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Comment by arethuza | Hacker News Reader

"Human progress to a more empathical and overall better society has been constant."

Part of me desperately wants to agree with that, but then I remember that the world probably looked a pretty decent place in 1913 and look how downright awful and risky the next ~75 years turned out to be.

There is no fundamental law of civilization that guarantees that things will only get better. Having said that, I think that on balance things will keep getting better - but only because a lot of people fight for those improvements based upon observations of where our societies are going wrong and putting up a fight to bring them back on course.

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In 1913, the US was just wrapping up fifteen years of bloody guerilla warfare in the Phillippines after starting the Spanish-American war and the Phillippine-American war.

First the government got the masses worked up with a propaganda campaign, and then went to war to annex new lands and seize booty. That's what healthy, vigorous countries did, and we had recently run out of Native Americans to pillage. We killed millions in Cuba and the Phillippines and demolished their industry, economy, and infrastructure - a major reason they are poor countries today.

Our Vice President, Teddy Roosevelt, personally led men into battle, killed people defending their homelands, and made millions off the war. So we elected him President.

The world was a rough place 100 years ago.

Of course, there was an implicit "from here in the UK and from a very comfortable middle class home" in my statement there...

[NB Anyway I stole the point from the start of Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money]

In 1913 the world looked like a tinderbox waiting to explode. War was in the air everywhere in Europe and looked to be all but unavoidable. It may have looked like a pretty decent place but that would have been deceptive and I don't think that it looked like that unless you were pretending to not notice.

Nationalism was on the rise, new technology gave access to weapons on an unprecedented scale (and weapons production was already well underway in 1913). I won't say it was inevitable, but it did not take much of a spark to set Europe in flames. People have compared it to a forest with tons of deadwood lying around just waiting for the right combination of draught, wind and a little bit of activation energy.

I think poverty is worse than war. That is the whole point of the article, you make masses of people poor and then turn them helpless and harmless by social benefits. Poverty is worse than slavery because people feel sad about themselves than identifying the cause of unequal distribution of the resources.

Makes you wonder how many people that have lived through a war agree with you.

In general, I would agree with you, but in some occasions the effects of extreme poverty can almost be indistinguishable from a kind of civil warfare:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_%28Ireland%29

No one wins in the misery olympics

Poverty also leads to civil war or worse. Cannibalism also is frequent during famine.

Steven Pinker wrote quite the tome on this subject. Its worth the read. "I argue that despite impressions, the long-term trend, though certainly halting and incomplete, is that violence of all kinds is decreasing. This calls for a rehabilitation of a concept of modernity and progress, and for a sense of gratitude for the institutions of civilization and enlightenment that have made it possible." http://edge.org/conversation/mc2011-history-violence-pinker

How can it have looked decent when the upper classes were prepared to blithely send hundreds of thousands of working men to certain deaths on the battlefields. Men in power back then were racist, classist, sexist, homophobic cunts. We've advanced on all those fronts.

That's uncalled for. The upper classes joined the lower classes on the battlefield and shared their fate. WW1 brought about the near extinction of the British aristocracy.

And I don't see that men in power were any more racist, classist, sexist etc than anyone else of their time.

The death rate amongst those from public schools was almost twice that of other soldiers:

http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/12/real-eton-rifles

Indeed, could argue (as Orwell did) that the public school system trained men for their place in war with the "old lie" of Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

[NB For those not in the UK - "public schools" are the self-appointed elite private schools, most people go to state schools]

Ok I accept both your corrections. I still maintain that we have advanced on the fronts listed and that in this way at least the world is becoming a better place. Most importantly, in terms of net suffering reduction, for women.

>There is no fundamental law of civilization that guarantees that things will only get better.

Do you believe that humans are capable of achieving our aims? Now: do you think we are capable of rationally aiming ourselves towards good aims?

If you assent to both, then what is stopping us?

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