posted on November 02, 2019 08:40 PM by
u/NotWithoutIncident
38
u/ImperishableNEET18 pointsat 1572756129.000000
Interesting how they almost say “now” as opposed not to the past, but
to the future. Almost like our best days are going to be behind us in
the coming Ecopocalypse.
Honestly I kind of agree with them. The world has a lot of problems
now, but it always has. I personally couldn’t time travel back very far
in US history before running smack into Jim Crow, and if I went back
even further I would be in slavery.
Many people with disabilities would also be fucked if we went back in
time too far, before effective treatments were available, before they
were shielded from the worst aspects of intolerance, eugenics, etc.
LGBT people are in a similar boat. Discrimination is still widespread
in the US but marriage equality is at least law now. If they went back
in time even a couple of decades they would risk imprisonment just for
their orientation.
Pretty much every marginalized or minority group I can think of would
be worse off in the past than the present.
Fantasizing about an idyllic past where problems didn’t exist is
generally a sign of extreme ignorance or privilege.
I would disagree not by saying that some previous time period was superior, but the entire idea is incoherent. It basically suggests Whig history is true -- oppression and impoverishment were maximized at the beginning of human history and are now minimized. This relies on projecting contemporary political economy back across all human history into the Pleistocene. How is wealth actually defined, etc.? Additionally, it assumes that certain phenomena (e.g. racism, war) have existed since the beginning of human history, which is not the case. Essentially, you'd need to calculate the utility function of all people over the globe at any one time. Even if you could settle on a crude utilitarianism as the baseline (which Gates, Pinker and co. do), it doesn't work within its own framework, being heavily reliant on [cooked](http://primarydeposits.blogspot.com/2012/10/pinker-and-archaeology.html) [stats](https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/2/3/pinker-and-global-poverty). Without that, you have to rely on more reasonable individual comparisons, but that undermines their case to a great extent. Louis XIV probably lived more QALYs than a child slave on a cocoa plantation in Ghana.
The idea according to which our present era is absolutely unprecedented in terms of civil liberties, right for minorities, equality, etc. (and therefore, that past mentalities were deeply rooted in hierarchy, racism and sexism) is very popular in both liberal and conservative circles. For liberals, it is used to essentially justify the status quo or incrementalism at most, on the grounds that "well, if things have been going so well so far, we should just keep doing what we're doing now and absolutely not undertake some deep transformation of society". For conservatives, it is used to make a point that our era is deeply unnatural, a blip in the history of mankind, and not meant to last (since so many conservative arguments are rooted in the naturalistic fallacy). It also makes a point that all humans are naturally drawn to hierarchy, sexism and racism (since it was present in all societies except ours), probably for "evolutionary" reasons, that any attempts to combat its excesses are doomed to failure so we should refrain from trying too much, and that the most fervent activists for gender and racial equality are probably insincere deep down (the whole "virtue signaling" shtick).
> Pretty much every marginalized or minority group I can think of would be worse off in the past than the present.
~~well, not before agricultural civilization~~
I agree. The problem with these sentiments is not the factual claim that things are good now, but the framework around it that suggests things like "things are perfect now" or "thing are good now because of neoliberalism" or "things are good for everyone now". Those claims are false, and there is an enormous amount of work to be done to make things better, but we shouldn't lose sight of the very real improvements that have been made.
Yep, not really feeling the sneer here. You don't have to like the dudes to admit they can say correct things every now and then. As far as I'm concerned there are very, very few demographics in a region that would, on average, be better off then than they are today, unless you want to go full primitivist and argue that hunter gatherers had it the best.
The billionaires aren't saying this because there's some genuine groundswell of people that think things are worse than ever. They say these things because they're worried that we might try to make things even better by instituting communism.
Maybe that’s so, but I disagree — there are a ton of people who insist that things actually are worse than ever and that we need to go back to an idyllic time period where traditional values were respected and the world worked the way it should. In the US where I live, these folks often say things like “Make America Great Again”.
As far as I can tell, their “great again” harkens back to some earlier time period (the 1980s? The 1950s?) where things were (possibly, arguably) better for them but much, much worse for rest of us.
That said, they are right in some ways for lots of groups of people.
The other side of it: is right now better than the future? Maybe!
Billionaires, sing us out, I guess.
Fwiw, Gates used Pinker as a source while reviewing Pinker's book, and the author of this piece just arbitrarily juxtaposed the three of them from separate sources (including said book review)
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On top of the other thread about the content of the idea – this is
pure clickbait. The three quoted men didn’t appear together, or have a
conversation, it’s literally just an idea that
Musk brought up in a speech
Bill Gates wrote about in his review of Enlightenment
Now
and Buffet wrote about in a 2016 letter to Berkshire Hathaway
shareholders
with no link to one another except that they’re probably all familiar
with Pinker
Now is the best time to be alive [for cishet middle class white
people].
Anyway, billionaires believe in trickle down economics, no surprise
there.
And perhaps the question isn’t when would you want to be alive, but
more when and as what? Right now I wouldn’t want to be a LGBT person in
Poland for example. Or 1,2.
Shit is good but we could do so much better, and we should be careful
it doesn’t get worse.
I would agree with that, doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be fighting
against inequality or efforts to make the world better but for most of
the world things are better than they were in the past.
Interesting how they almost say “now” as opposed not to the past, but to the future. Almost like our best days are going to be behind us in the coming Ecopocalypse.
Honestly I kind of agree with them. The world has a lot of problems now, but it always has. I personally couldn’t time travel back very far in US history before running smack into Jim Crow, and if I went back even further I would be in slavery.
Many people with disabilities would also be fucked if we went back in time too far, before effective treatments were available, before they were shielded from the worst aspects of intolerance, eugenics, etc.
LGBT people are in a similar boat. Discrimination is still widespread in the US but marriage equality is at least law now. If they went back in time even a couple of decades they would risk imprisonment just for their orientation.
Pretty much every marginalized or minority group I can think of would be worse off in the past than the present.
Fantasizing about an idyllic past where problems didn’t exist is generally a sign of extreme ignorance or privilege.
Using Pinker as a source, sigh.
That said, they are right in some ways for lots of groups of people. The other side of it: is right now better than the future? Maybe! Billionaires, sing us out, I guess.
dat headline
It’s a grand old time for them, I’m sure.
Not so much for us !
On top of the other thread about the content of the idea – this is pure clickbait. The three quoted men didn’t appear together, or have a conversation, it’s literally just an idea that
with no link to one another except that they’re probably all familiar with Pinker
Let’s seize all their wealth.
Now is the best time to be alive [for cishet middle class white people].
Anyway, billionaires believe in trickle down economics, no surprise there.
And perhaps the question isn’t when would you want to be alive, but more when and as what? Right now I wouldn’t want to be a LGBT person in Poland for example. Or 1,2.
Shit is good but we could do so much better, and we should be careful it doesn’t get worse.
I would agree with that, doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be fighting against inequality or efforts to make the world better but for most of the world things are better than they were in the past.
Well, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet are all terminal dumbasses and blowhards.