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rgraham666
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When fish goes rotten, the head stinks first.
If we're headed into a Dark Age, it's not because of the common people's entertainment. It's because the people that make the important decisions are decadent swine.
If we're headed into a Dark Age, it's not because of the common people's entertainment. It's because the people that make the important decisions are decadent swine.
Rumple Foreskin
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Is it possible? Yeshmmnmm said:
Is it happening/has it happened? No
For many people, times are worse than in the pre-9/11 days. But in comparison to the 13th century or even the 1930's, things aren't that bad.
Rumple Foreskin
Huckleman2000
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rgraham666 said:
Your comparisons insult the noble sea bass and indomitable pig, Sir!
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rgraham666
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Huckleman2000 said:
I'd liken us more to what was happening just before the Enlightenment occurred.
The old way of running things, through Church and King, was failing. Both institutions were more interested in making sure they stayed rich and powerful that they were ignoring their responsibilities. They were stuck in their hermetically sealed world while reality continued on around them. Eventually reality caught up with them and gave them a severe shit kicking.
My favourite author suggests that a good start on change would be to shut down the Chicago School of Economics. He compares this to the disbanding of the Jesuits. Without the strangling hand of these accomplished courtiers on learning and thought, new ideas will be set free to change the world for the better.
Roxanne Appleby
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The Dark Ages in Europe were the period between 476 a.d. ("official" fall of the Roman Empire) and 1066, the Norman invasion of England. The exact dates are conventions, but the period was characterized by a massive decline in trade, population, law, learning, civility, etc.
The modern era is qualitatively different in a billion ways, perhaps the biggest is that we just know so much more about the world, and that knowledge is disbursed so widely that that it would be impossible to destroy most of it, short of a nuclear armageddon type event. When one talks of a "dark age," it is perhaps the light of learning that is the critical element that determines how dark, and how long, so this is highly significant.
An interesting thought experiment is Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" series. A vast and cosmopolitan galactic empire was in the slow process of disintegration, and one really smart guy realised this, and realized that it couldn't be stopped. But - he figured out a way to make the "dark age" interregnum until the next period of light and growth last just 1,000 years, instead of the 50,000 years his calculations suggested if nothing was done.
Keep in mind that we have never been here before - industrial civilzation and its fruits are so exceedingly new - like 200 years - and the changes in human life it has wrought are so monumental and momentous, that we should not be surprised if it takes us a while to get it right. Like maybe a few thousand years, for instance, during which we might expect some bumps in the road. But there's no reason we couldn't eventually get pretty good at this sort of thing.
BTW, even agricultural and civilization itself are exceedingly recent developments in the life of the species. It was just an eyeblink ago that we were grubbing for roots and chasing down brontosauri.
The modern era is qualitatively different in a billion ways, perhaps the biggest is that we just know so much more about the world, and that knowledge is disbursed so widely that that it would be impossible to destroy most of it, short of a nuclear armageddon type event. When one talks of a "dark age," it is perhaps the light of learning that is the critical element that determines how dark, and how long, so this is highly significant.
An interesting thought experiment is Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" series. A vast and cosmopolitan galactic empire was in the slow process of disintegration, and one really smart guy realised this, and realized that it couldn't be stopped. But - he figured out a way to make the "dark age" interregnum until the next period of light and growth last just 1,000 years, instead of the 50,000 years his calculations suggested if nothing was done.
Keep in mind that we have never been here before - industrial civilzation and its fruits are so exceedingly new - like 200 years - and the changes in human life it has wrought are so monumental and momentous, that we should not be surprised if it takes us a while to get it right. Like maybe a few thousand years, for instance, during which we might expect some bumps in the road. But there's no reason we couldn't eventually get pretty good at this sort of thing.
BTW, even agricultural and civilization itself are exceedingly recent developments in the life of the species. It was just an eyeblink ago that we were grubbing for roots and chasing down brontosauri.
Roxanne Appleby
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I got this via e-mail and I don't know where it was published. It's a bit lengthy, and even cut short at the end, but it's fun, and heartening, and I think it's relevent to the thread, too.
