Thread #2168

See Alex, there are threads you can reply to.

>>2233
I guess you would rather complain about how there are no threads you can reply to, though.

>>2438
I'm happy to contribute to and encourage discussion of broader topics on the board but I really don't see how I could contribute to the discussion the OP seems to want to initiate except by striking through most of what he seems to be saying and starting again - which would probably be interpreted as "hijacking the thread".
In my opinion, just about everything that is set up as a presupposition here is false.

Looking back on ten thousand years of human activity there are certain consistencies in what we see as good and bad states of humanity

Either false or trivially, almost tautologically true. The statement is certainly false if what is meant is that there have been "certain consistencies" over the last ten thousand years in what EACH RESPECTIVE EPOCH within this long period saw as "good and bad states of humanity". I suppose there has been a certain constancy of value-judgment on the most absolutely elementary - and therefore, as I say, well nigh meaningless - level. All epochs in the last ten thousand years have foir example, I suppose it is safe to say, thought alike in believing that it is better for the human race to continue to exist than for it to be annihilated without trace. But above and beyond such an absolutely basic consensus as THAT, our era and the early Middle Ages, for example, thought and evaluated radically differently in almost every respect. It is a well-known commonplace that the typical European living around 1200 thought and felt within a frame of mind inspired and determined by the Catholic Church. That is to say, the average European of that era - only eight or nine hundred years back in the period of ten thousand years referred to - had entirely different views about "good and bad states of humanity" from those almost universally shared (outside the Islamic world) today. S/he placed, in the last analysis, little value on the "here below", or actual life in the physical body and in the intersubjective social world, and much

>>2439
value on "one's reward in the world beyond".
Hold on, I have to write dirty Skype messages to a schoolgirl.....

>>2440
OK, that's done. So, as I was sayig, there have in fact plainly been enormous "inconsistencies" in what humanity has seen as "good and bad states of humanity" just in the last thousand years, let alone in the past ten thousand. Therefore the the statement the OP makes is false, assuming it is a substantial, non-trivial statement at all. Of course, if it is meant as the merely trivial statement that when "we" - "we" in the sense of "our epoch in human history" and not in the sense of "humanity considered as a whole across all epochs of history" - look back on ten thousand years of human activity then there are certain consistencies in what "we" - again "we" in the sense of our century or our contemporrary age - see as good and bad states, then the statement is doubtless true but, as I say, only trivially true. It goes pretty much without saying that "we" in the sense of "our epoch" - assuming, that is, that we can bundle all the present local mentalities of the globe into one concept "our epoch" - is going to have a fairly "consistent" set of valuations of which past states of humanity were good and whicn bad, since we are indeed talking in this case about ONE epoch (ours).

The OP's opening of the discussion displays several such highly questionable presuppositions, which are all stated as if they were simple statements of unquestionable cultural-historical fact. To cite just one more out of the many, take the statement in the second paragraph:

We stand at the lowest point of disease, crime, war deaths, and intolerance this world has ever seen.

If the first statement I discussed was either false or trivial, this is - at least as regards several of its constituent parts - either false or meaningless. I am not qualified to say whether the beginning of the twenty-first century "stands at the lowest point as regards disease" (meaning there is absolutely LESS disease) in the last ten thousand years of human history. It certainly sounds like a questionable claim to

>>2440
a schoolgirl? is this someone new?

>>2441
me, though, and like something that is being said from a very unreflectively Eurocentric or Americanocentric perspective. Africa, for example, is currently being devastated by a disease which only came into existence a few decades ago, AIDS. And although I am not an anthropologist; I seem to remember reading in an anthropological study the name of which escapes me that the common conception of life in the Mesolithic Era as disease-ridden and wretched is in fact a misconception. Large sections of humanity 7000 or 8000 years ago enjoyed an excellent healthy diet and suffered relatively little from disease. The second item on the OP's list, "crime", represents a respect in which hsi statement is not so much false as meaningless. Since conceptions of "crime" have altered radically many times in the course of the last ten thousand years, it is just meaningless to talk about there being "more crime" or "less crime" in 2014 than, say, in 3000 BC. To recur to the Christian Early Middle Ages as a point of comparison once again, there is indubitably massively more "impiety" and "blasphemy" going on today than in 1200 AD - but since the psychological and moral framework that made these things punishable offences 1000 years ago has pretty much ceased to exist, to say that there is is to say nothing meaningful. Whether the statement that we "nowadays" have far less "war deaths" than we did in past epochs is true or massivelly, ridiculously false depends on where you draw the line establishing the start of "nowadays". It wouldn't be unreasonable, I think, to push that line back to the last century, in which case the statement is indeed massively, ridiculously false. The twentieth century clocked up many more deaths by war and war-related catastrophes than any other century before it. Whether the twenty-first century will be very different has yet to be seen. Finally "intolerance" here is another case of simple meaninglessness, if we are looking at a period of ten

thousand years. The concept of "tolerance" in the sense of a political or moral ideal really only came into existence in the Sixteenth Century as a consequence of the post-Reformation Wars of Religion. Before that, both "tolerance" and "intolerance" were literally meaningless in the overwhelming majority of human societies, so to talk about there being "more" of them or "less" of them now than in, say, 2000 BC or even 1500 AD is just senseless.

These are just some of the reasons why I find "discussion" of the questions raised here impossible.

Oh and fuck you Dolly you worthless drug-sucking whore go and die in a ditch.

Haha, made you type.

>>2443
That is obscenely short-sighted. As a percentage of human lives a vastly larger number of years are being lived to old age, with all the productivity that provides than any earlier era.