It's truly a matter of perspective.
100%. And I respect your position even if I don't agree with it.
Broadly speaking, history is macro. It's wars, regime change, famine, the fall of empires, etc. It isn't celebrating a friend's birthday, falling in love, writing poetry, or watching a sunset. I would have trouble describing my absolute joy while watching The Matrix.
But isn't this like telling a chronically ill person 'have you tried taking a walk on a sunny day?' Like that somehow erases 22 hours per day of discomfort, pain, defeat, and anxiety?
Not to be.. aggressive.. about it but while I'm glad you enjoy watching The Matrix, approximately 116 people are murdered every time you watch it (.86 people per minute x 2h16m runtime). It just feels so empty, I guess, to be like "I understand that approximately 2.4 million children die per year due to malnutrition, but have you ever seen a sunset over the mountains?" Like.. what?
History is macro, absolutely. But the suffering it inflicts is not. For every statistic about the abject horror we inflict on each other, there are countless ground level stories of suffering and misery. What's the Stalin quote? 1 death is a tragedy, 1 million deaths is a statistic? I can't allow myself to pull away from those statistics and de-humanize those experiences specifically just because they're too big to grasp.
The existence of joy itself, the fact that some people live happily, isn't a point against the idea that many, many more people simply do not. If the existence of poetry is a saving grace of our species, then the existence of murder is, at least, just as powerful an indictment against it.
That I am telling this to you, someone I've never met—through a miraculous invention that allows us to transcend time and space—is even more awe-inspiring.
Can something not be awe-inspiring but ultimately neutral and not proof of goodness or worthiness in us? I mean, this same magic machine we invented is used to destroy peoples' lives every day a thousand times over. It's certainly debatable whether this incredible invention has done more good or more harm. Because we, as a species, cannot help ourselves but to do evil things. Nothing can ever be just a force for good.
Does it matter that we're trying?
No. It matters that not enough of us are trying, and those that might be trying, are failing. That's what matters. What is it -- almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades? That some of us, I wouldn't even argue a majority of us, want to do better and be better doesn't magically free the estimated 20-50 million people currently living in slavery. And I would wager very few of them feel gratified in knowing that, hey, some of us really think that's a bad thing that's happening to them and would prefer it stop.
Not like.. enough to stop eating chocolate, though. Chocolate is delicious.
We're also making progress.
Are we? By what metric? Obviously we're making progress in areas where 'progress' is mostly defined by our technological development. For example, we've made incredible progress in infant mortality (although, thanks to Republicans, that has taken a step down in the USA). Now, to be fair, that progress only matters to those with access to it. Some woman dying while giving birth alone in a shed in a third world country doesn't really care how much progress our species has theoretically made. That progress is intentionally withheld from her for the sake of greed and apathy (sometimes also for worse motives).
Slavery is -up- since the days of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Or at least steady. 12 million people were captured and sold into slavery during that period in that area of the world. Our
lowest estimates say at least 20-30 million people are slaves -right now-. The modern world's rich elites have the single greatest concentration of wealth in human history. They are literally wealthier than medieval kings and queens. How is that progress?
The problem is that we, even progressive type people, are arrogant as fuck. We think that because we live now, it must be better than before. Because before was before - when people were uneducated and dirty and didn't wear pants or whateverthefuck. We think we MUST be doing better than they are, even if we can't point to concrete reasons why we should think that's true. The more you study history, the more you realize it's probably not actually true except in very specific ways (again, mostly related to technological advancement, NOT related to ways in which we treat each other).
Even our much-vaunted social advances aren't all that advanced compared to what came before, because we always compare ourselves to the worst point in history, at the worst places in history, so that we can say 'see!? we're better!' And even then, most of the time you're comparing something like ancient Athens to modern America so we can strut around about how -our- women aren't covered head-to-toe and forced to stay indoors whenever men aren't walking them around outside like pets. But like... that is still very much the case in large swaths of the world. And there's no guarantee it won't revert to that in America just as it did in parts of the Middle East that didn't used to be the way it is.
Feels a lot like nothing has really changed except which country and which group of people are currently doing the gross bad things.
We had no idea that burning fossil fuels would eventually doom us for a full century of the Industrial Revolution.
Yeah. But when we found out we still kept doing it. Not just the US. The whole fucking world. We are -rushing- towards our own extinction for greed and out of apathy and (as I said about religion) complete disbelief in basic facts. That's part of why we are doomed. We can't even be trusted to agree about, and attempt to solve, literal existential threats to our entire species.
There will always be evil, but I believe the good outweighs it.
I hope you hold on to that for every moment for the rest of your life. Genuinely and sincerely. I don't agree. I think, if anything, the good things are pinpoints of light in a world that is aggressively horrible for no other reason than we are horrible.
I just can't see humanity as a failure for the failures of the institutions we've created and those in power.... But the worst always has more immediate power, both tangibly and in thought.
This position largely agrees with me, I would argue. Human institutions seemingly always fall to greed, violence, and apathy if not outright malice. You can't really counter that by saying 'but some people like to garden.' Okay - but our existence isn't individual. Our existence is collective and, collectively, we allow and encourage suffering on mass scale under virtually every type of power structure we create.
If the worst of us always has more immediate and tangible power, as you said, then it's kind of game over on the debate of 'is humanity ultimately bad?' The answer, then, is yes. We will always allow/encourage mass suffering.
The architects of peace and prosperity
Are all killed or ignored and practically never create any kind of lasting change so far as I can ascertain. No anti-war architects have ever stopped war. No anti-poverty architects have ever stopped poverty. But plenty of greedy assholes have managed to destroy families and poison the planet probably beyond saving.
That's no a lens that will capture reality, only a segment of it.
I dislike this approach to history because it seems... dismissive.. of suffering. It's the 'statistics' problem I mentioned above, where we group a thousand deaths into 'one bad thing that happened that ignores all the children's laughter of the world!' But if you execute 10,000 people, you can't look at that as a single terrible thing that happened in history and gloss over it. That's 10,000 individual acts of horror. That's families ripped apart - each member of which having their own story of suffering and despair. We CANNOT absolve ourselves of considering these things by writing them off as 'macro scale stuff.' If we can consider every person that ever tries to do good as evidence for a more just and caring world, by extension we need to consider every act of barbarism as evidence to the contrary.
I guess what I'm saying is that those events do capture reality. Because they describe the reality many people had to live through, or died in.
If I had the money, I'd just go to an island somewhere and live with the indigenous tribes. Pick somewhere they won't eat me. I'm just done.
Okay, I'm going to -seemingly- (but not actually) contradict what I've been saying above for a moment.
I will sit here and say I think the human race is trash. That I think we're collectively awful and that I simply do not believe we can become better than this. You seem to agree.
Here's the thing; we could be wrong. We don't believe we are. But a huge problem in the world today is a lack of intellectual honesty and humility; the inability to say 'I could be wrong about this.' Act as if the world could be better than it is. Worst thing that happens is you're wrong and it stays shitty. But in most cases, at the very least, you can make -some- lives better while you're here. And that's always going to be better than -not- doing that.