WE'RE GETTING NICER EVERY DAY.
A History of Violence by Steven Pinker
In sixteenth-century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted in a sling on a stage and slowly lowered into a fire. According to historian Norman Davies, "[T]he spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized." Today, such sadism would be unthinkable in most of the world. This change in sensibilities is just one example of perhaps the most important and most underappreciated trend in the human saga: Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth.
In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek to quantify the historical ebb and flow of violence point to exactly that conclusion.
Some of the evidence has been under our nose all along. Conventional history has long shown that, in many ways, we have been getting kinder and gentler. Cruelty as entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labor-saving device, conquest as the mission statement of government, genocide as a means of acquiring real estate, torture and mutilation as routine punishment, the death penalty for misdemeanors and differences of opinion, assassination as the mechanism of political succession, rape as the spoils of war, pogroms as outlets for frustration, homicide as the major form of conflict resolution-- all were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. But, today, they are rare to nonexistent in the West, far less common elsewhere than they used to be, concealed when they do occur, and widely condemned when they are brought to light.
At one time, these facts were widely appreciated. They were the source of notions like progress, civilization, and man's rise from savagery and barbarism. Recently, however, those ideas have come to sound corny, even dangerous. They seem to demonize people in other times and places, license colonial conquest and other foreign adventures, and conceal the crimes of our own societies. The doctrine of the noble savage--the idea that humans are peaceable by nature and corrupted by modern institutions- -pops up frequently in the writing of public intellectuals like José Ortega y Gasset ("War is not an instinct but an invention"), Stephen Jay Gould ("Homo sapiens is not an evil or destructive species"), and Ashley Montagu ("Biological studies lend support to the ethic of universal brotherhood" ). But, now that social scientists have started to count bodies in different historical periods, they have discovered that the romantic theory gets it backward: Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler.
To be sure, any attempt to document changes in violence must be soaked in uncertainty. In much of the world, the distant past was a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it, and, even for events in the historical record, statistics are spotty until recent periods. Long-term trends can be discerned only by smoothing out zigzags and spikes of horrific bloodletting. And the choice to focus on relative rather than absolute numbers brings up the moral imponderable of whether it is worse for 50 percent of a population of 100 to be killed or 1 percent in a population of one billion.
Yet, despite these caveats, a picture is taking shape. The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon, visible at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and years. It applies over several orders of magnitude of violence, from genocide to war to rioting to homicide to the treatment of children and animals. And it appears to be a worldwide trend, though not a homogeneous one. The leading edge has been in Western societies, especially England and Holland, and there seems to have been a tipping point at the onset of the Age of Reason in the early seventeenth century.
At the widest-angle view, one can see a whopping difference across the millennia that separate us from our pre-state ancestors. Contra leftist anthropologists who celebrate the noble savage, quantitative body-counts- -such as the proportion of prehistoric skeletons with axemarks and embedded arrowheads or the proportion of men in a contemporary foraging tribe who die at the hands of other men--suggest that pre-state societies were far more violent than our own. It is true that raids and battles killed a tiny percentage of the numbers that die in modern warfare. But, in tribal violence, the clashes are more frequent, the percentage of men in the population who fight is greater, and the rates of death per battle are higher. According to anthropologists like Lawrence Keeley, Stephen LeBlanc, Phillip Walker, and Bruce Knauft, these factors combine to yield population-wide rates of death in tribal warfare that dwarf those of modern times. If the wars of the twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in the wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion deaths, not 100 million.
Political correctness from the other end of the ideological spectrum has also distorted many people's conception of violence in early civilizations- -namely, those featured in the Bible. This supposed source of moral values contains many celebrations of genocide, in which the Hebrews, egged on by God, slaughter every last resident of an invaded city. The Bible also prescribes death by stoning as the penalty for a long list of nonviolent infractions, including idolatry, blasphemy, homosexuality, adultery, disrespecting one's parents, and picking up sticks on the Sabbath. The Hebrews, of course, were no more murderous than other tribes; one also finds frequent boasts of torture and genocide in the early histories of the Hindus, Christians, Muslims, and Chinese.
