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Do you think the world is getting better or worse?
I'm going to intentionally leave this vague and open-ended, because I want to hear different perspectives hopefully without imposing my own views. I've heard some people express that the world is getting much better, for example, in terms of science, technology, and medicine. Other people feel that the world is getting worse, for example, in terms of climate change or political corruption. What do you think? Or is it that we're biased towards our own time period? In other words, do you think it's human nature to think that our own generation/time period is experiencing the best or worst or most significant period in history?
I tend to be more optimistic as well. I agree that, especially with the help of science, people in general are living much better lives than previously. There are some things that make me question it, though.
For example, science and medicine have helped people live longer, healthier lives. The downside of that being that, in my opinion (I'm not an expert by any means), we'll eventually have to deal with a problem of over-population. Do we have enough resources to support our growing population, thanks to our advances in medicine?
Another example I think of is our advance in technology. We have so much knowledge available to us, and we can connect with people that we'd never have had a chance to without technology/the internet. However, we also have issues with people losing their jobs to automation. We also have people designing technology (e.g. social media) to keep people basically addicted due to the dopamine hits. Again, I'm not an expert on any of this, just very interested in the subject.
I would argue that we, as a planet, will have plenty of resources, but the problem will be distribution. Though, if people expect to live at the same consumption rate we have now spread to the rest of the population of the world we will not be able to sustain life as we know it.
So, there's that to think about.
I posted a topic about automation not long ago, feel free to read/participate.
That being said I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing to lose jobs, I don't think people should be working unless they want to, but most societies don't support that, nor do they plan to.
You aren't wrong here, we've designed society around rewarding financial success and these companies really want that high score and they will find anyway to get it, even if it means manipulating the population at large. Or, maybe, especially if it means that.
EDIT: some minor grammar issues
My major concern is the looming threat of technology, out current techological progress is incomparable to anything in the past and our legislative system just can't keep up, politics is slow by nature and perhaps (was) it's redeeming feature but the changes wrought by technological advancement leave an avenue for exploitation. Net neutrality for example.
My hope is that things will balance out due to labor hours decreasing people will spend more time invested in politics and movements.
I guess it depends on what you mean by better, what your metric and scale are... as said above, overall wealth, health and happiness are growing - however, we're working on a scale of a few thousand years. To put that in perspective, fossils of Tyrannosaurus Rex range in age from at least 500,000 years to 2 million years. So our timescale is immensely compacted, and I would say it's far too early to know with any certainty what "good" even is. Are we advancing, technologically and socially at an insanely fast rate? For sure... but what that brings, no one can know.
For my money, I'm torn between thinking we might be able to get off this rock, and spread to the rest of the solar system (and maybe even galaxy one day), and that we're going to wipe ourselves out in the next hundred years or so (see: tipping point), and life will continue on in its more common, non-sentient fashion for a few more billion years until the sun goes nova...
Thank you for this reply. As cliched as it is, I think we often only worry about whether we CAN do something and don't stop to think about whether we SHOULD. For all of our advances and improvements, we cause other issues that we'll eventually have to solve. Often, it seems that it's impossible to know the exact consequences of something until we've already done it.
I used to be pretty pessimistic about the future for humanity, but now I genuinely think the opposite and the world is getting better by almost every meaningful metric, undeniably so. Hans Rosling (RIP) showed me the truth of that through the use of empirical evidence, statistical analysis and data visualization.
His TED talks (well worth watching):
https://www.ted.com/speakers/hans_rosling
His site (hit play on the historical statistics datavis chart for instant eye opening):
https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$chart-type=bubbles
Thanks for the links! They're really interesting. I was a little surprised to see Dollar Street listed too, which was nice.
Back in 1999, Marilyn Manson wrote an excellent article about Columbine. In it, he said, "Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised." I think it's true.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/columbine-whose-fault-is-it-19990624
I think that's definitely another factor of it. When we frequently hear bad news, we'll tend to think that it's more prevalent. And having access to so much news, good and bad, from all over the world is so new to us as a species. It can skew our perspective for sure.
For sure. And Manson wrote this about eight years before smartphones and social media existed.
