Life was dirty, difficult, and dangerous for almost everyone who ever existed

https://www.freethink.com/society/techno-humanist-manifesto-chapter-1

by elashri • 2 years ago

45 36 2 years ago

qarl5• 2 years ago

And it would be extremely naive to think that people 100 years from now won't think our lives were dirty, difficult, and dangerous too.

gazook89• 2 years ago

On the other hand, this may be the cleanest we will ever be

qarl5• 2 years ago

Sure, if civilization collapses, it may take us a while to get back to this point.

But my point is, essays like these assume we are peak humanity. We're not. Given enough time, we'll look like primitive barbarians too.

downvotetruth• 2 years ago

On the contrary, our civilization has never before had to deal with so much shit.

DaoVeles6• 2 years ago

Why would they think that? Please ignore all the microplastics, ecological destruction and wildly altered climate due tot dumping 2 trillion tons of carbon in the atmosphere.

silverquiet• 2 years ago

"We really did have everything, didn't we?"

bee_rider3• 2 years ago

the ballpoint pen, invented in the 1930s, saved many clothes and tablecloths from spilled ink

I used an inkwell and dip pen for a couple years to take class notes. Don’t really know why. Spilling the ink was never a problem, but really they are just worse than pencils in every way. Can’t erase, the nib doesn’t want to go backwards, and ink smudges.

DaoVeles6• 2 years ago

Sorry we all know the real inventor of the Ball point pen. From Black Adder Back & Forth. ;)

Blackadder: Well, this is the title page for Macbeth, signed by Shakespeare himself.

[The guests look at Blackadder like he's grown a second head]

Melchett: No, no, wait, you all remember Shakespeare. He's the fellow who invented the ballpoint pen!

Blackadder: Well, I might have affected one or two things,

eternityforest• 2 years ago

Most mechanical pencils never seem that reliable. The leads break after a month of jostling in a bag and then it doesn't work when you need it.

This could also just be because I used 0.5 and never thought to try 0.7 back when I was taking long paper notes daily, in the pre phone era.

bee_rider3• 2 years ago

I keep mine in a little box. .3 2B!

number6• 2 years ago

How old *are* you?!

bee_rider3• 2 years ago

Mid 30’s. It got comments, haha.

mathieuh• 2 years ago

So what, we should just sit back and not try to improve things? I’ve never understood this perspective. It just seems like a way to try for people who have done well in the current system to justify to themselves the fact that in reality people in wealthy countries do still struggle with poverty. There are millions of people living hand-to-mouth.

Not to mention the fact that the reason wealthy countries have got to this stage of development is often because they are exporting the negative externalities associated with this lifestyle to poor countries.

tonygrue• 2 years ago

For me the point of thinking like this is to remain centered and not freak out. I see some people who feel like ‘everything is going downhill and this is the worse time ever’ and that’s just not very grounded.

The benefit is that you can be optimistic that the hard work we’re putting in, more likely than not, might continue the progress. Even if there are blips along the way.

DaoVeles6• 2 years ago

I was just talking about this today. There was a political comedy TV show here in Oz 'Shaun Micallefs : Mad as Hell'.

I cannot remember the details exactly but the general idea was something like this.

There was a dinner party with all these people talking about how bad they have things. One was complaining about how they had poor service at a restaurant. The next talked about the pain of the Covid lockdowns. The next spoke of rationing in the war time of the 1940's. The last one was a 10th century peasant that goes on about how "the skies turned dark and winter came and it never left. All the crops died and then the people. And then came the plagues..."

It was done as a way of saying, yes, we have issues but put into context, we are still doing fairly well.

quantified2• 2 years ago

I don't think that's the thrust of the piece, any more than celebrating your birthday is an invitation to commit suicide. Appreciation of where we are at, like a birthday, seems its point.

And that there are a great many people who don't feel all the blessings of these achievements. Not only is there relative inconvenience and suffering, there are also resentments and those have tangible social and political impacts. One useful step is to simply acknowledge them. I write this from a small town that lacks Uber, Doordash, and has people that basically work for a living, not sit behind a desk. Their construction and agricultural labor enables some of the luxuries-cum-expectations listed in the piece.

We'll always judge ourselves relative to surroundings and peers, so the billionaire needs to be a centibillionaire and the retired cotton field hand would like all their teeth back and AC that works. Let's not forget we, the readers of the piece, were basically born on third base already.

