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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

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It's no good saying 'oh preindustrial civilization is so great' even if it's true, Ted should've had the wisdom to understand that nobody is going to pull back.

I mean, I care about the truth even if the truth is that the type of society that most people would want to live in given the choice will inevitably be destroyed by another type of society that is more fit in an evolutionary sense. That would be sad, just like the fact of our mortality or the eventual heat death of the universe are sad, but we all come to understand and accept such things in our own time, and in general asking questions irrelevant to our immediate survival is pretty central to my conception of what separates humans from worms and jellyfish.

But ours is the only civilization that can contemplate such abstract theoretical questions. We have words like philosophy, evolutionary, heat death of the universe. I'm pretty sure hunter-gatherers don't have that. They don't usually have writing, their language actually is limited to what's directly needed for survival.

I think we industrialized people shouldn't romanticize nomadic or pre-industrial life overly. Much of it would not be to our liking. India and the other poor countries are not enthusiastic about such a lifestyle.

Questions that are irrelevant to contemporary concerns can often be useful - but ideas that cannot possibly be implemented are much less so. Indeed, some knowledge can be harmful. Suppose that it is true, then we'd be forever unsatisfied trying to return to monkey and failing due to competition and coordination problems. Perhaps there'd be more terror groups in the style of Ted. Ignorance can be blissful in certain cases.