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View Full Version : Is Society Evolving or Degenerating?



calamus
March 1st, 2019, 01:10 PM
Many people see a culture war taking place right now. What is considered good and wholesome is open to heated debate. What one side calls traditional family values, the other side calls hate; what one one side calls a woman's right to choose, the other calls murder of the defenseless. What does this mean? Is one side right and the other wrong? Are both sides wrong, or part right and part wrong? And what of society itself? Does that fact that so many people are now embracing what was considered seriously disordered if not outright evil not so long ago mean that society is "evolving," or that it is degenerating? What does history tell us about this?

azkid
March 1st, 2019, 07:18 PM
I tend to take a very long and broad view of history, as well as looking at human nature, when this question comes up.

mhosea
March 2nd, 2019, 12:30 PM
The Wikipedia article on infanticide is fascinating, BTW. One would have thought it was always repugnant to advanced civilizations, but it has not been so.

I do not really think there have been any significant societal changes with respect to abortion or infanticide in the US recently. Left-wing politicians are competing for attention and, more importantly, for political support by trying to exceed what their Democratic rivals have been willing to do. What's made this worse is that while the political debate used to be somewhat ideological in nature (smaller versus larger government, regulation versus deregulation, etc.), it has shifted to populism on both sides of the aisle. It is just a different brand of populism with a different story about who has been ignored by the current order of things, not to mention radically different ideas about how to fix it.

Empty_of_Clouds
March 3rd, 2019, 03:49 AM
What is happening now is not fundamentally different from what has happened throughout recorded history.

A key characteristic of evolved life is selfishness. While some self-less acts do occur, the overall balance is very much skewed the other way.

I was thinking along these lines the other day with regard to the Fermi paradox, and a specific idea arose in my mind and it was this: there may well be countless planets in the Universe that harbour sentient life, but what if the cost of being able to go to the stars can only be met by exhausting the entire resources of your planet? That all sufficiently advanced species perish on their now barren worlds, the thought of escape a faded dream?

That is the current path we are on as a species.

I get the feeling that the moguls who have all the money and all the influence know this. Know that there is no long term future, so why care. Live it up now. This is your only time.

TSherbs
March 3rd, 2019, 06:54 AM
While I share EOC's bleak outlook for the future of Earth's resources, I am more positive in this way: the general arc of human history has been toward greater justice, equity, and health. I agree with Pinker that the world, overall, has never been better off than it is right now. Yes, there are very serious problems and terrible abuses, but humanity and its laws is on a track toward progress overall. A "culture war" is a lot less toxic to humanity than a plague or a world war. But whether we can survive the consumption of our natural resources and the pollution of the planet is another problem. This may be the next coming "plague" and Dark Ages.

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TSherbs
March 3rd, 2019, 06:55 AM
I tend to take a very long and broad view of history, as well as looking at human nature, when this question comes up.Me too.

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TSherbs
March 3rd, 2019, 07:00 AM
.....

I get the feeling that the moguls who have all the money and all the influence know this. Know that there is no long term future, so why care. Live it up now. This is your only time.

I worry that this is felt by more than just the rich. After all, what influence do the poor have on controlling policy or industry? I sense a broad helplessness and lack of will, for many reasons. We are, after all, addicted to our stuff, no?



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calamus
March 5th, 2019, 05:45 PM
I think that throughout history people have been primarily motivated by what they perceive as their self-interest, and that throughout history there have been more poor people that rich people, and that poor people in general have had and continue to have less power than wealthy ones. I don't see any of that as having changed.

TSherbs
March 5th, 2019, 06:15 PM
I think that throughout history people have been primarily motivated by what they perceive as their self-interest, and that throughout history there have been more poor people that rich people, and that poor people in general have had and continue to have less power than wealthy ones. I don't see any of that as having changed.True. I would only add that there are fewer people, proportionately, who are truly destitute around the world. The great progress around the world over the past hundred years is the expansion of medicine and clean water and above subsistence living into a larger middle class. Generally. But yes, the poor are still just that. China's progress, alone, changes the world's stats.

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kazoolaw
June 26th, 2019, 04:20 PM
Are we not men?
We are devo
http://https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hRguZr0xCOc

calamus
June 27th, 2019, 02:03 PM
The 20th century should have taught us about the dangers of the totalitarian state, and how easily a civilized country such as Germany or Russia can become a nightmare state. I worry much more about that than fluctuations in climate. In particular, if a totalitarian "one world" government were to come into being, I think we'd be really screwed, because there would be no escape and any rebellion would almost certainly be easily crushed.

