Civilized to Death Flashcards
Christopher Ryan critique on growth:
The gifts of civilization partial compensation for what we’ve paid: the wonders of vaccines/antibiotics as a consequence of industrialized animal farming.
Flight and bombing civilians
The illusion reveals of our dystopian societies:
CO2 levels rise, agriculutral collapse, oil spills, antiobiotic resistance, increasing armed conflicts.
Charles Darwin on selling native people on civilization:
Passing Tierra del Fuego on the Beagle:, Robert FitzRoy kidnapped three Fuegians, indoctrinating the two children into society .
Heading back with them a year later, so they could spread the word, then a year after that, they re-assimilated to their culture
How does Carl Jung describe our present condition?
We live more in the future and its chimerical promises of a golden age than in the present, with which our evolutionary background has not yer caught up
Jung on progress:
We refuse to recognise that everything better is purchased at the price of something worse.
Correlation of GDP and impoverishment:
Between 1990 and 2014 GDP increased 271% yet those on less than $5 per day up by 10%, and starvation by 9%
Differenetiating progress and adaptation:
An evolving species doesn’t get ‘better’ as it evolves, only adapts to its conditions
How he phrases our belief in progress?
An antidote to a present too terrifying to contemplate.
How is this ‘end of world’ different?
Mayans, Rome, Sumer, ancient Egypt, were regional, this is global.
What ideologies circumvent this fact of ‘end of world?
Beauty in culture, technology, science; biases - someone you love saved by modern medicine, so the idea growth is bad is repulsive - idea coalitions of intelligent people find ways to put us on course.
Analogy of how growth only solves issues it creates:
‘If you’ve set my house on fire I wont be grateful when you show up later with a bucket of water”
Analogise our clinging to growth:
A young man holding a bloon that starts ascending, but the man doesnt let go - loss aversion loop, grom lending a hand to realising fatal mistake - every second thought “I should’ve let go before. It’s too late now”
A real life example of this ‘loss aversion loop;
Our ancestors transition from foraging to farming - a point of no return.
How the agricultural transition has been viewed:
Jared Diamonds 1999 essay: “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race”
Yuval Noah Harari “History’s biggest fraud” - agriculture fueled population growth and pampered elites.
What did early agriculturalists face?
Increased social inequality, more violence with organized conflict, monothesistic religious elites locking in power.
Contrast of agricultural technology with others:
Archaelogical history shows spear throwing and poterry difussed across tribes, but agriculture did not - spread from fertile crescent throguhout Europe slowly.
Where agricultural arose?
8 times across 5k years independently: Fertile Crescent, Andes, China, Central Mexico, Gunea, Egypt, West Africa, Mississippi Valley - all independent with climatic changes.
How change to Agriculture changed our entire species:
Male-female relations, child care, government, class system, militarism, human relations to other naimals…
How Agriculutre changed mindsets:
Humans seperated from natural world - away from interconnected with other species, “delcared war on local ecosystems”
