| > Compared with every metric in history, we are better. I call this the "Hobbes fallacy" and it seems to be in vogue among a certain literati a la Steven Pinker who have taken up the task of proving that lay people's pessimism and anxiety are unfounded. I propose an alternative: that when we expand the timeline of humanity back far enough, many of the improvements in the modern era disappear and are seen to only be improvements from local minima occuring during the last several hundred or thousand years. Go back further to pre-agricultural times when big game and forage were still abundant and hadn't been depleted from population growth. Humans had excellent health, a modal survival after childhood comparable with modern humans, easily obtainable food, few working hours, lots of social support, living with friends and family. Nowadays that type of lifestyle would be an idyllic luxury for many. After the resource crunch and transition to sedentary agriculture you start seeing lifespan and health plummet, food insecurity, caste societies, endemic war, slavery. These things were not widespread for most of human history, just the agriculture era, which can be viewed as a time of unusual scarcity that created a high degree of competition and adaptation. Technology has merely clawed back much of what used to be the common human condition. |