SIR
June 28th, 2019, 01:46 AM
Neo-feudalism is a very real threat.

TSherbs
June 28th, 2019, 07:50 AM
The 20th century should have taught us about the dangers of the totalitarian state, and how easily a civilized country such as Germany or Russia can become a nightmare state. I worry much more about that than fluctuations in climate. In particular, if a totalitarian "one world" government were to come into being, I think we'd be really screwed, because there would be no escape and any rebellion would almost certainly be easily crushed.The 20th century also saw fascism fail.

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calamus
June 28th, 2019, 10:34 AM
The 20th century should have taught us about the dangers of the totalitarian state, and how easily a civilized country such as Germany or Russia can become a nightmare state. I worry much more about that than fluctuations in climate. In particular, if a totalitarian "one world" government were to come into being, I think we'd be really screwed, because there would be no escape and any rebellion would almost certainly be easily crushed.The 20th century also saw fascism fail.

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Totalitarian Communism is still alive and well, and its ideology continues to spread. And in a very real sense, does it matter if one be crushed by the right boot or the left boot?

Pendragon
June 28th, 2019, 03:20 PM
Totalitarian Communism is still alive and well, and its ideology continues to spread. And in a very real sense, does it matter if one be crushed by the right boot or the left boot?
No, it does not matter. Sometimes the totalitarian jackboot is neither right or left, but simply intolerant of any dissent. The San Francisco Bay Area is a perfect example. There are still some awesome people here, but also many that are petty, preachy, elitist, self-centered to the point of narcissism, show scant regard for human life or the welfare of others, are very greedy, and quite ill-mannered. It is a rather shocking societal shift, and stands in stark contrast to society in times past. I would say that is a very marked decline, and might be due to behavioral sink.

calamus
June 28th, 2019, 04:39 PM
Neo-feudalism is a very real threat.

Would you care to elaborate? The term has been used in deiiferent contexts to mean very different things. Who do you think may be the emerging feudal lords? I fear it may be the global elites, who appear to be striving to wipe out national borders to further their multinational financial interests. This could well be a step toward the totalitarian one world government I believe those interests are trying to create.

SIR
June 29th, 2019, 07:03 AM
There still exist very powerful and influential monarchs who continue to subvert democracies through landowning, business influence, and political manipulation through degrees of separation; then there are theocratic influences and controls - the 'soft-skills' of landowners and slave traders since Pharaonic times; and let us not forget the governments themselves... 'representative democracy' is not democracy, the people have no control, and there elected representatives can give as little care for the concerns of the people as they like.

TSherbs
June 29th, 2019, 09:33 AM
.... 'representative democracy' is not democracy, the people have no control...

Yes, it is. Representative democracy gives voters a degree of control. You have been describing things in absolutes, in reactionary terms. Our representative democracy in America has been improved over the last 150 years through the expansion of suffrage to include all races and genders and economic classes. Are there other forces at play limiting citizen control? Of course. But the general progress has been toward wider suffrage and involvement. The world is a better place, the best it has ever been.




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SIR
June 29th, 2019, 01:18 PM
The world is a better place, the best it has ever been.

Democrat? No, the world isn't the best it has ever been; though perhaps in your own locality compared to others in the world, maybe...
read the signs - serial killers, terrorism, government use of extra-judicial murder - where do you think this is going and which side are you on?

and no again, representative democracy doesn't give voters any degree of control.

TSherbs
June 29th, 2019, 03:02 PM
The world is a better place, the best it has ever been.

Democrat? No, the world isn't the best it has ever been; though perhaps in your own locality compared to others in the world, maybe...
read the signs - serial killers, terrorism, government use of extra-judicial murder - where do you think this is going and which side are you on?

and no again, representative democracy doesn't give voters any degree of control.Pick one region of the world where disease, nutrition, and health care (average life expectancy) is worse than 150 years ago for the common folk of that region. Even deaths from warfare (world wide) are currently at the lowest they have ever been. You are writing more about your fears than you are about objective conditions that are measurable. There are more people in the middle class around the world with access to food and clean water than ever before in modern history. And there are many more hundreds of millions of people who have been given the right and access to voting for leadership in their countries.

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SIR
June 30th, 2019, 07:50 AM
You are writing more about your fears than you are about objective conditions that are measurable.

