Appreciate the Bounty of the Modern World
Imagine explaining Pringles to a medieval peasant. A single can contains most of an a adult’s daily value of fat, and a considerable amount of sodium and carbohydrates. Going by its current price on Amazon ($1.59), a minimum-wage worker could buy four of them with an hour’s wages and still have money left over. They’re not exactly healthy, but many find them delicious in small quantities. And when you buy one, you don’t worry if rats have been at it.
“Sounds amazing!”, the peasant exclaims.
You try to dampen their enthusiasm, “Nevertheless, some consider chips to be a symbol of what’s wrong with our world. You see, some people just eat too many of them, and that’s not healthy!”
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”, says the peasant.
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Imagine explaining Twitter/Tumblr to a person from 1995. Completely free websites, choose among a great variety of people/blogs to follow, maybe interact with them, maybe have your own account worth following, etc. But not all is well, you explain - some follow people they disagree with, and get really mad at their posts, and rile up their friends about it.
“What the hell is wrong with them?”, the 1995 person asks.
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Tharg talk to spirit of ancestor Oog. Tharg show Oog new sharp stone knife. "We make knife sharp! Cut deer better!“, Tharg explain. Oog hoot excite. "Some say knife bad. Can use on neck of man.”, Tharg say sad.
Oog hooted to indicate, “Language is not that impressive of an invention if it can be used to communicate such nonsense.”.Maybe these “ancients” are too dazzled by modern wealth to appreciate that some parts of it could have problems. But we tend to be too focused on those problems, while ignoring that they’re often just flaws in things that would seem amazingly good to a world without them. It’s also common to blame tools (and their creators) for their misuse, especially for their users’ personal psychological flaws.
Too often, I’ve heard something like “The modern Western world suffers from anomie and spiritual malaise, and all it has to show for its pursuit of wealth is chips and social media. We need a different approach, something better than economic growth.”. It’s true that wealth isn’t everything, but let’s not forget how important it is. It’s not just Pringles and Tumblr (though we shouldn’t throw them under the bus), nor mansions/yachts/fancy cars, but washing machines, refrigeration, indoor plumbing, internal heating and air conditioning, fruits and vegetables available out of season… Hardly anyone thinks of that as wealth - to them, it’s just furniture in the background. But imagine how much worse-off we’d be if we had given up on economic growth before these innovations became widespread.
But even ignoring wealth, the modern world is doing pretty well:
“So you’re saying that I can marry anyone who’s willing, even if my parents don’t like them, and I can disagree with my spouse and it’s a crime if they beat me, I can still own property, and work outside the home?” summarized the time-traveling woman.
“Yes, but some think that modern liberal norms are bad because, uh, some people are lonely.”There’s nothing inherently wrong with complaining, but maybe we should first make sure that we still want to complain if we imagine ourselves describing our situation to the numerous historical people who’d give an arm and a leg to switch places.
I mean the food thing is a straight up miracle. It’s not super healthy, or long term sustainable, but you can survive in the short-medium term on $1/day in food, easy. $2/day probably is long term sustainable without crippingly nutrient deficiencies. Not great, and I’m not suggesting that’s how much anyone ought to be spending on food, but shit man, I’ve been there, and it’s incredible that it’s even an option.
I can’t stand this kind of thing. Among other things, we know from actual history that many people would not in fact, give an arm and a leg to live in modern society, but would, in fact, fiercely resist its encroachment. Some of these people are valorized and some are demonized, but there’s a lot of them.
Second… Okay, maybe this will have to wait until I’m less drunk, but there’s an extremely pernicious use of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs going on here.
Basically, any complaint about a lack of the higher steps on the pyramid is met with “Okay, but the base of the pyramid is being fulfilled. You aren’t saying that you’d rather live a life where the base isn’t fullfilled, right?”
To which there is no possible argument; the base of the pyramid is objectively the most important part, so even if we’re sacrificing every other level of the pyramid to keep the base satisfied that is objectively the right thing to do and it is absurd to complain.
Which, on the one hand, is hard to argue with (I first need to actually be alive if I’m going to find love and belonging), but creates a terrible paradox where we can’t demand or conceptualize a way of getting anything more.
“The way you’ve chosen to fulfill my basic needs is also making it much more difficult to meet my more complex psychological needs.”
“Oh, so you’re saying you’d rather die in the gutter because your basic physiological needs aren’t met?”
“Well, no, but…”
“Well then there’s not actually a problem and no reason to change. Go away.”
Yeah, I detest this.
I suspect the reaction would be something along the lines of, “you have this incredible wealth and power and you use it for *this*?”
The part about marriage is… Pretty silly to reduce to “some people are lonely”.
(caveat: many of the people who aggressively resist modern society are specifically resisting becoming the lowest form of peons, where they would have very low purchasing power, but would be subjected to outside interests.)
Many of the most common solutions to modern problems amount to “turn back the clock.” Which is a dumb solution for the Maslow’s-hierarchy-type reasons described above. It is true that meeting people’s highest psychic needs is very important, but any plan for doing that had better account for how you’re going to continue meeting their lower-order needs.
With regard to stuff like marriage norms, people are extremely good at noticing whatever-the-problems-today-are and much less good at comparing them to the unreal-seeming problems of yesteryear. (The number of people I’ve recently seen getting all nostalgic for the days of arranged marriages is kind of boggling, considering…how most of those people would fare in an arranged marriage with a person whose selection is almost arbitrary in terms of certain important kinds of personal compatibility.)
Many of the people who aggressively resist modernity are in thrall to local elites who don’t like the idea of losing their power to less-local elites.