At the century scale, it is hard to find quantitative studies of deaths in warfare spanning medieval and modern times. Several historians have suggested that there has been an increase in the number of recorded wars across the centuries to the present, but, as political scientist James Payne has noted, this may show only that "the Associated Press is a more comprehensive source of information about battles around the world than were sixteenth-century monks." Social histories of the West provide evidence of numerous barbaric practices that became obsolete in the last five centuries, such as slavery, amputation, blinding, branding, flaying, disembowelment, burning at the stake, breaking on the wheel, and so on. Meanwhile, for another kind of violence--homicide- -the data are abundant and striking. The criminologist Manuel Eisner has assembled hundreds of homicide estimates from Western European localities that kept records at some point between 1200 and the mid-1990s. In every country he analyzed, murder rates declined steeply--for example, from 24 homicides per 100,000 Englishmen in the fourteenth century to 0.6 per 100,000 by the early 1960s.
On the scale of decades, comprehensive data again paint a shockingly happy picture: Global violence has fallen steadily since the middle of the twentieth century. According to the Human Security Brief 2006, the number of battle deaths in interstate wars has declined from more than 65,000 per year in the 1950s to less than 2,000 per year in this decade. In Western Europe and the Americas, the second half of the century saw a steep decline in the number of wars, military coups, and deadly ethnic riots.
Zooming in by a further power of ten exposes yet another reduction. After the cold war, every part of the world saw a steep drop-off in state-based conflicts, and those that do occur are more likely to end in negotiated settlements rather than being fought to the bitter end. Meanwhile, according to political scientist Barbara Harff, between 1989 and 2005 the number of campaigns of mass killing of civilians decreased by 90 percent.
he decline of killing and cruelty poses several challenges to our ability to make sense of the world. To begin with, how could so many people be so wrong about something so important? Partly, it's because of a cognitive illusion: We estimate the probability of an event from how easy it is to recall examples. Scenes of carnage are more likely to be relayed to our living rooms and burned into our memories than footage of people dying of old age. Partly, it's an intellectual culture that is loath to admit that there could be anything good about the institutions of civilization and Western society. Partly, it's the incentive structure of the activism and opinion markets: No one ever attracted followers and donations by announcing that things keep getting better. And part of the explanation lies in the phenomenon itself. The decline of violent behavior has been paralleled by a decline in attitudes that tolerate or glorify violence, and often the attitudes are in the lead. As deplorable as they are, the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the lethal injections of a few murderers in Texas are mild by the standards of atrocities in human history. But, from a contemporary vantage point, we see them as signs of how low our behavior can sink, not of how high our standards have risen.
(Pinker goes on to speculate on the causes of the widespread decline in violence)
WE'RE GETTING NICER EVERY DAY.
A History of Violence by Steven Pinker
In sixteenth-century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted in a sling on a stage and slowly lowered into a fire. According to historian Norman Davies, "[T]he spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized." Today, such sadism would be unthinkable in most of the world. This change in sensibilities is just one example of perhaps the most important and most underappreciated trend in the human saga: Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth.
In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek to quantify the historical ebb and flow of violence point to exactly that conclusion.
Some of the evidence has been under our nose all along. Conventional history has long shown that, in many ways, we have been getting kinder and gentler. Cruelty as entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labor-saving device, conquest as the mission statement of government, genocide as a means of acquiring real estate, torture and mutilation as routine punishment, the death penalty for misdemeanors and differences of opinion, assassination as the mechanism of political succession, rape as the spoils of war, pogroms as outlets for frustration, homicide as the major form of conflict resolution-- all were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. But, today, they are rare to nonexistent in the West, far less common elsewhere than they used to be, concealed when they do occur, and widely condemned when they are brought to light.
