Samuel here.
You guys! Little-known fact, you guys: hating the world is not a passport to Coolsville. I know plenty of people who will tell you at great length that humans are fucked up and society sucks, but I personally believe that the world houses some pretty rad dudes. Let's explore this at length!
So we fucked up everything, huh? We fucked up everything. Well, what are you reading right now? I'm no one important. I just woke up this morning and decided that I had some things to say. It took me about two hours to write something that anybody in any place at any time can just sit down and read. Basically forever.
Where are you? Because I'm in my room. I'm alone. I'm not talking to anyone. You could be in Bangladesh
This thing that you're reading my post with, what else can it do? Just take half a second to think about that. Until 100 years ago, just two human generations, anything you were seeing was actually in front of you. Until 150 years ago, three human generations, anything you were hearing was right there with you. Until 5,000 years ago, maybe 170 human generations, anything you were learning was from someone who was literally right beside you. For tens of millions of years of human history (depending on what you consider to be human), you could only experience things in your immediate vicinity. In our grandparents' lifetime that permanently changed. We are no longer restricted by time and place. It doesn't matter to us. It's that simple.
Go to a window. Look up. Since you're on the internet, and are therefore only awake at night, I'm going to assume you can see the moon. Take a good look at it. People have been there. People have been there! That is incomprehensible.
Much of the world still lives in the Middle Ages. We have the capital to lift them out of it. But that has changed tremendously, and increasingly rapidly, in the past 50 years, and almost every political scientist and economist will tell you that it's going to keep happening and it's going to happen faster.
We have traversed the Earth and we have ascended into space just to make sure we didn't miss anything, and now I can sit at home with a $200 computer and a free copy of Google Earth and I can literally see any part of any piece of land on Earth. I can take sightseeing tours through Madrid Madrid Madrid
Literacy. Medicine. Plumbing. I could literally write fifty pages about how mind-bogglingly better things are than they used to be. I am thoroughly, firmly, unshakeably convinced that we have created for ourselves an awe-inspiring, free, and functional world. I think that the vast majority of the people I know are very good people, and I think that the vast majority of people alive are, too.
I lead an indescribably good life. Nothing truly bad has ever happened to me. I have never had a sibling or a close friend die. That's ridiculously new in the timespan of human history. I have never caught polio or scrofula or the bubonic plague. I was born with severe myopia, but it couldn't matter less; I happen to have been one of the maybe 0.000001% of history's myopic humans who has access to corrective glasses. It doesn't even begin to affect my quality of life. The kings and the queens of history would kill to enjoy the quality of education, health care, or transportation that I do. They would be floored to encounter the ease with which I can communicate with anyone in the entire world. What does it say about our society that any reasonably intelligent person with a decent work ethic can, within a couple decades of their birth, learn something substantial about the universe that literally nobody in human history has ever known before? Ever met someone with a PhD? I bet you have. One of the most dominant institutions in our society, the institution of higher education, is designed to enable ordinary people to figure out things that literally no one in the history of the human race has ever figured out before. That is completely new to the last generation. It is pretty much unique to the last fifty years.
Even our political structure is fucking awesome. You hate politicians, right? Well, get a life, dingus. Do you know how remarkable it is to have freedom of speech? To have literally no meaningful fear whatsoever of police officers spontaneously arresting and torturing you, to be able to choose your career for yourself and to live your life with a person you love, to have finally freed yourself from the shackles of institutionalized racism is something tremendously remarkable. Mitt Romney doesn't excite you? Barack Obama turned his back on you by not horsewhipping senators into not fillibustering? Stephen Harper is...Stephen Harper seems kind of mean? What absurdly petty complaints! You're getting handed a briefcase full of money and you're complaining that the bills are folded wrong. The fact that you even know what Barack Obama is doing on any given day should be more than enough reason not to whine so much.
How about the morning after pill? How about abortion? 1966 is the hallmark year in the history of women's liberation. Sex, whether rape or consensual, no longer has to change your life forever. That is the most empowering thing I can imagine. And it just happened. It just happened.
