
Solution to climate change? Learn to let our current civilization die - mfburnett
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/21/were-doomed-now-what/?_r=0
======
douglance
This article reads like the rantings of someone who was well educated long
ago, but has since watched daytime news every day.

The world is more peaceful than ever. You are less likely to die to violence
now than at any other point in history. Medicine is better than any other
point in history. As populations grow larger, they also grow older and people
have fewer kids.

We aren't going to overpopulate the earth. We aren't going to run out of
materials. We aren't going to destroy the environment. We aren't going to blow
up the earth.

That is lazy thinking. Life has grown and expanded for billions of years.
Humanity will continue growing and expanding into the future. We couldn't stop
it if we tried.

~~~
mfburnett
Hm, I think though there will be serious societal consequences to climate
change in particular - particularly around scarcity of resources (we may not
"run out" but there is a finite amount of resources that we are rapidly using
up) and territorial claims (I think they will shift from land to sea, as we're
already seeing with the South China Sea and the Arctic) - while humanity will
continue growing and expanding, it's about consciously shaping what we want
that expansion to look like. I really liked the point about multiple
perspectives - "Most important, we need to give up defending and protecting
our truth, our perspective, our Western values, and understand that truth is
found not in one perspective but in their multiplication, not in one point of
view but in the aggregate, not in opposition but in the whole."

~~~
arpa
On the other hand giving up western values would produce a vacuum so abhorred
by nature; The truth in multiplication and aggregation of perspective is
actually one of the western values, as is egalitarianism of sexes and races.
To give up these values is to replace them with ones quite potentially less
humanitarian; who in their sane mind (and education) would rally us to give up
enlightenment and rationalism as values? If anything, we must cherish and
defend them, while simultaneously expanding them. Now the platform for those
values - the dogma - is of another question; if we are talking about
progressing economic systems, social systems, methods of up-keeping our values
- count me in. But casting all values aside, while so Nietzschely romantic
(breaking old tables without having written new ones), is short-sighted and
very, very dangerous.

~~~
douglance
Get rid of religiosity and give me scientific education and political decision
making and we will be fine

~~~
vlehto
Problem here is that we don't have "scientific" viable moral framework.
Western values are built on the fading influences of Catholicism and
Protestantism, neither is coming back. Utilitarianism has been trying to break
into mainstream, but its not really applicable to real life.

Then there is individualism. But it has gone bit too far. It is currently
making people lonely, unsafe and unhappy. Then as persons yearn for
collectivity, they are giving up their privacy in virtualized group meetings
over internet.

~~~
dragonwriter
There's no such thing as a scientific moral framework; the concept is
incoherent, like a four-sided triangle. Science answers "is" questions, not
"ought" questions.

Science can inform moral decisions by providing information about which
actions will achieve the goals set by a moral framework, but not can't provide
you with a moral framework.

(Specific religions also probably get too much credit for providing moral
framework; while its not an incoherent idea, its usually inaccurate --
usually, a moral framework coevolves with a religion, or has a religion
constructed -- ot split off from some predecesssor -- to support it, rather
than really emerging from the religion.)

~~~
vlehto
I don't really care if religions didn't create moral frameworks. The point is
that a religion can justify one. "Why can't I kill Joe, he is an asshole! -
Because God said murder is wrong."

Philosophy might be able to do that too, but the west doesn't seem to be
aligning behind any one philosophy. And there are no credible purely
philosophical moral frameworks to pick from.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Philosophy might be able to do that too, but the west doesn't seem to be
> aligning behind any one philosophy.

The West was never united behind one religious moral framework even when it
had, at the highest descriptive level, one dominant religion -- _both_
racial/sexual equality (as cited above) _and_ strong racial/sexual
discrimination were justified by reference to Christianity; likewise both
religious tolerance and religious persecution have been.

"People don't agree on one moral framework" is an issue, sure, but its not a
new issue in the West, nor is it one in anyway linked to the decline in the
dominance of Christianity.

> And there are no credible purely philosophical moral frameworks to pick
> from.

There are plenty of moral frameworks not grounded in religion to pick from
(everyone, inevitably, _has_ a moral framework, and lots of people don't have
religions.)

Not sure what your criteria for "credible" is, or how you've determined that
no existing non-religious moral framework satisfies it.

~~~
vlehto
The "egalitarianism of sexes and races" is based on bible. West didn't agree
on many single issues, but for couple millenia west agreed on bible as moral
authority.

In the future if there is something that deviates west from those values,
there is nothing to turn us back. For a long time there was bible and "god
created all men as his image". But we don't care about that shit anymore. We
only care about money.

Nazi Germany could not happen before 1930 because people were too religious.
It was pushed back by outside forces, still clinging on religious moral
framework. When memory of concentration camps fades eventually, there is no
such thing left.

The only current challenger for moral framework for the atheist is
utilitarianism. Which happens to he hopelessly inapplicable to real life. So
we can't really rely on any "western values" endlessly. Which could be good or
bad thing.

------
mfburnett
There really is a lot to this piece, but my favorite passages, to start,
grapple with Nietzsche's quote, “Man will sooner will nothingness than not
will.” -

"When he wrote 'Man will sooner will nothingness than not will,' Nietzsche was
exposing the destructive side of humanity’s meaning-making drive. That drive
is so powerful, Nietzsche’s saying, that when forced to the precipice of
nihilism, we would choose meaningful self-annihilation over meaningless bare
life. This insight was horrifically borne out in the Götterdämmerung of Nazi
Germany, just as it’s being borne out today in every new suicide attack by
jihadi terrorists — even as it’s being borne out here at home in our willfully
destructive politics of rage."

"Our drive to make meaning is more powerful than oil, the atom, and the
market, and it’s up to us to harness that power to secure the future of the
human species."