At one time, these facts were widely appreciated. They were the source of notions like progress, civilization, and man's rise from savagery and barbarism. Recently, however, those ideas have come to sound corny, even dangerous. They seem to demonize people in other times and places, license colonial conquest and other foreign adventures, and conceal the crimes of our own societies. The doctrine of the noble savage--the idea that humans are peaceable by nature and corrupted by modern institutions- -pops up frequently in the writing of public intellectuals like José Ortega y Gasset ("War is not an instinct but an invention"), Stephen Jay Gould ("Homo sapiens is not an evil or destructive species"), and Ashley Montagu ("Biological studies lend support to the ethic of universal brotherhood" ). But, now that social scientists have started to count bodies in different historical periods, they have discovered that the romantic theory gets it backward: Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler.
To be sure, any attempt to document changes in violence must be soaked in uncertainty. In much of the world, the distant past was a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it, and, even for events in the historical record, statistics are spotty until recent periods. Long-term trends can be discerned only by smoothing out zigzags and spikes of horrific bloodletting. And the choice to focus on relative rather than absolute numbers brings up the moral imponderable of whether it is worse for 50 percent of a population of 100 to be killed or 1 percent in a population of one billion.
Yet, despite these caveats, a picture is taking shape. The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon, visible at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and years. It applies over several orders of magnitude of violence, from genocide to war to rioting to homicide to the treatment of children and animals. And it appears to be a worldwide trend, though not a homogeneous one. The leading edge has been in Western societies, especially England and Holland, and there seems to have been a tipping point at the onset of the Age of Reason in the early seventeenth century.
At the widest-angle view, one can see a whopping difference across the millennia that separate us from our pre-state ancestors. Contra leftist anthropologists who celebrate the noble savage, quantitative body-counts- -such as the proportion of prehistoric skeletons with axemarks and embedded arrowheads or the proportion of men in a contemporary foraging tribe who die at the hands of other men--suggest that pre-state societies were far more violent than our own. It is true that raids and battles killed a tiny percentage of the numbers that die in modern warfare. But, in tribal violence, the clashes are more frequent, the percentage of men in the population who fight is greater, and the rates of death per battle are higher. According to anthropologists like Lawrence Keeley, Stephen LeBlanc, Phillip Walker, and Bruce Knauft, these factors combine to yield population-wide rates of death in tribal warfare that dwarf those of modern times. If the wars of the twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in the wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion deaths, not 100 million.
Political correctness from the other end of the ideological spectrum has also distorted many people's conception of violence in early civilizations- -namely, those featured in the Bible. This supposed source of moral values contains many celebrations of genocide, in which the Hebrews, egged on by God, slaughter every last resident of an invaded city. The Bible also prescribes death by stoning as the penalty for a long list of nonviolent infractions, including idolatry, blasphemy, homosexuality, adultery, disrespecting one's parents, and picking up sticks on the Sabbath. The Hebrews, of course, were no more murderous than other tribes; one also finds frequent boasts of torture and genocide in the early histories of the Hindus, Christians, Muslims, and Chinese.
At the century scale, it is hard to find quantitative studies of deaths in warfare spanning medieval and modern times. Several historians have suggested that there has been an increase in the number of recorded wars across the centuries to the present, but, as political scientist James Payne has noted, this may show only that "the Associated Press is a more comprehensive source of information about battles around the world than were sixteenth-century monks." Social histories of the West provide evidence of numerous barbaric practices that became obsolete in the last five centuries, such as slavery, amputation, blinding, branding, flaying, disembowelment, burning at the stake, breaking on the wheel, and so on. Meanwhile, for another kind of violence--homicide- -the data are abundant and striking. The criminologist Manuel Eisner has assembled hundreds of homicide estimates from Western European localities that kept records at some point between 1200 and the mid-1990s. In every country he analyzed, murder rates declined steeply--for example, from 24 homicides per 100,000 Englishmen in the fourteenth century to 0.6 per 100,000 by the early 1960s.
