With all due respect to previous generations of humanity, they didn't have industrial capitalism and its handmaiden anthropogenic climate change in their corner. I don't worry about life on earth or even about the human species so much, but it seems clear to me that our current civilization is environmentally unsustainable, and whatever replaces it will be the end of society as we know it now, and our current civilization with it. I don't even think that will be all bad--I'm all for the death of capitalism--but I cherish my doubts about the long-term future of things like antibiotics and readily available potable water, to name just two. And while it's certainly still possible to mitigate climate change, it's also the case that if things keep going the way they have, things like shutdown of thermohaline circulation are very much on the table, and that's basically game over.
Now, it could be that the civilizational shift will be comparatively gentle--looking back to 1400 from 1600 in most of Western Europe, you'd be forgiven for not realizing quite how much had changed how radically (well, kind of, what with the Protestant Revolution and all. Except the really horrible centuries of wars of religion were still in the future. But also, corn and potatoes). But we also have records of much harsher civilizational shifts, such as the fall of the western Roman Empire in the 400s--and "the fall" of the "empire" is something that is greatly exaggerated in some respects (people in Rome were basically happy to see the Goths set up shop, and made no particular bones about that), and it's also true that things probably wouldn't have gotten so bad if the Byzantines hadn't run rampant in the 6thC and fucked everything up at the same time as a major volcanic eruption on Krakatoa and plague, but it's also true that if you look at things like the size of cow skeletons, the rate of silver smelting, and shipwreck density as well as diversity/distance-traveled of cargo, it took more than 1600 years for Europe to regain the heights of the 2ndC CE. The Dark Ages weren't, of course, and the Renaissance is also a lie, but it's also true that if you look at the lives of ordinary people, it's hard to conclude that they were better off in that intervening 1700 years. (Whether things were better under industrial capitalism in the C19 is a different and entirely valid set of questions. But by the time you get to the C20, yeah, I'm pretty comfortable saying that ordinary people were much better off in any number of ways than they had been before.)
That was a book-long answer to your comment. Suffice it to say, you are of course not incorrect, but my training as a historian leads me to a very different set of conclusions.
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regna
(no subject)
Date: 2015-01-04 08:23 (UTC)Now, it could be that the civilizational shift will be comparatively gentle--looking back to 1400 from 1600 in most of Western Europe, you'd be forgiven for not realizing quite how much had changed how radically (well, kind of, what with the Protestant Revolution and all. Except the really horrible centuries of wars of religion were still in the future. But also, corn and potatoes). But we also have records of much harsher civilizational shifts, such as the fall of the western Roman Empire in the 400s--and "the fall" of the "empire" is something that is greatly exaggerated in some respects (people in Rome were basically happy to see the Goths set up shop, and made no particular bones about that), and it's also true that things probably wouldn't have gotten so bad if the Byzantines hadn't run rampant in the 6thC and fucked everything up at the same time as a major volcanic eruption on Krakatoa and plague, but it's also true that if you look at things like the size of cow skeletons, the rate of silver smelting, and shipwreck density as well as diversity/distance-traveled of cargo, it took more than 1600 years for Europe to regain the heights of the 2ndC CE. The Dark Ages weren't, of course, and the Renaissance is also a lie, but it's also true that if you look at the lives of ordinary people, it's hard to conclude that they were better off in that intervening 1700 years. (Whether things were better under industrial capitalism in the C19 is a different and entirely valid set of questions. But by the time you get to the C20, yeah, I'm pretty comfortable saying that ordinary people were much better off in any number of ways than they had been before.)
That was a book-long answer to your comment. Suffice it to say, you are of course not incorrect, but my training as a historian leads me to a very different set of conclusions.