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Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

> I think the parent comment made a reasonable point and did so in a calm manner.

As I have pointed out in other remarks here today, calmness reasonableness do not make a bad position good. If anything they add a palatable veneer to the harm.

> It in no way overplayed the misery of the past

I completely disagree. The idea that in the past people were "lucky to see their children grow up" is dramatic, and a tautology anyway since we are all "lucky" to see our children grow up in any epoch. It paints a needlessly bleak picture of some awful past that technological progress is implied to have eliminated with justifiable costs.

> What do you mean exactly? What civilization?

Actually, you know what. You're right [0].

"What do I think of Western civilisation? I think it would be a very good idea."

[0] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi

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> I completely disagree. The idea that in the past people were "lucky to see their children grow up" is dramatic, and a tautology anyway since we are all "lucky" to see our children grow up in any epoch. It paints a needlessly bleak picture of some awful past that technological progress is implied to have eliminated with justifiable costs.

You got me there, I do think the costs for (almost) eliminating famine and diseases with double-digit mortality rates are justifiable. That said you didn't really answer my question, but I'll roll with it.

Consider the extinction of megafauna [0], the deforestation of China [1] or Mesopotamian farming practices [2]. It would be hard to blame these on Western civilization (real or imagined). I'd say we have been operating in the same unsustainable way for a long time. I wish it were otherwise because it would make everything easier.

[0] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2013.325... [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S003101822... [2] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.128.3334.1251

> you didn't really answer my question

Fair remark, I brushed it off.

> when did this start?

It started when science and technology changed from something we do, into something we believe in.

I don't think that actually happened any time around the Enlightenment of even the Industrial Revolution, but we're definitely deep in it now. I'll leave you to put the pin in the map.

Also, the cause and effect are not so simple. It's not as if we changed our culture and beliefs, and then embarked on a century of planet-destroying madness. Rather, like the sunk-cost bias of an addict, we realised we are on a bad road, labelled that as "inevitable", surrendered before the forces of "technological determinism" and found we had no choice but to believe.

But that was a false choice.

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