On the scale of decades, comprehensive data again paint a shockingly happy picture: Global violence has fallen steadily since the middle of the twentieth century. According to the Human Security Brief 2006, the number of battle deaths in interstate wars has declined from more than 65,000 per year in the 1950s to less than 2,000 per year in this decade. In Western Europe and the Americas, the second half of the century saw a steep decline in the number of wars, military coups, and deadly ethnic riots.
Zooming in by a further power of ten exposes yet another reduction. After the cold war, every part of the world saw a steep drop-off in state-based conflicts, and those that do occur are more likely to end in negotiated settlements rather than being fought to the bitter end. Meanwhile, according to political scientist Barbara Harff, between 1989 and 2005 the number of campaigns of mass killing of civilians decreased by 90 percent.
he decline of killing and cruelty poses several challenges to our ability to make sense of the world. To begin with, how could so many people be so wrong about something so important? Partly, it's because of a cognitive illusion: We estimate the probability of an event from how easy it is to recall examples. Scenes of carnage are more likely to be relayed to our living rooms and burned into our memories than footage of people dying of old age. Partly, it's an intellectual culture that is loath to admit that there could be anything good about the institutions of civilization and Western society. Partly, it's the incentive structure of the activism and opinion markets: No one ever attracted followers and donations by announcing that things keep getting better. And part of the explanation lies in the phenomenon itself. The decline of violent behavior has been paralleled by a decline in attitudes that tolerate or glorify violence, and often the attitudes are in the lead. As deplorable as they are, the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the lethal injections of a few murderers in Texas are mild by the standards of atrocities in human history. But, from a contemporary vantage point, we see them as signs of how low our behavior can sink, not of how high our standards have risen.
(Pinker goes on to speculate on the causes of the widespread decline in violence)
Roxanne Appleby
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Oi-vey.
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Roxanne Appleby
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I like bath tub age.
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SEVERUSMAX
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Rob, I like and respect you, but shutting down any school is a bad idea....well, with the possible exception of Liberty and Regent Universities.... 
Emulating Justinian doesn't appeal to me.
Emulating Justinian doesn't appeal to me.
rgraham666
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Normally I wouldn't either Sev.
But you can't take a shit in the West without an acolyte of the Chicago School telling you've done it wrong, how to do it better and charging you for the privilege of them showing off their superior knowledge.
I'm sure they'd find lots of other places that would snap them up. But it would free us from from the web of sophistry they've wrapped us in.
But you can't take a shit in the West without an acolyte of the Chicago School telling you've done it wrong, how to do it better and charging you for the privilege of them showing off their superior knowledge.
I'm sure they'd find lots of other places that would snap them up. But it would free us from from the web of sophistry they've wrapped us in.
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SEVERUSMAX
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rgraham666 said:
LOL....let me guess....neo-con utopians?
rgraham666
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SEVERUSMAX said:LOL....let me guess....neo-con utopians?
I'm so transparent, aren't I?
My favourite writer compares them to the Bolsheviks. There aren't a lot of them and they're driven by a simple, economically deterministic philosophy.
Their first step was to hijack the language. This made it difficult to discuss anything, but especially economics on any terms other than the ones they set. You can't argue with them because they've won before you even start.
Their second step was to gain power by hiding their revolutionary intent by hiding behind a 'conservative' front. Once they got that power, they took the gloves off.
None of what's happened over the last few years has surprised me. History rhymes.
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rgraham666
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May you live in interesting times.
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ChristopherMaxwell
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rgraham666 said:
Shades of the Iron Lady! Perish the thought of another Thatcherite PM!
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SlickTony
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According to this book I've been reading called The Long Emergency, by James Howard Kunstler, what we're headed for is a dim age: when enough of the world's oil has been used that it becomes scarce and unaffordable. When this happens, the world will contract, living will become intensely parochial, the suburbs will turn into slums or abandoned areas, and the US might become Balkanized, i.e., break up into several autonomous or semi-autonomous states.
rgraham666
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SlickTony said:
I'm working on a couple of stories set in such a future.
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