Read some Steven Pinker. Your observations about our present state are not wrong, but seriously consider every other point in human history and realize we are not worse off in any measurable way. In fact, much better.
- we're better off because there is less human suffering "per capita" for lack of a better word.
- we're worse off because technology has allowed us all to instantly see and learn about every human (and animal) atrocity anywhere in the world.
I'm sure if I keyed up a gore site right now I could find the latest mexican cartel atrocity, or a necklacing in Africa, or someone somewhere else being cruelly hurt. But in the 1950s you had to pay for a paper which was excessively rate-limited and narrow in scope.
In "Better Angels" he chooses "healthy, wealthy and wise" as his three benchmarks. We live longer (and suffer less violence). We have more wealth. We are smarter. That's what "better off" means. You can argue that's not what "better off" means, but you'd be arguing that we should strive for shorter lives, more poverty, and increased stupidity.
What does wise mean here? Because it seems to be the same as intelligent, which is not how I would describe wisdom at all. Wisdom and intelligence are not the same thing, and while our age is definitely "smart" it seems to have a complete and total lack of wisdom about pretty much everything.
To simply dismiss Pinker as a moron either means you haven't at all read any of his books, or you yourself have a rather moronic definition of stupidity. You can disagree about many details in "Better angels of our nature" and debate future trends in interesting ways, but it's definitely not the work of a stupid individual. All the contrary, it's well thought out and highly robust in its arguments.
Also, "everything is relative" is an idiot's way of saying something something meaningless while trying to make it seem incisive. Yes, many things are relative to others, but there are also objective measurements and visible differences between material aspects of the world, past and present especially. Feel free to live with the violence and material resources of a 16th century peasant, with no access to modern amenities for a few months and see how you rethink "better off" when considering most of mdoern life (even for a majority of poor people)
Probably he is indeed a moron, or perhaps the shrewd academic.
The peasant who used to get one square meal in 3 days now gets one square meal a day. So objectively we are better off. ( And the HN idiot will gloss over the stats to point out how fortunate we are to have software jobs)
How is that different than my dad saying the cliche "Back in the day we had it much worse?" It's just a book to make the same conservative point. Since when did any child of a parent hearing that ("Back in the day, we didn't have food / shelter / etc.") respond in agreement? Talking about how much worse things were back then is beside the point, because it is the wrong category of comparison to make. It just shows the person - a parent, a teacher, Prof. Pinker - saying it is out of touch and doesn't understand the actual complaint in todays' context. It's just paternalism expressed with more words.
In fact I can answer my question in another way. We do not exist as a hive collective and nor ought we individuals compare our lives to an alternate life living in the past. A historical societal fact that is technically does not apply to the problems of individual people living today. It was wrong of Pinker to inconsiderately apply those historical facts on the level of societies by further making his implied political points about the individual needs of the marginalized and the oppressed today, but in public that is what he has constantly done.