To be fair, most if not all of what you wrote read more like 'feelings' than evidenced facts...

and again, i reiterate, having a semblance of choice in who makes your decisions for you is not the same as being able to actually make those decisions yourself.

TSherbs
June 30th, 2019, 08:59 AM
You are writing more about your fears than you are about objective conditions that are measurable.

To be fair, most if not all of what you wrote read more like 'feelings' than evidenced facts...

and again, i reiterate, having a semblance of choice in who makes your decisions for you is not the same as being able to actually make those decisions yourself.I haven't stated my "feelings" at all about this.

Do you really need statistics about the increase in life expectancy around the world in order to accept the fact? I am not willing to make the effort to fill you in on modern advancements in medicine, food, and water.

And "representative" democracy is precisely what I have described. It is of course not total freedom of will nor total control of outcomes by the voters. This extreme is not possible nor even a matter for reasonable discussion. Besides, the losing group in any election gets nothing.



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SIR
July 1st, 2019, 12:49 AM
You know life expectancy in a lot of U.S. states, if not on average overall, is decreasing right?
Also, you should realise the question originally posed by this thread is whether society is evolving or not, not whether the effects of society's relative development is benefitting the majority of people to a greater or lesser degree.

SIR
July 1st, 2019, 12:54 AM
And "representative" democracy is precisely what I have described. It is of course not total freedom of will nor total control of outcomes by the voters. This extreme is not possible nor even a matter for reasonable discussion.

A Swiss person might find that comment deeply offensive!

TSherbs
July 1st, 2019, 12:01 PM
Again, I say, yes, society is improving, especially over the last century and a half, toward greater longevity and suffrage and middle class comforts across all parts of the globe. Tyranny, war, and colonial injustice have all been reduced. Yes, I call this all social progress. My apologies to that Swiss person who may feel otherwise. I am, of course, trying to see beyond my own back yard and my own life time.


.

SIR
July 1st, 2019, 01:04 PM
Society has improved/did improve, but is it still improving?!

mhosea
July 2nd, 2019, 09:53 AM
Being a mathematician, I tend to view "society" as a complex dynamical system. It is certainly not "evolving". An evolutionary process is characterized by tentative changes which either stick or don't stick, depending on whether they give advantage or not. I do not think it is "degenerating". That connotes a slow and steady process heading in the wrong direction. In some respects it is still improving, in some stagnated, and in others degenerating, so it is difficult to characterize the overall situation as degenerating. It is clearly changing, though. I think western civilization is (probably) at risk of destabilizing, and if it does, it could go to hell in a hand basket very quickly, erasing virtually all gains in social justice over the last century and most of the economic progress. We should commit ourselves to small incremental improvements, keeping an open mind about whether our changes actually are improvements or threaten to take us in wrong directions, either through direct unintended consequences or fomenting backlash (which can occur in some cases when change is too rapid or implemented in a ham-handed way).

Linger
July 3rd, 2019, 12:27 PM
The 20th century did see a lot of violence, of all sorts. If you add up the global number of deaths in societies due to war, genocide, revolutions, basically all sorts of horrible events, an estimated 190-200 million people lost their lives. Yet, in the same century, the global population grew from a little over 2 billion to well over 6 billion. So yeah, things are improving.

Empty_of_Clouds
July 3rd, 2019, 02:34 PM
Interesting. Yes, infant mortality is lower, and longevity is increasing, but that hardly begins to answer the question of the direction society is taking. The two factors mentioned here lead to two obvious further problems, namely overpopulation and increasing age-related morbidities that drive up health costs against limited resource availability.


Also, the OP question makes no sense as it assumes that evolution is a process of improvement rather than a record of fit. That society is changing is not in doubt. Whether it is a desirable change, to our own sensibilities, is perhaps a better way of framing the question.

TSherbs
July 4th, 2019, 09:34 AM
Maybe I should have added that unless you canvas the billions of people not suffering as much as 150 years ago, then our answers here might be skewed toward the priveleged way of seeing things. The recent month-long effort to have even the remotest of Indian villages participate in their elections (representative democracy) is another of what I would call improvements toward greater suffrage for the traditionally disenfranchised. And yes, I think that this matters a lot. Except for those who suffer the ennui of privelege. And I consider suffrage an important aspect of "society".

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TSherbs
July 4th, 2019, 09:42 AM
The 20th century did see a lot of violence, of all sorts. If you add up the global number of deaths in societies due to war, genocide, revolutions, basically all sorts of horrible events, an estimated 190-200 million people lost their lives.....

