I just got through reading the Wikipedia (thank you Wikipedia) description of Steven Pinker's book 'The Better Angels of Our Nature'. It has some very interesting ideas.
According to Wikipedia, Steven Pinker describes how violence has gone down over time in society. He classifies a series of historical processes: 'the pacification process', or the formation of states and civilization being the first one.
As I see it, there are two great processes in civilization with regard to violence and many other things: refinement and catastrophe.
Steven Pinker's book (or the Wikipedia article on it) describes very well the process of refinement, of gradually learning and improving not as technological progress but as true advancement, which is rooted in wisdom and not technology.
But it describes very well the process of refinement in European civilization.
European civilization.
The rest of the world was way ahead of Europe. Way ahead. Way, way ahead.
The world today is a barbarism compared to Gupta India or Ming China.
Europe has advanced.
But Europe has forced its primitive systems on the rest of the world.
And then there's the other process. Catastrophe.
European colonialism was a catastrophe.
The World Wars were a catastrophe.
Europe was set back a thousand years in a catastrophe- the Black Plague and the Hundred Years War in France that followed (and took the Papacy down with it).
Much of Europe's refinement has been building back up from that catastrophe.
But neither Europe today, nor Europe at the height of the High Middle Ages before the catastrophe, was anywhere near as advanced as Asia in the last 2,000 years of the preindustrial era.
Let's not kid ourselves. Catastrophes happen. But refinement also happens. And the world of Ming China and Gupta India is not dead. People still follow Confucius and The Buddha. People still follow Krishna and the Sufis. Asia is being reborn as we speak.
All that might well be reborn. Russia has recaptured her old identity as a Christian Empire- something we thought had been lost forever. It can happen.
This world was once much better than this.
But refinement is real.
It is not 'progress'. It is refinement. It has nothing to do with technological progress and everything to do with wisdom. And it is real.
And the wisdom of old can be recaptured. It is being recaptured as we speak in Japan, south Korea, China, India, Malaysia and east Arabia. And it is real. The world was once much brighter and more wonderful than it is today. This modern mess it not as good as it gets. 80 years ago, 1942, is as bad as it gets. But normal life is much, much better than today.
But refinement is real. We do learn over time. And catastrophes on this kind of large scale don't happen very often.
In fact, there has only been one other catastrophe that comes even remotely close to the scale of European colonialism and the World Wars. (A catastrophe that includes 'Black' slavery. Yup- that is part of European colonialism.) And that was the mysterious 'Bronze Age Collapse' of around 1200 BC. Nothing else in the long, over 5,000-year history of urban civilization even comes close. The next largest, the Black Plague and the Hundred Years War, mostly just affected Europe. And even that was nothing compared to what we are recovering from.
We're doing damn well. Whod'a thought that less than 25 years after the end of World War II we would land a man on the Moon? Who would have imagined the beautiful western Europe of 1960 in 1945? Whodv'e imagined a happy and prosperous Germany as America's ally just 15 years later in 1945? Who'd've imagined the Japan of 1990 in 1945? And whod've imagined that Russia would even be an Orthodox Christian state again? In 1945? Whodv'e imagined that the Soviet Union would fall so softly and harmlessly, without even a battle?
We're doing damn well. It wasn't this good 80 years after the end of the Bronze Age Collapse! Not in the areas that were affected, like the Aegean! There was nothing there! No civilization at all!
We're doing damn well. And refinement is real. But the world was once a whole lot better than it is now. This is not as good as it gets.
In a hundred years it will be a whole lot better.
This is not as good as it gets.
Refinement and catastrophe. The forces that shape civilization.
And the coming climate crisis will not be as bad as the World Wars. Not even close, not even if the worst happens. We've seen worse. We've just recovered from far worse.
One more thing: more advanced civilizations are less suceptible to catastrophe. The current catastrophe was brought on by the relatively primitive civilization of Europe. The biggest catastrophe between the recent one and the Bronze Age Collapse happened to Europe. The black Plague was less severe in the middle east where they practiced sacred cleanliness (which Europe dismissed as superstition until Louis Pasteur in the 19th Century) and were good to cats, and certainly was not enough to bring about political catastrophe as it did in France. And the Bronze Age world, while more advanced than 18th Century Europe, was less advanced than the Asia that followed. Only the less advanced civilizations are suceptible to the biggest catastrophes. (Too bad Europe brought down the rest of the world with it!)
Once we are more advanced again, these things will not happen anymore! Not unless we are really, really unlucky!
And I'm not trying to put down western civilization- most people just don't realize how rediculously advanced classical Asian civilization was, in India, China, Persia, Japan, Ethiopia, Indonesia, the Islamic world, in ideas, art, philosophy, in all the things that matter in civilization- most people in the west today could scarcely imagine anything like it, not though the west has reached the highest level it ever did starting about 1958 with the beginning of the space age, in Miles Davis's day with Explorer 1, continuing in America until the early 90's and in Europe to this day!
And those ideas still live even to this day, and are rising anew in places like south Korea and Japan!
God loves you! Keep your head up!
Sincerely,
David S. Annderson