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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31065 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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Sure, we could look at the Great Leap Forward, cite Chesterton, and conclude that abandoning tradition is dangerous. But the Green Revolution also involved abandoning many traditional agricultural methods, and:

Studies show that the Green Revolution contributed to widespread reduction of poverty, averted hunger for millions, raised incomes, reduced greenhouse gas emissions, reduced land use for agriculture, and contributed to declines in infant mortality.

This is just one of many cases where radical change produced outcomes that are almost universally regarded as beneficial. We have also, for instance, reduced deaths from infectious disease by more than 90%. One doesn't have to look at too many graphs like this or this to understand why "change," as an idea, has so much political clout at the present moment.

There's always a tendency among activists to suggest things are terrible and improvement is only possible through whatever radical program they're pushing right now. In that context, it doesn't do to admit how much better things have gotten without that program.

But more broadly, had change reliably lead to ruin over the last few centuries, surviving cultures would have strong norms against permitting it. Instead we have exactly the opposite — cultures that permitted change reliably outcompeted those that didn't, so successful cultures are primed to accept it.

How does making humans more likely to survive and granting them more resources, reduce GHG emissions?

More importantly, the beneficaries of Green Revolution, "Global South" now use their superior numbers, enabled, by GR to demand more power, as that Modi speech that was the subject of a recent top level post shows. So this shows that only The Thrird World gained, any possible benefits for the First aren't demonstrated by your comment.

The comment to which I was responding seemed to be about how open human societies in general should be to allowing change. This first world vs. third world angle wasn't present. The societies that adopted these new agricultural techniques benefited substantially from doing so. It would have been a serious mistake for them to reason that abandoning their traditional methods could have unanticipated negative consequences and so they shouldn't do this.

Anyway, the first world obviously adopted the same techniques earlier, also abandoning traditional agricultural methods. To a large extent these advances are the reason there is a first world, a set of large, rich nations where most of the population is not engaged in agricultural production.

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