the US could be kept afloat during COVID by a single rich person. Unless they want confiscatorily high tax rates in the future they should step up now.

karlakush 6y ago
So you're saying you're going to rob the rich unless they give you their money? How generous of you to give them a choice.
swsieber 6y ago
> but we fear much more for our children People did back then too, so I'm not sure what's mediocre about it. We've had to live with situations outside of our hands for a long time. Our ability to alter the impact of adverse events isn't really driven by the magnitude of said events (e.g. family vs tribe vs city vs nation vs world). No matter the age, you just have to accept that you might encounter very unhappy events.
- throwaway5752 6y ago
  Thought both are out of my hands and would result in my death, I fear a 100km diameter asteroid strike much more than being murdered. "fear of the atomic age" is proxy for "fear of a thermonuclear exchange between the US and the Soviet Union" for a generation of people. It's not comparable to COVID-19 and it's not comparable to the other concerns he listed, and for someone so deeply rooted in moral and ethical philosophy as C.S. Lewis I'm surprised. Anyway, it's off topic, this is my last word on it.
  - philipkglass 6y ago
    In 1948 thermonuclear weapons did not yet exist. The bombs dropped on Japan in 1945 were about 1000 times as powerful as the largest conventional bombs. Thermonuclear weapons came about in the 1950s. The thermonuclear bombs the USA and USSR had in 1958 were about 1000 times as powerful as the 1945 bombs. It was the development of thermonuclear bombs that made nuclear weaponry the swords of civilizational extinction. C.S. Lewis was writing about weapons 1000 times less powerful than you're thinking of. He was also writing when the number of nuclear weapons that had been stockpiled was much smaller.
YinglingLight 6y ago
I would agree that most people are altruistic, which makes us vulnerable to naivete. The fear of harming our fellow man/children, combined with an unshakeable faith that Science, as it is conducted today, is pure and unadulterated, allows the most intelligent and altruistic of us to become pawns in the hands of sociopaths. One's worldview changes dramatically on simply coming to terms that sociopaths exist, and changes once again when coming to terms that groups of sociopaths exist. C.S. Lewis was many things. Naive was not one of them.
irrational 6y ago
Or, he had the foresight to realize that (as we have learned by our own experience) the atomic age did not lead to the end of the human species. If anything, if we had more fully embraced the atomic age and gotten off of fossil fuels in the mid-1900s by creating many more nuclear power plants, we may have been able to avert the current climate crisis that is this generations version of the dreaded atomic age.
- mixmastamyk 6y ago
  Thankfully they didn't before safety and technology improved, else we'd all be living next to 1950/60s reactors. Now that electric cars are viable, it's a good time to take a fresh look.
TearsInTheRain 6y ago
> Unless they want confiscatorily high tax rates in the future they should step up now. This sounds like a threat. The government is not going to pay for their spending with higher taxes. They are going to inflate it away.

karlakush 6y ago

So you're saying you're going to rob the rich unless they give you their money? How generous of you to give them a choice.

swsieber 6y ago

> but we fear much more for our children People did back then too, so I'm not sure what's mediocre about it. We've had to live with situations outside of our hands for a long time. Our ability to alter the impact of adverse events isn't really driven by the magnitude of said events (e.g. family vs tribe vs city vs nation vs world). No matter the age, you just have to accept that you might encounter very unhappy events.

throwaway5752 6y ago
Thought both are out of my hands and would result in my death, I fear a 100km diameter asteroid strike much more than being murdered. "fear of the atomic age" is proxy for "fear of a thermonuclear exchange between the US and the Soviet Union" for a generation of people. It's not comparable to COVID-19 and it's not comparable to the other concerns he listed, and for someone so deeply rooted in moral and ethical philosophy as C.S. Lewis I'm surprised. Anyway, it's off topic, this is my last word on it.
- philipkglass 6y ago
  In 1948 thermonuclear weapons did not yet exist. The bombs dropped on Japan in 1945 were about 1000 times as powerful as the largest conventional bombs. Thermonuclear weapons came about in the 1950s. The thermonuclear bombs the USA and USSR had in 1958 were about 1000 times as powerful as the 1945 bombs. It was the development of thermonuclear bombs that made nuclear weaponry the swords of civilizational extinction. C.S. Lewis was writing about weapons 1000 times less powerful than you're thinking of. He was also writing when the number of nuclear weapons that had been stockpiled was much smaller.

YinglingLight 6y ago

I would agree that most people are altruistic, which makes us vulnerable to naivete. The fear of harming our fellow man/children, combined with an unshakeable faith that Science, as it is conducted today, is pure and unadulterated, allows the most intelligent and altruistic of us to become pawns in the hands of sociopaths. One's worldview changes dramatically on simply coming to terms that sociopaths exist, and changes once again when coming to terms that groups of sociopaths exist. C.S. Lewis was many things. Naive was not one of them.

irrational 6y ago

Or, he had the foresight to realize that (as we have learned by our own experience) the atomic age did not lead to the end of the human species. If anything, if we had more fully embraced the atomic age and gotten off of fossil fuels in the mid-1900s by creating many more nuclear power plants, we may have been able to avert the current climate crisis that is this generations version of the dreaded atomic age.

mixmastamyk 6y ago
Thankfully they didn't before safety and technology improved, else we'd all be living next to 1950/60s reactors. Now that electric cars are viable, it's a good time to take a fresh look.

TearsInTheRain 6y ago

> Unless they want confiscatorily high tax rates in the future they should step up now. This sounds like a threat. The government is not going to pay for their spending with higher taxes. They are going to inflate it away.