Look, I get that some things suck. I'm the first to tell you --- and I have at great length, in previous posts --- that poverty today is more widespread and more preventable and more despicable than I can possibly describe, let alone conceive of. I am deathly afraid of nuclear weapons; I cannot believe that everyone who will ever get their hands on them will fear their own destruction more than they wish for the destruction of others. I am frightened by epidemics, I am frightened by decreasing biodiversity, I am frightened by those who insist that birth control is more wicked than the systemic disempowerment of women. But how long have these been problems? 40 years? 50 years? 70 years? Not even the blink of an eye. We're in a race against the clock, but it's really not the first time. And what happens if the worst should happen? What are we losing? Nothing except what we've built ourselves. If we fucked everything up, why does it even matter if we lose it all? And what have we fucked up other than the stuff that could make us lose it all? It's a self-defeating argument: "nothing we have is worth having because it threatens what we have". Listen to yourself, cartoon! Everything meaningful that we are risking is relegated to this planet, and is our responsibility. At worst, all we risk is undoing our work. We fucked everything up? Give me a break.
As Louis C. K. says, "everything's awesome, and nobody's happy". It's one of the most important messages I have ever heard from anyone. I live in a democracy where I befriend whomever I want. I love my fellow humans and I can tell them anywhere at any time. I have never met a human who does not work for the good of the human race, and I doubt that you have, either. Time and time again, we confront our demons, and time and time again it is our angels that prevail. What Earthly reason could I have to want to devolve? I am the blessed member of a blessed species. And anyone who thinks otherwise can respond in the comments section with their impossibly common near-infinite-distance instantaneous communications device.At the risk of blunting the message, I would like to add an unrelated post script: please do leave a comment. We write these for other people to read, so the more comments we get, the happier we are. And if you leave a comment giving us advice (longer, shorter, post about this dumb thing on my news feed), the better we will understand what people want from us. And anyone who knows me understands that disagreeing with me is an excellent way to make me write unreasonable amounts of stuff, which is always great fun. So commenting can only ever be a win-win situation.
Other important Post-Script note: I will not be updating next Wednesday. I have a math midterm that day and a physics midterm two days after, so I will be doing super important stuff that night (drowning my sorrows). However, the next week is reading week, so I'll update at least twice then. Until then, keep on trucking.
A note to those responsible for the ~15 pageviews since I posted this: it's been rather heavily edited. Sorry that I do that, but these really important ideas for changes always hit me just after I upload.
ReplyDelete"Well, get a life, dingus."
ReplyDeleteI had to stop reading at this point. This sentence was just too much.
And, I love this post. It's beautiful. It just makes me feel good reading about things humanity has accomplished. That's the good. The bad is that this is just one in a long stream of images and such things that complain about good things. It's just something people love to do for whatever reason. Can we take a minute to just think about how there is an entire North American industry based on selling merchandise to married couples about how marriage is horrible and awful and ruins one's entire life? years and years after arranged marriages were widespread in North America? Sorry I was thinking about this earlier today and this seemed like a vaguely appropriate time to get frustrated about it on the internet
Sometimes I just stop, take a look at my life, and think about this.
ReplyDeleteA few seconds ago, I was writing code, so that the compiler could take the code and see what I want to write, then create a program that my CPU (which does calculations billions of times a second) can run it. Of course, this was barely possible not that long ago, as my computers teacher can attest to.
3 billion of times a second.
Times 4.
For less than $100.
We are living in the future.
http://xkcd.com/676/ <- relevant comic
Philippe here.
ReplyDeleteI agree with almost everything here. In fact, I've been making similar arguments for quite a while.
But agreement is boring so I'm going to argue with anything objectionable that I can find.
1. Distance still matters. Can't transmit a lunch or a car or a person over the internet. Yet.
2. There are plenty of valid complaints about our politicians. Sure, they're a lot better than medieval monarchs. But sometimes they're still pretty bad. See: Steven Harper's census alteration, Silvio Berlusconi's entire career.
3. Sex can still change your life forever, especially if it's traumatic and rapey.
4. The objections to the modern era are founded upon the idea that we are threatening more than we have built. Most of the objectors, not coincidentally, effectively worship nature.
5. I'm happy, but I still like to complain about airports. Because complaining is fun and airport security is incredibly stupid. Louis CK's complaints about complaints are no more valid than my complaints about my brother getting his cologne confiscated.
6. The entire idea of devolving is farcical. Please don't say things like "why would I want to devolve?"
7. Semi-relevant comic: [url]http://www.viruscomix.com/page392.html[/url]. Hope that those tags work here...
1. It's essentially irrelevant. It doesn't matter in the sense that, if I *really, really* need a lunch from France by the end of today, it is perfectly possible.
