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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   28370 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 2023

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Thanks for this great link. I'm often skeptical of arguments that people in previous generations were better orators and rhetoricians; many modern speechwriters would be capable of a Lincoln or a Churchill speech, their style is just considered 'cringe' now. Still, there is much good content here.

Meantime we have learned the doctrine that evil means pain, and the revolt against pain in all its forms has grown more and more marked. From societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals up to socialism, we express in numberless ways the notion that suffering is a wrong which can be and ought to be prevented

Very prescient. The entire American opioid epidemic exists not because of the Sacklers, or "muh Purdue", but because of a cult of pain-avoidance that spread through American society from the mid-20th century onwards. Certainly this was exploited by opioid manufacturers, but really 'pain is the fifth vital sign' was only the outcome of a broader societal shift toward the amelioration of pain at all costs. Older people (especially those who have done much manual labor) have suffered from back pain, joint pain etc. for millions of years (obviously). Only in late 20th century America did this necessitate 'treatment' with powerful narcotics.

The opioid epidemic isn't about pain avoidance. It's about getting high. Yes, older people lived in pain all the time before the invention of opioids (and NSAIDS), but this pretty much sucked. Pain is not acting as a useful signal in many, many cases, because even if there is a known physical cause, there's often not a thing you can do about it.

Wherever painkillers have been available historically they seem to have been used, far before the late twentieth century:

8000 year-old hardened Sumerian clay-tablets are the earliest prescriptions of opium. Ancient Greeks, Indians, Chinese, Egyptians, Romans, Arabs, people in middle ages, Europeans from renaissance to now, knew opium as an ever-approved next-door medicine-a panacea for all maladies. References in the Odyssey and the Bible, and use by known leaders and minds like Homer, Franklin, Napoleon, Coleridge, Poe, Shelly, Quincy, Hitler and many more, have removed the label of immorality from its use.

Even in the context of modern painkillers (morphine and heroin invented about 200 years ago), opioid use globally seems quite a bit higher in the beginning of the twentieth century (1.5% of world population using) than the end of the century, or now (0.25% of world population using in 2008, though I assume its higher now).

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