I don't think human nature is changing all that much. Some of our values are, but our innate desires do not appear to be not terribly different from those within reasonable historical reference.
If we accept that human nature is relatively constant then we need to look at other factors to determine if the world is getting better or worse.
Quality of life: While quality of life is certainly inequitable, the fact that a significant percentage of the population of the world currently lives in a first world environment and even the "poor" in those first world environments have an enviable quality of life compared to undeveloped nations or even developed nations of a hundred years ago, I would say that the world is getting better in this regard.
Technology, science, & medicine: Always improving. Unless there is an all out world war three that literally destroys a huge percentage of the world population, these areas of knowledge will continue to be improved upon.
Politics: There's a lot of corruption in the world. There's a lot in the USA. I think as a whole it is getting better as the internet connects communities and light is shed on corrupt dealings. As a supreme court justice (Learned Hand?) once said about political corruption: "Light is the best disinfectant."
Regardless of your feelings about the electoral college or Donald Trump, I believe that there is a LOT of merit in the fact that the USA has had over 200 years of regular & peaceful transitions of power. There are not a lot of nations (past or present) that can make the same claim.
So as far as politics / political corruption, as a whole, I would say the world is getting better. But probably not at the pace anyone would find ideal.
Our biases? I believe that we all are biased to find events in our own life to be more important than those of others, or of historical contexts. We don't protest or fight battles because we think they are trivial purposes.
In light of that bias, I do think that (for the USA) -- when some of our biggest social-political battles are about whether 2 men can get married, or whether NFL-kneelers are making a legitimate statement or simply disrespecting the country -- if those are the dominant social issues we have, we don't have many problems.
Thank you for this analysis. I really like your last paragraph. It's easy to lose perspective. While the problems we're facing seem huge and significant, it's easy to lose sight of exactly how far we've come. Again, going back to that bias of feeling that we are the most important/significant.
There's a lot of things getting better. Certainly, I would have a much higher chance of being killed at most times and places in history. I can't pretend that I, personally, would rather be alive at a different time. But I think it's a pretty rough question if I'm looking beyond how I personally feel right now.
I think a lot of things get better and a lot of things get worse, but I guess I would generally say things are getting worse because climate change and our inability to do anything about it is so overwhelmingly awful that any positive moves can't compare. Especially when you consider how many of those improvements are built on the backs of the things that drive climate change as a result of it, it's hard to feel good about em. More people being fed right now doesn't feel very meaningful when the mechanisms which allow that are also either running out or causing issues that have already spiraled out of control.
Better in a lot of ways, but when it comes to consumerism - way way worst.
The inevitable progress of climate change leads me to say better in the short term, but worse in timeframes over 20 to 30 years or so. It's really a tough thing to grapple with, not least of all because nobody is talking about it.
I'm 99% sure that there's a similar ancient Greek or Roman quote about how terrible and lazy and ruinous kids are too.
To me, I am certain that the world is a much better place than it ever was --- but with more access to media, we're more aware of the bad things happening around the globe, which can skew our perspective.
over the past few decades, lots of things have improved: murder rates are down, global prosperity is up, global democracy is up. Long term, we are screwed.
Global population is increasing. By 2100, it's estimated an additional 4 billion people will join humanity, for a total of 11 billion. All of these new people will require food, shelter, money, and energy.
We are currently in the midst of what some researchers are calling an extinction crisis. We are losing species at 1,000 to 10,000 times the normal background extinction rate for that species.. All of the last 5 major extinction events (the kinds that killed the dinosaurs) featured greatly increased extinction rates for all kinds of life.
Oil will be peaking relatively soon, at which point not being able to afford to refill your gas tank will be the least of your worries.
Peak coal is also fast approaching. Most of the electricity in the US comes from coal. Electricity will get much, much more expensive.
Global temperature has been increasing steadily since the 1800s, and even the most optimistic estimates say global warming will continue to increase no matter what we do (although we should still try to mitigate the damage as much as possible by reducing CO2 emissions). Along with global warming will come a host of problems, such as spreading disease vectors (mosquitoes, flies, spiders), species loss (on top of species loss from other causes; this will increase the extinction rate even more), storms and property loss, global sea level rise which will destroy cities, ocean acidification and dead zones, and more fun stuff.
