Solution to climate change? Learn to let our current civilization die | Hacker News Reader

Solution to climate change? Learn to let our current civilization die

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com

7 pointsmfburnett12 comments

This article reads like the rantings of someone who was well educated long ago, but has since watched daytime news every day.

The world is more peaceful than ever. You are less likely to die to violence now than at any other point in history. Medicine is better than any other point in history. As populations grow larger, they also grow older and people have fewer kids.

We aren't going to overpopulate the earth. We aren't going to run out of materials. We aren't going to destroy the environment. We aren't going to blow up the earth.

That is lazy thinking. Life has grown and expanded for billions of years. Humanity will continue growing and expanding into the future. We couldn't stop it if we tried.

Couldn't agree more. Many people seem to confuse our exponentially increasing ability to report on real or predicted negative events as proof that everything is getting worse when virtually any social metric that we have long term data for shows the opposite. Even climate change, which will have major negative consequences, will in no way mean the end of our species, we will move, food-growing areas will shift but we will carry on.

Hm, I think though there will be serious societal consequences to climate change in particular - particularly around scarcity of resources (we may not "run out" but there is a finite amount of resources that we are rapidly using up) and territorial claims (I think they will shift from land to sea, as we're already seeing with the South China Sea and the Arctic) - while humanity will continue growing and expanding, it's about consciously shaping what we want that expansion to look like. I really liked the point about multiple perspectives - "Most important, we need to give up defending and protecting our truth, our perspective, our Western values, and understand that truth is found not in one perspective but in their multiplication, not in one point of view but in the aggregate, not in opposition but in the whole."

On the other hand giving up western values would produce a vacuum so abhorred by nature; The truth in multiplication and aggregation of perspective is actually one of the western values, as is egalitarianism of sexes and races. To give up these values is to replace them with ones quite potentially less humanitarian; who in their sane mind (and education) would rally us to give up enlightenment and rationalism as values? If anything, we must cherish and defend them, while simultaneously expanding them. Now the platform for those values - the dogma - is of another question; if we are talking about progressing economic systems, social systems, methods of up-keeping our values - count me in. But casting all values aside, while so Nietzschely romantic (breaking old tables without having written new ones), is short-sighted and very, very dangerous.

Get rid of religiosity and give me scientific education and political decision making and we will be fine

Problem here is that we don't have "scientific" viable moral framework. Western values are built on the fading influences of Catholicism and Protestantism, neither is coming back. Utilitarianism has been trying to break into mainstream, but its not really applicable to real life.

Then there is individualism. But it has gone bit too far. It is currently making people lonely, unsafe and unhappy. Then as persons yearn for collectivity, they are giving up their privacy in virtualized group meetings over internet.

There's no such thing as a scientific moral framework; the concept is incoherent, like a four-sided triangle. Science answers "is" questions, not "ought" questions.

Science can inform moral decisions by providing information about which actions will achieve the goals set by a moral framework, but not can't provide you with a moral framework.

(Specific religions also probably get too much credit for providing moral framework; while its not an incoherent idea, its usually inaccurate -- usually, a moral framework coevolves with a religion, or has a religion constructed -- ot split off from some predecesssor -- to support it, rather than really emerging from the religion.)

I don't really care if religions didn't create moral frameworks. The point is that a religion can justify one. "Why can't I kill Joe, he is an asshole! - Because God said murder is wrong."

Philosophy might be able to do that too, but the west doesn't seem to be aligning behind any one philosophy. And there are no credible purely philosophical moral frameworks to pick from.

> Philosophy might be able to do that too, but the west doesn't seem to be aligning behind any one philosophy.

The West was never united behind one religious moral framework even when it had, at the highest descriptive level, one dominant religion -- both racial/sexual equality (as cited above) and strong racial/sexual discrimination were justified by reference to Christianity; likewise both religious tolerance and religious persecution have been.

"People don't agree on one moral framework" is an issue, sure, but its not a new issue in the West, nor is it one in anyway linked to the decline in the dominance of Christianity.

> And there are no credible purely philosophical moral frameworks to pick from.

There are plenty of moral frameworks not grounded in religion to pick from (everyone, inevitably, has a moral framework, and lots of people don't have religions.)

Not sure what your criteria for "credible" is, or how you've determined that no existing non-religious moral framework satisfies it.

The "egalitarianism of sexes and races" is based on bible. West didn't agree on many single issues, but for couple millenia west agreed on bible as moral authority.

In the future if there is something that deviates west from those values, there is nothing to turn us back. For a long time there was bible and "god created all men as his image". But we don't care about that shit anymore. We only care about money.

Nazi Germany could not happen before 1930 because people were too religious. It was pushed back by outside forces, still clinging on religious moral framework. When memory of concentration camps fades eventually, there is no such thing left.

The only current challenger for moral framework for the atheist is utilitarianism. Which happens to he hopelessly inapplicable to real life. So we can't really rely on any "western values" endlessly. Which could be good or bad thing.

Which resources are we running out of? The Earth is made out of the same stuff as us. It's huge.

We are not running out of resources. We may be running low on easily accessed, cheap resources.

We will adapt. New mining tech and asteroid mining will give more resources than we could use. There's accessible asteroids that have enough platinum to give each person on earth thousands of dollars. That's just one of millions. The resources will never run out.

There really is a lot to this piece, but my favorite passages, to start, grapple with Nietzsche's quote, “Man will sooner will nothingness than not will.” -

"When he wrote 'Man will sooner will nothingness than not will,' Nietzsche was exposing the destructive side of humanity’s meaning-making drive. That drive is so powerful, Nietzsche’s saying, that when forced to the precipice of nihilism, we would choose meaningful self-annihilation over meaningless bare life. This insight was horrifically borne out in the Götterdämmerung of Nazi Germany, just as it’s being borne out today in every new suicide attack by jihadi terrorists — even as it’s being borne out here at home in our willfully destructive politics of rage."

"Our drive to make meaning is more powerful than oil, the atom, and the market, and it’s up to us to harness that power to secure the future of the human species."

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