And most of this destruction came to an end in 1950s, seventy years ago. I would argue that this relative absence of genocide, purge, and war on the scale of a continent for this length of time has been a massive improvement for the mid-low economic classes around the world, living with food and water being preferable to dying on a massive scale.



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Empty_of_Clouds
July 4th, 2019, 06:32 PM
Wallpaper bubbles, that's what it is like. Wallpaper bubbles. You know, when you flatten one out and another pops up somewhere else on the wall.*

While it may be nice to point to specific improvements in daily living conditions, it is also imperative to consider what else has changed (or will change) because of them. In other words, there is always a cost (another wallpaper bubble). As I see it there are two paths ahead: one, where we manage our environment, and two, where the environment manages us.

By 'environment' I am talking about not just the global climate but all available resources (renewables and otherwise).





*with apologies to those who are unfamiliar with this phenomenon.

TSherbs
July 5th, 2019, 11:27 AM
Yes, our environment has been degrading. The "society"of Gaia has been degrading since humans denuded Europe and discovered coal.

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kazoolaw
July 5th, 2019, 12:03 PM
The 20th century did see a lot of violence, of all sorts. If you add up the global number of deaths in societies due to war, genocide, revolutions, basically all sorts of horrible events, an estimated 190-200 million people lost their lives.....

And most of this destruction came to an end in 1950s, seventy years ago. I would argue that this relative absence of genocide, purge, and war on the scale of a continent for this length of time has been a massive improvement for the mid-low economic classes around the world, living with food and water being preferable to dying on a massive scale.



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Chinese Cultural Revolution - 196o's - 1 million or more killed killed - per NYT

Killing Fields Cambodia - more than a million killed

Rwandan genocide - 1994 - 500,000 to 1,000,000 killed

Indonesia - 1966 - 500,000 to 3,000,000 estimated killed.

Relative?

TAYLORPUPPY
July 6th, 2019, 03:26 PM
Are we not men?
We are devo
http://https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hRguZr0xCOc

I said whip it, whip it good


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DavidStewart
July 16th, 2019, 10:55 AM
I think society always tends to evolve, it only has good times and bad times. For example for someone who was born in '30's in Germany might have thought that it's the end of the world but for someone who was born in '60's it must be the best place in the world.

DevianceTheory
November 1st, 2020, 11:29 AM
As an anthropologist, I think this question is really interesting and the answer probably has a lot to do with your world view, upbringing, and field of study/profession. The upsets about "traditional values" are modern upsets for the most part that appear and disappear as cultures change and reshape their ideas about the culture itself. Even a lot of the identities of the modern day are fairly modern. I've lived in a pretty rural area for the past few years for work and the general idea here about attacks on so called "traditional values", usually LGBTQ related, simply wouldn't have existed a few hundred years ago. It isn't because deviants who violated the established norm didn't exist but more-so that the ideas of gender, sex, and attraction are shaped almost entirely by the more modern era and our memory is relatively short. Our ideas of what a family is and how we organize one is really recent! That is not to imply they don't have value though. If we went into another dark age tomorrow people would still make art, develop their scientific theories, change their ideas, and live/die just as happily as they had during any of the other. The Romans thought it was the height of culture to bathe in public and to have heated stone floors but that doesn't mean we're any less advanced for not having them. These ideas are just kind of fluid.

Empty_of_Clouds
November 1st, 2020, 11:46 AM
When you consider the way most people view time - as a linear, one-directional thing - then the concept of "traditional" loses any meaning other than a temporary one.

Secondly, when anyone raises the idea of society being "advanced", I am inclined to ask for a definition of "advanced" and what measures are used to determine it. Much of this is subjective. Yes, we live longer on average today, as an example, but on the other hand we suffer a great deal more age-related morbidities that rob us of joy and dignity. Or, yes we can travel easily and relatively cheaply anywhere we want, but it could be argued that this robs the journey and the destination of value both in terms of personal growth and discovery.

Point being, there are many ways of examining the factors that are appended to the belief that we have an "advanced society", and I've only mentioned a couple of simple ones! :)

TSherbs
December 6th, 2020, 06:16 AM
Wait.

Was this all a trick question?

Is the correct answer "Yes, evolving, because we have more fountain pen and ink manufacturers"?

Chuck Naill
December 6th, 2020, 06:24 AM
Not evolving, but adapting to the present opportunities and challanges.