The fact that vaccination and global warming have been made into political issues instead of staying strictly scientific makes me have little hope for humanity.
I think an interesting aspect of this is that on an individual level, things tend to seem to be getting worse as we get older. This primarily stems from the fact that as we grow, we understand more about the world and pay attention to things that don't directly affect us. As a kid or young adult, you generally only pay attention to events that directly impact you and as long as your life is going well, you assume society as a whole is doing well. As you get older, you pay more attention to the negative headlines around you and it seems as though everything is falling apart compared to how it used to be.
Thank you for that perspective. I hadn't thought about it that way before.
NA is getting worse. The EU is getting worse. Estonia is getting better. The Republic of China is getting better. The People's Republic of China is getting worse. North Korea is getting better. South Korea is stagnant.
Really, it's based on where you are.
Net-wise? Things are temporarily getting better, but without a massive change in the West it globally won't continue.
We've allowed civilisation in the West to stagnate—allowing things today that even on September 12th, 2001 wouldn't be considered okay. We need to stop this decline, and stop the hate that the collective West is giving out right now.
Overall, I think Ireland made it clear recently that the world is getting much worse. Most of the world has regressed back to tolerating murder of children. There are some areas where things may be improving, but not much else matters in comparison to this.
i respectfully disagree.
the numbers show that if you want less abortions, making them illegal is not the answer. free contraception, excellent education lead to drastically lower numbers of abortions. i think the answer here lies in intelligence. as a species, we are getting smarter with every generation. that trend would indicate abortion will decline over time, as has born out in areas provided free contraception and good sexual education.
also, our methods of contraception are getting better all the time, slowly reducing the need for abortions.
Contraception is on the same level of evil as murder, so that's not an answer. Nor do the numbers show that (abortion was much less common before prosecution ceased). Finally, the outcome doesn't matter - murder should still be prosecuted even if it had no deterrent effect (which it does).
I don't know this specific user's stance, but there's a lot of interesting history there. As natural as responsible birth control seems to many of us, that has not always been the case for everyone.
Sex itself has been restricted by religious doctrine in many different cases into mostly a function for reproduction, so it's not surprising that anything which makes sex possible while denying the possibility for reproducing would be shunned. That isn't to say it's good, I'd say pretty much anything along these lines is absolutely repugnant, but it follows from the rest. Thing is, as you get more and more modern these kinds of things have more progressive views retrofitted into ideas and rules that were meant to be for all time, so you end up with a big mess. There's a certain attractiveness to simpler interpretations that don't require a bunch of obscure justifications, doubly so if you really truly believe the ideas that you started with are the true and come from god or someone who speaks for him.
Murder is primarily wrong because the right to end a human life is exclusively God's. By killing someone without God's permission, we are usurping His authority. Hence why killing plants and animals is fine (God doesn't reserve this to Himself), and States are justified in killing certain criminals (God gives them authority to do so).
Contraception, on the other hand, is intrinsically evil in of itself, since it violates the very nature of the sexual act (that is, its purpose of procreation). Unlike killing, there are no circumstances that could ever justify it, and God would never command it. So it could actually even be argued to be fundamentally more evil than murder.
this isnt conservative thinking, its regressive. and again, keeping to the spirit of the op, im glad there are fewer people in the world with each generation with these kinds of incompatible viewpoints.
we as a species cant move on without compromise. divinity is incompatible with humanity.
You have it backward. Modern society is what is regressive. Undoing regression is actually progressive.
While I disagree with your position vehemently, I want, instead, to ask how you feel about population growth. Do you think we should always strive to have more people in the world?
We have a divine command to fill the Earth. We're nowhere near meeting that goal yet.
Aside, human beings are not merely biological. We have a spirit. Spirits cannot be created through merely biological reproduction, only by a special creative act of God. When/if population ever becomes a problem, God will presumably just stop creating new human beings (or give us more planets to fill, perhaps).