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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024

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In many ways I think we are still stuck playing out the consequences of the cultural upheaval of post-WWII America.

That is undeniably true. Hell, it's such a cliche I think we all kind of accept it without even really thinking about how strange this situation is.

The more I read and think about history, the more I see is as being on the far right side of an exponential growth chart. Almost none of the stuff that dominates our lives has ever existed before. That's trivially true for recent inventions like social media and video games, but you can go back further and say that about anything. Like you said, the sexual revolution and civil rights era wasn't that long ago, it's within living memory, I've talked to my parents about it. Cars, TV, and telephones also only became common at that time.

Or go back further. The human population didn't used to grow so fast, until like 1850 when the developed nations solved child mortality and suddenly tripled in size in the span of a few generations. Then that spread to every other country on earth, until we all suddenly stopped having kids for some reason.

Or ocean travel. That didn't used to be a thing! Sailors would stay close to shore so they wouldn't get lost at sea. It was only a few centuries ago that humans learned to sail across the ocean, leading to the "age of discovery" when they could finally explore the world. Even then, it was normal for ships to crash and sink. Magellan and most of his sailors died on his expedition.

Before that, you have the bronze age and the metal age, when humans finally learned how to make metal. And it was a huge ordeal, requiring tons of skilled labor and maybe some slaves dying in the mines. That was still just a few thousand years ago, practically a blip in the human timescale, compared to the first humans from 2.8 million years ago. So for most of our history I guess we just used rocks and sticks, living in small tribes, leading a very violent dangerous life, and that's what we've evolved for. It's going to take some time to figure out how to live in in this modern world of technological miracles.