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By most metrics, it's almost always been worse. But that doesn't make the modern era suck any less.
by standardUser 11mo ago
By most metrics, it's almost always been worse. But that doesn't make the modern era suck any less.
- stinkbeetle 11mo agoAnd would most of those metrics you allude to happen to have been brought to us by institutions like Harvard, or the US Treasury Department?
- Maxatar 11mo agoBrought to you by Steven Pinker, another one of Epstein's associates.
- standardUser 11mo agoI'm talking about disease prevention, maternal mortality, infant mortality, access to clean water, anesthetic(!!) and access to things like reading glasses and hearing aids and oh, I don't know, refrigeration. What does your precious Harvard and US Treasury Department have to say about that?
- JKCalhoun 11mo agoI think the topic though was corrupt abuses of power, lack of justice or accountability for the wealthy—those kinds of things.
- noduerme 11mo agoTaking a longer view of history... One metric of change would be that statutory (underage) rape wasn't a crime anywhere 200 years ago. In some countries, it still isn't. Mass rape and kidnapping is going on right now from Nigeria to Sudan. Wealthy old men can still marry 12 year olds across much of the Middle East. The fact that sex with minors has become relegated to something like a luxury designer drug for the elite hypocrites in the US and UK, and the fact that they're now being exposed for it, is in many ways an unexpected victory for humanity. The previous 5k years of recorded history, and probably the whole million years before that, were wall to wall with war, slavery and raping children. As well as the elites having such rights as prima nocta and simply executing anyone they wished. So I think we are making progress.
- wahnfrieden 11mo agoNot according to the metrics proposed by Graeber & Wengrow in the last chapter of Dawn of Everything > The three freedoms that most of our ancestors enjoyed, but which most modern humans lack are: > The freedom to leave. > The freedom to disobey an order. > The freedom to create new ways of relating to one another. https://drdevonprice.substack.com/p/the-three-fundamental-human-freedoms https://drdevonprice.substack.com/p/the-three-fundamental-hu...
- colechristensen 11mo agoEh, there's a tremendous amount of projecting a particular modern viewpoint onto the past in that work. It's a bit nonsense.
- JKCalhoun 11mo agoAdmittedly, I only read a brief review of the book, but it was suggesting the opposite. And example: we tend to inject too much of our modern viewpoint onto the old monarchies—that Henry VIII would not have thought himself ruler of the "state" of England although we talk about him in that regard from our modern perspective.
- colechristensen 11mo agoThat book is "rethinking" history but that rethinking curiously fits extremely well with a particular modern narrative. Some people eat it up. But separate a few decades in the future and it will seem like an extremely fad-driven interpretation of things.
- wahnfrieden 11mo agoThe book makes a point of how historical analysis was already fit extremely well into particular contemporary fad narratives of the time. It does as much deconstruction of that (and of the idea that those contemporary fads were timeless elements of human nature) as it does construction of new ones. The former is a very interesting part of the book you’re not addressing. I don't know what you add to this conversation with such breezy dismissal...