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this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2023
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Asklemmy
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I‘d highly recommend the follwoing book:
The Better Angels of our Nature by Steven Pinker https://books.apple.com/ch/book/the-better-angels-of-our-nature/id457552067?l=en-GB
While it might seem that the world is getting worse and worse, it’s actually quite the opposite. We have less war deaths than any centuries before, social justice is on the rise almost everywhere, poverty is at an all time low. For the last 50 or so years, almost every metric of human wellbeing increased, some significantly.
Doesn’t mean there aren’t any problems and we still have a lot of work to layed out for us. But to say that the world is getting worse and worse is just factually incorrect.
What about our inaction on climate change? We've made very small advances and it threatens the fundamental existence of organized human society within a single human lifespan of right now. Everything else is rather insignificant by comparison. Rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic
I wouldn't really call it inaction. In fact in the last 100 years marketing has made great strides towards accelerating climate change through the promotion of senseless consumption and the active denial and obfuscation of the effects various industries had on climate change for as long as possible.
When you're right, you're right.
I don't think this kind of catastrophizing helps. Climate change certainly doesn't "threaten the fundamental existence of organized human society". Sure, we should do more about it and future generations would be better off if we were to lessen the impact, but it is not an existential threat.
It isn’t catastrophizing when it is about a literal catastrophe which climate change is.
It absolutely does represent an existential threat to the current and future lives of billions of humans.
There is also a CATASTROPHIC loss of biodiversity and habitat occurring on earth, there is literally no other word for it and the consequences are so gargantuan it is difficult to wrap your head around. We are living in a mass extinction, which may yet include ourselves.
I agree with your point on biodiversity and yes, climate change poses an existential threat to individual people, but not to civilization as a whole.
facepalm no, I don’t think you understand the magnitude of what is occurring here. I am not going to sit here and argue semantics but suffice to say there is absolutely zero evidence that we won’t wipe ourselves out through habitat loss, collapse of the biosphere and climate change (that themselves cause a litany of other quick and slow moving disasters).
To think civilization will inevitably make it through this is to understand the human organism as just a single species of ape, not a dizzying constellation of bacteria, viruses, plants, fungus and animals that sustains what we think of as “human”. We destroy that and there is no “us”. We can’t just take the human species and transplant it to mars and expect it to survive without the diversity of all those other species. You might as well pluck out a single ant from a colony expecting it to be able to survive alone.
Complete ecological collapse by the end of the century isn't an existential threat?
Not if you loosely define "organized human society". Imagine a bright future where you just live in your pod and be a happy meatbag that powers the Matrix. Hell, even corporations are "organized human society".
Those ghouls are saying we should dim the sun instead of disinvestment in oil.
No, I'm certain that human civilization would survive.