[dfxm12]

“There are plenty of young people who are appalled by the behaviour of the older generation, rightly, and are dedicated to trying to stop this madness before it consumes us all. Well, that’s the hope for the future.”

I'm sure some social critics thought the same of young people like Chomsky, who were thrown in jail for protesting the Vietnam War. I don't know if I'm being pessimistic or realist, but in the context of climate crisis & impirialism, we've seen history repeat itself enough time across enough generations that I'm not hopeful anymore that the kids will figure it out.

[roughly]

At the same time, we made enormous progress during that time - the environmental movement of the 60s led to the EPA, the clean air and water acts, and a whole host of other regulatory, legislative, and indeed societal changes that have actually made a real impact. On a larger level, things like the ban on CFCs later in the 80s were a global-scale response to a large environmental problem.

It’s easy to forget, but we’ve done this work before, and not too long ago.

[scottLobster]

Well in this case the young people in question have, on a generational level, inherited worse circumstances than their parents. That hasn't been seen in the Western World since pre-WWII.

I'm not saying millennials will figure everything out, but there's no denying the shift in values. It's not some idealistic cultural awakening, just a harsher reality forcing adaptation. In the long run we'll probably ameliorate climate change and screw a bunch of other things up.

[vorpalhex]

> the young people in question have, on a generational level, inherited worse circumstances than their parents.

If only we could go back to when life was perfect, like.. uh.. the 1950s.. wait no, things were better in the 1970s! I mean, not really since we had massive inflation and gas shortages.. uh, what about the 90s when crime spiked?

What mythical year was this where life was better than today?

[scottLobster]

Oh I don't know, that large swath of decades where housing was cheap relative to the last 10 years, a high school education could get a job that afforded a middle class existence and education could be paid for with a part time job? Hell for part of that period wages even grew with productivity, what luxury! Sure some things are better today, but the cost of the necessities of life are through the roof relative to wage growth.

Back in the 70s my dad worked his ass off between classes and jobs to pay his own way through his PhD, and owned a small house off his stipend/odd jobs and my mom's salary as a public school teacher, in a decent area of California no less. Even he's admitted that would be simply impossible today.

[yucky]

>Well in this case the young people in question have, on a generational level, inherited worse circumstances than their parents.

At no point in history has the world been less violent and more accommodating for marginalized people. Or are you implying that is the problem?

Otherwise, I suspect you're just alluding to the high housing prices caused by every young person wanting to move to the same 5 cities and driving up prices? I mean, the US is big and housing is cheap in plenty of places. Starter homes used to be a thing.

[JKCalhoun]

And yet doesn't history also show us that it gets sorted out eventually? Even, sadly, though that may mean generations of rebellion, war, strife, hardship....

[coldtea]

>And yet doesn't history also show us that it gets sorted out eventually?

That's called "whig history" and it's mostly an idea of religious origin: the idea that the world progresses to some moral or enlightened end.

Technology and scientific knowledge do accumulate over time. Actually, even those can be lost (tons of techniques were lost for centuries, and some are still unknown, when empires like Rome fell), but generally they accumulate, based on their technical and informational nature.

But society, morality, government enlightenment etc. don't accumulate. They can revert to totally worse than previous times at any point, and often have. That's based on human character (not so malleable outside of evolutionary time spans), interests (national, folk, and private), resource availability and contest for resources, who is in power, and trends, ideology and moral ideas prevalent at each era.

(E.g. post golden-era Athens compared to before, post-Roman empire medieval times, the Renessaince (the quentessential era of slaughter and war in Europe, and also when the Inquisition was founded and operated), WWI and WWII compared to the "belle epoque".

And those regressions was in regular, non existential danger times. What can happen under lack of resources like water (in most of the planet), climate change catastrophes, or even nuclear war, is even worse.

[dragonwriter]

> And yet doesn't history also show us that it gets sorted out eventually?

No, it does not.

It does show that it sometimes gets “sorted out“, but it sometimes just gets institutionalized. And even when it does get “sorted out“, sometimes the sorting out...unsorts.