On 07/31/2013 01:01 PM, John Larkin wrote:
[...]
The death count from WWII is estimated at 60 million, 2.5% of the world's
population. Unlike previous conflicts, this was Total War, 100% involvement,
cities firebombed, passenger ships torpedoed, starvation camps, six million
innocents killed in gas chambers and incinerated in ovens.
Not very civilized.
There's a very real sense in which our civilization ended in 1914, and
we're only now realizing it. The moral descent from the debate over the
Armed Ship Bill at the beginning of WW1 to the death camps and fire
bombings of WW2 is astonishing.
Phil, ( and anyone else worried about this )
If you have a couple of free hours you might be somewhat reassured by
Steven Pinker's "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has
Declined". Pinker presents a good ( IMNSHO <grin!> ) staistical
argument that violence has steadily decreased over the centuries, and
that we are living in a surprisingly -- for human beings -- safe world
today. He then goes on to describe the factors he believes have
contributed most to this result.
Before anyone asks, Pinker isn't claiming, as Dr. Pangloss did, that
things are perfect, only that they are much, much better than they
have been.
Frank McKenney
--
Utopian ideologies invite genocide for two reasons. One is that
they set up a pernicious utilitarian calculus. In a utopia everyone
is happy forever, so its moral value is infinite. Most of us agree
that it is ethically permissible to divert a runaway trolley that
threatens to kill five people onto a side track where it would kill
only one. But suppose it were a hundred million lives one could
save by diverting the trolley, or a billion, or -- projecting into
the future -- infinitely many. How many people would it be
permissible to sacrifice to attain that infinite good?
Not only that, but consider the people who learn about the promise
of a perfect world yet nonetheless oppose it. They are the only
things standing in the way of a plan that could lead to infinite
goodness. How evil are they? You do the math.
The second genocidal hazard of a utopia is that it has to conform to
a tidy blueprint. In a utopia, everything is there for a reason.
What about the people? Well, groups of people are diverse. Some of
them stubbornly, perhaps essentially, cling to values that are out
of place in a perfect world, They may be entrepreneurial in a world
that works by communal sharing, or bookish in a world that works by
labor, or brash in a world that works by piety, or clannish in a
world that works by unity, or urban and commercial in a world that
has returned to its roots in nature. If you were designing the
perfect society on a sheet of paper, why not write these eyesores
out of the plan from the start?
-- Steven Pinker / The Better Angels of Our Nature
