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Originally Posted by Glice
Yeah, but apart from abolishing slavery, hygiene, communications, science, medicine, equality laws, plentiful food and democracy - what has modern civilization ever done for us, eh?
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abolishing slavery? lol?
science? yep, nuclear bombs too. new technology with which to kill things.
medicine. true, altho we can mostly only cure or attempt to manage diseases that are created by modern conditions. so its kind of a double edged sword. but yes method, knowledge, technique and technology have improved massively. we may have lost a lot too but that old knowledge is not impossible to rediscover. a massive downside is all the potential cures for cancer/other disease that we could have found but are lost forever due to our enviromental recklessness. (they reckon their must have the clues that would lead us to a cure for cancer somewhere in the brazillian rainforest but thats its probably lost now or will be soon due to all the logging.)
equality laws? maybe if your a first worlder. and you're not female, black, from originally outside of the national state you live in now or gay, in which case you'll be at best "tolerated" and kept in your place and at worst basically murdered. and even so, the equality laws have not fixed the income disparity between blacks, hispanics, latinos etc. and the white population. we can't legislate equality when the system demands it as its structural foundation.
plentiful food? only if your a first worlder. otherwise things have probably got worse for you. and the 1st world food is only good for the minority, the rest eat unhealthy shit, far worse and more toxic than most of the so called "uncivilised" peoples but yes, there is a lot of it.
democracy? i'll believe it when i see it.
you could have said technology, but after peak oil that's all over anyway haha. once peak oil is gone and providing we don't find a workable alternative (wind solar etc. rely on oil/batteries) we're going back to the primitive anyway. but yeah, without wanting to sound like i endorse the whole "technology will save us and is the reason for life" argument we have made a lot of new shit recently. but this shit isn't necessarily gonna last. wasn't the flush toilet, or was it maybe some sort of irrigation system, created somewhere then lost for centuries before it reappeared again? we will possibly loose a lot of our acheivements in the sands of time.
also civilisation has brought unprecedented enviromental destruction. but it should be said also the means with which to understand and predict things like global warming.
so its kind of a mixed bag, but i think the civilisation/non civilsation framework is kind of useless.