4 ms·
> 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
by 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 agoThought 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 agoIn 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.