Oof. Now I understand something I didn't before
If we could solve climate change without "addressing thoughtless consumerism, corporate impunity, and lack of international accountability" we would all be f'ing _thrilled_.
As I type this Hurricane Helene just destroyed a good chunk of inland North Carolina (!!!) and Hurricane Wilton was just upgraded to a "category 5" storm.
If we could solve climate change the easy way we'd all be _thrilled_, because then we'd actually solve climate change.
Nor is it correct to ignore the decades of peer-reviewed research that concludes that we really are causing more hurricanes on the basis that hurricanes have always existed.
I think the argument is pretty much the opposite: not everyone would be thrilled. The wannabe priest class (think of Greta and her How dare you!), which is always with us, would be frustrated from the lack of something to preach about.
Of course there is always Israel vs. Palestine.
I _would_ be thrilled if there was an expedient way to solve climate change. But the best systems models for the earth all tell us that there's one way to solve the issue: just leave the carbon in the ground. That's it. Stop extracting it. Nothing else will solve the problem, it's a really simple, really bad, feedback loop.
This characterization of environmental or Palestinian activists as wanting to have the moral high ground is, imo, a knee jerk reaction. The people on the street aren't in it for clout, they're doing it because it is the right thing and they feel compelled to act. What gets me moving is not wanting to feel morally superior (a religious aspect, more at home in right wing politics), but an anxiety for the future, which is projected to include horrible death and suffering due to obvious problems that we could all fix if we just decided to recognize them.
And I think it is actually useful. People will try to manipulate other people through emotions, and mobs are easy to manipulate. One should have fairly high barriers before joining a street mob, because its potential destructive power is enormous, and it also tends to elevate unsavory characters to positions of power.
I am not saying that those barriers should be infinitely high, but fairly high.
For us humans, it is easy to succumb to "righteousness in numbers".
Food is less than ideal, war is less than ideal, death is less than ideal, HN is less than ideal.
Are you satisfied with this sort of Twitter-like posting and thinking? I am not.
Pixels are basically free and we should strive to post more than one-sentence snarks. For one-sentence snarks and drive-by dismissals, Reddit is the ideal territory.
It's also important to weigh the harmful effects of apathy in the balance. These are easily forgotten but almost inestimably enormous. Just think of all the damage done in the decades (centuries) where hardly anyone could be bothered to protest against slavery, women's oppression, racial segregation, pollution, etc. etc.
I think you may be proving my point. Taking one side of a complicated situation because of a black-and-white moralistic thinking is potentially destructive, and organizations like Hamas benefit from that.
As for your slavery example, did slavery disappear because humanity awakened morally and started demonstrating in the streets, or because we gained a new non-human resource of raw power? Previous civilizations didn't engage in slavery because they were profoundly immoral, but because human and animal muscle was the only practical source of power. The specifics varied across the globe, but unfree labor was ubiquitous in pre-modern societies.
For a contemporary situation, imagine a 22nd century activist judging people of 2024 for eating meat from dead animals, when he can get a good steak by pressing a button on a steak-making machine. It wouldn't be demonstrations which made the difference between 2024 and 2124.
OK, but that was sort-of my point. The more outrage, the less you need to really think about things.
"err, yes, popular anti-slavery movements played an important role in the abolition of slavery"
That is a chicken-and-egg question. Why did those mass movements only emerge at the time of the Industrial Revolution, and why did they emerge first in places that were influenced by the Industrial Revolution the earliest, while other places (Russia, the Ottoman Empire, the Qing Empire) only followed suit after their own industrialization began?
I don't think the arrow of causality is so simple here. A hypothetical society that abolished slavery, serfdom etc. in the 15th century could easily prove non-viable against its slavery-powered foes, which had more brute force at their disposal. By 1820, the situation was very much turning around and it was the modern, personally freer societies that were more effective in commerce and at war.
Notably, even though Victorian Britain was very anti-slavery, starting with the monarch herself, it had no moral qualms against subjugating a quarter of humanity in another form of submission. Which tells me that it was less about morality (equality) and more about practicality of the situation.
Your take on slavery is pretty wild. The Industrial Revolution did not replace Haitian slaves with machines for harvesting sugar cane. Nor did Spartacus invent the steam engine.
Existence of more-or-less successful slave revolts across history doesn't really say much about viability of slavery as an economic institution. I don't think my take is pretty wild. The historic correlation between industrialization and abolition of slavery is rather strong, and while we can argue about whether it was causative, the hypothesis is at least plausible.
"Wild" would be if I attributed abolition of slavery to something that is clearly uncorrelated with it, so, say, the Milankovic cycle.
That's the point. The Haitian revolution didn't have anything much to do with the economic viability of slavery, but it still happened, and was a major and very definitely causative event in the broader history of the abolition of slavery.
If you think that slavery ended for purely economic reasons, then perhaps you can point to a mainstream historian who advocates this theory. I don't think you are doing your overall argument any favors by tying it to wild revisionist lost causes.
A:"Only Global Communism can solve Climate Change."
B:"Nuclear power also solves climate change."
A:"I don't want to solve Climate Change, I want Global Communism."