DaoVeles6• 2 years ago

Exactly. My (mild) fear it that we ignore those kinds of issues and they blow back on us to start doing real harm to the overall system. To ignore the externalities like running up a credit card.

As to the second point, this is what empires do. They pump wealth away for their own gain until they are almost completely drained. And there still many countries that are empires in everything but name.

tempestn2• 2 years ago

No, the opposite. We should appreciate all the marvels that progress has brought us, and use that as motivation to bring about more. That was the conclusion of the piece, and I agree. Progress has gained a negative connotation to many people in recent times, and I take it that the author is pushing back against that sentiment.

shizcakes• 2 years ago

The essay ends

But we can pay it forward: we can keep progress going, and build an even better world for the generations to come.

jellicle• 2 years ago

When you're an empire being supported on the labor of a couple billion people in other parts of the world, yes, life for you and yours can be pretty okay.

Not as okay for the imperial periphery, the sacrifice zones, but they don't really count.

You can amass a closet full of outfits, in a variety of styles and colors, with no knowledge of the spinning machines, the dyeing vats, the automatic looms, the sewing machines, or the tremendously efficient factory system they are a part of—the system that has turned this kind of product from a luxury for the rich into a commodity available to the average worker.

When I read things like this, I really understand how the lack of a liberal arts education has crippled a lot of people. I want to post that angry goose meme: "Who made the outfits, buddy? WHO MADE THE OUTFITS?"

atleastoptimal• 2 years ago

Industrial revolution and automation still makes amenities far more accessible for all. The material conditions of the average factory worker in Thailand is still miles ahead of the condition of someone of that percentile of the worldwide socioeconomic strata in any other period of history.

DaoVeles6• 2 years ago

Its complicated. If you are on the very lowest rung of the industrial structure, you are probably in worst conditions that working on the family farm with the local village. Things will look better monetarily, but the overall life quality will be diminished.

There would be a point that as your wealth grows it does get better but that is depended on there being others to fill the lower rung to support that.

You aren't wrong but there is also additional nuance. Clothes for everyone on the planet is just so simple nowadays due to massive excess for instance.

DaoVeles6• 2 years ago

Imperial wealth pumps, the drive engines of empire. There is a reason why the military is so heavily funded.

southernplaces7• 2 years ago

I really understand how the lack of a liberal arts education has crippled a lot of people.

I think I also see how a surfeit of liberal arts education, with all its absurdly relativizing, simplifying, hand waving fashionable criticism of everything "commercial" that it depends on has crippled your own perspective.

No, the modern world isn't a simplistic black and white case of a tiny rich world being that way only because it lives off the back of a massive toiling class of slaves. The reality is much more complex and mutually transactional. The same market dynamics that make more developed countries even wealthier also heavily contribute to improved living in countries still developing further, and vice versa.

Is there exploitation? Sure. The human world has never been perfect and even while it improves, many injustices remain, but to categorize the socioeconomic structures of today's world so simplistically as your comment does is to make an argument that caricaturizes both the genuinely wealthy and the billions of poor you implicitly claim to sympathize with. They too are looking for and finding their comparative measures of improved wealth specifically by being participants in the market system that they too help build and actively participate in, and which makes the consumer goods they seek more affordable than ever before for an incrementally more comfortable life.

It's not perfect, but it's far better than the vast majority of historical alternatives. If you hate it so much, at least lay out a practical alternative that's actually desirable and realistic enough for billions of people to embrace it in practice as they do largely capitalist markets. Can you?

While you're doing that, why not look at the actual numbers for how more people than ever (in the developing or third world too) live today compared to any time in human history and try calling it all bullshit. It's easy to compare a given situation to our ideal of "how it should be". It's however much more honest to compare it to a previous reality so that the hard increments of improvement can be appreciated.

boredemployee• 2 years ago

This text only makes sense if you are in a privileged position. For the majority of the population in many countries, the world is not that wonderful.

jstummbillig• 2 years ago

It's actually still is, comparatively to what was. I took that to be the point.

quantified2• 2 years ago

The Ambari wedding this year is a wonderful illustration of the range available.

geodel• 2 years ago

Previously it used be to nasty, brutish and short. Dirty, difficult and dangerous seems little polite and gentler version of it.

xk_id• 2 years ago

Enduring the misery is not even the impressive thing; that’s just the default condition of every animal on earth. What is extraordinary is that, despite their misery, somehow enough humans have managed to contribute to the incremental creation culture.

Life was dirty, difficult, and dangerous for almost everyone who ever existed

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