Yeah, I was enlisted during one of those “minor conflicts” we had recently. To be honest, it didn’t seem nearly so damned “out of the way” to me, even if I didn’t have to deploy. There’s really no where on the planet that’s an out of the way location today and there hasn’t been for some time now.
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And? Nobody said war, famine, or disease were gone.
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ooof! lol!
Reminds me of a spiritual adviser I was working with the other day, she was explaining how humans have progressed beyond our daily survival tasks and can now bring on real change by focusing on honest spiritual and social challenges. I’ve heard it before, but never realized how short minded it is until a real person is saying it to my face.
But anyway… this author probably has some interesting ideas and the main point isn’t really debating where humanity is at, it’s all theoretical fun times about the future. But it is interesting that he chooses to lead with that, I’m sure that gets attention every time he says it.
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It’s like the housing bubble. Those bills will come due.
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I understand the emotional appeal you are attempting to make. However compared to those times in history when 10-20% of the world or more was directly engaged in violent warfare, these conflicts ARE minor. None of the serious combatants are major players, and the US and other major players involved aren’t actually serious about it.
No, sending 20k troops from a population of 400 million is not “serious”. I am sure this will seem cold and unfeeling, but compared to having my arm cut off, breaking a toe isn’t really a huge concern.
The flip side of that argument, though, is that we don’t exactly have a long record of this kind of “peace”. It’s not like a 70-80 year hiatus from globe-spanning conflicts is unprecedented in history, and within the last couple of years we’ve had the president of the US saying that the president of Russia was approaching a “red line” in their international aggression. Sure, nothing came of that, but if something had it could have easily dwarfed most previous conflicts.
Conflicts like the ones we have today may be relatively minor, but they show we are still solving our problems with wars. Taking comfort in their scale would be like taking comfort that the earthquake zone you live in has only been producing 4s recently - it’s been a long time since there’s been an 8 or a 9.
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I’m not speaking even of globe spanning conflicts. I mean that the vast majority of the world isn’t engaged in any violent conflict, not even smaller regional ones. There is still far more violence than I would like, but compared to almost any point in the past we’re pretty darn lucky to live when we do. Again, 8 billion people.
We also are not, in general, solving our conflicts with wars. Conflicting ideologies and resource control hasn’t gone away, but the disputes are by and large handled non-violently. You can point to the exceptions, but they are exceptions. Is it totally out of the toolbox? No, not yet. But it is definitely much less used. I will point out that much of the reason we aren’t in violent conflict is simply that the level of available resources is much higher, due to technology. This is where that “famine” thing falls away. If famine was nearly as common as it was in the past, warfare would be up to those levels as well.
Saying “We are more peaceful than ever” does not mean anyone is saying “So we should stop worrying about it at all”. That is a false dichotomy that I will dispute people using. And in no way does this mean that we should stop trying to end violent conflict and finding other means. But to magnify what is there out of proportion does us few favors, if any. And yes, this doesn’t take into account what might happen in the future. Because that is the future, and circumstances can change. I’m going to drag that 8 billion people marker up again, because that is a large cause for concern.
I actually read your argument as technocratic, my response wasn’t meant to appeal to your emotions but to assert that there is no future where locations are out of the way, except to skew statistics on suffering.
My point is: For you.
I assert that this is false if you can go live in a war zone and it no longer makes sense:
The evidence of our power is everywhere: we have not simply conquered nature but have also begun to defeat humanity’s own worst enemies. War is increasingly obsolete; famine is rare; disease is on the retreat around the world. We have achieved these triumphs by building ever more complex networks that treat human beings as units of information.
I agree things are better than they ever were and I hope they get better. I do not agree that less suffering = good enough, even if it is as good as it gets. That way lies apathy and more war.
Edit: I was attempting to rebuke Harari, I replied with that in mind.
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Since no rational person can define either intelligence or consciousness, it is hardly possible to say that anyone has uncoupled them. In other news, which seems to cast doubt on the assumption that humans are either intelligent or conscious, I was amused by the repeated assertions of how great everything is. The earth cannot sustain the present use and abuse of it by humans; there will be hell to pay. The fact that billions of people are temporarily docile is not a determiner of the future.
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If you want to redefine “out of the way” in such a sense, you state a truth, however you make that truth vacuous by doing so.
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