Delete2. I agree, but people treat Steven Harper's census alterations as though they fundamentally destroy Canadian democracy, while I imagine they have basically no measurable impact at all on the life of the average citizen. Berlusconi is obviously an extreme case, though. He deserves to be complained about. That's like telling me that complaints about our politicians aren't petty because look at Assad!
3. Oh, I definitely agree that it *can*. I deny that it *has to*. That used to essentially be the case (assuming both parties are fertile etc.). But, rereading it, you're right that it's ambiguous. I will edit the wording to make that clearer.
4. Right, I knew that you (or someone) would raise this objection, but I didn't want to cover it because it just got way too clunky if I addressed it in the post. So I guess the argument would be that, say, nuclear weaponry infringes on the right of our descendants to live and to live well, and also infringes on the rights of animals/trees/rocks to live full and peaceful lives. My response to that is that rights are an arbitrary construct conferred by humans on other humans, and extending the franchise to animals make it tenuous at best, and meaningless at worst. I do not believe that cows have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I firmly believe that people do. I think it is wrong to inflict excessive pain on them, simply because I don't think it's a nice thing to do, but I think that it is strictly evil to tell humans they cannot pursue obviously beneficial progress (say, nuclear power) because you fear for the livelihood of the hummingbird. I'm an environmentalist. I like the Earth a lot. But I am first and foremost a humanitarian, and I will not allow the suffering of my fellow humans (for example, by saying life would have been better if we had never encountered nuclear weapons/nuclear power) so that animals can have a better time of it. Having said that, this same argument is often used to support, say, drilling in Alaska, and I think that application misses the point entirely. I don't think that people need to drive or whatever nearly as much as they do, and I think there is a balance to be found between minimizing consumption and maximizing quality of life. But that's a different debate entirely.
Regarding our descendants, I think we should do everything in our power to leave a better world for those yet to be born. And I also believe that our wants and needs are infinitely more important than the wants of needs of nonexistent people. I don't think you change a behavior that threatens your life just because somewhere down the line it might also threaten the life of someone who does not exist. It's like stopping a guy from pulling a knife on a 9-year old because you want the 9-year old's future children to have a good life. It's just a perverse motive.
5. Yeah, okay, but balance that by constantly expressing your wonder about the universe. I'm less attracted to his argument about complaints than I about to the part where he does his impression of what everyone on an airplane should always be like.
6. The cartoon suggested we should want to go back along the evolutionary chain. I was directly responding to the cartoon. That's the whole point of this blog.
7. that is awesome
DeletePhilippe here again.
Delete1. Last Saturday I missed a Taekwondo tournament because it was in Mississauga. Distance matters less than it used to, but it matters.
2. Sure, things are pretty good in politics. But that doesn't mean we should shut up about the things that aren't so good.
4. I pretty much agree with you, but let me present an opposing viewpoint anyway.
The world as a whole is more important than humanity. Humanity does not have the right to damage nature, and if only we still lived in caves then we would be much less capable of doing such damage.
5. This is mostly about social rules. Wouldn't it be annoying if everyone on an 8 hour flight kept shouting "HOLY SHIT I'M IN THE SKY!"? By contrast, complaining is fun. And it's a good way to bond with people. So no matter how good things get, people will complain often and exclaim joy rarely.
This blog is a good example. Your proclamations of the world's greatness come in the form of complaints about dumb people.
6. But by replying in such a way you accept the premise that it's possible to go back down the evolutionary chain. Evolution only goes one way.
7. Yeah, I quite like that comic. It's wordy and preachy, but funny in a clever way nonetheless.
1. Right, that is clearly just semantics
Delete2. This is also clearly just a matter of wording. Obviously I do not think that we should shut up the things that aren't so good.
4. If we still lived in caves we would die at the age of 22 in horrendously painful ways. Like I said, I am more of a humanitarian than an environmentalist; we not only have a right but a responsibility to damage the world if it is a necessary component of a just human enterprise and is not excessively cruel.
5. Philippe, it's a metaphor. No one is actually advocating shouting on planes.
6. I honestly can't understand what your problem is here.
Cartoon: "You should devolve"
Me: "no"
I can see how there would be a problem if I had said "while that is a reasonable and practical proposition, I do not accept it on moral grounds", but what I actually said seems quite reasonable to me.