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by debok
898 days ago
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>Homelessness >Hunger >Slavery >Genocide All are greatly reduced in the last 100-150 years. Globally. In large part thanks to "Western" contributions to science. The rest are some very developed and sophisticated atrocities. Being developed and sophisticated doesn't make people good, it just makes their evil deeds more sophisticated and developed. Just to qualify: I'm not trying to promote the noble savage myth here either. I'm trying to say that the simplicity/sophistication scale is orthogonal to the good/evil scale. |
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>reduced hunger, but not eliminated it
>potentially exacerbated homelessness, as the income/wealth floor for maintaining a household is now higher, globally
Additionally:
>there are more slaves in the world today than at any other point in history
>some of the worst genocides in history are within living memory
All of the above is the result of Western cultural and logistical immaturity in the face of its industrial over-development. E.g., notice how a major global shipping lane is currently inaccessible due to war (a war ultimately cause by Western meddling in the region). It should also be noted that we're in the middle of a mass extinction driven by this same dynamic.
Any positive assessment of the West's sophistication and development has to be tempered or even nullified by the reality that its efforts have served to worsen, let alone ameliorate, basic measures of civilizational quality. An extreme analogy, using fiction: I refuse to call the civs in universes like WH40K, Dune, etc. "sophisticated and developed", because they've simply transposed and magnified age-old failings and atrocities onto a cosmic scale. True sophistication and development may eschew technological complexity, if complexity is instead in the systems and processes that support self-actualization in the population.
To go back to the original point: if the introduction of indoor plumbing and the extension of civil rights in America had been switched chronologically, we'd be much better off as a society. If landing on the moon and the acceptance and election of a female president had been switched, ditto. So, yes, it's shameful.