Topic: Does modern civilization is currently progressing or declining? (Read 482 times)

I think that we are just developing so fast in a good and a bad way at the same time, so time will show what we could do with our civilization, i hope that we will go more in this better way.

the last attempts of the fallen to survive... they AI is like a boa on them... they may win a little, but don't forget, it was just the snake letting them have a little more space to get to the best spot before the "final breath"... and then the slow exhaustion of each o2 molecule... and soft again.

I think the reason why some people think the older generation is better is because internet and smartphones and all those high technology gadgets we have now were not invented yet during their time. While we spend so much time on our smartphones and computers, they were busy interacting with each other face to face. Technology wise we are way more advanced, and if we only learn to communicate personally, our generation will be much better, I think.

going back a few millenia.. people followed kings and barons.. back then they knew about evolution of caveman to human
the story of adam and eve was a meander of explaining how the thyroid gland (apple shaped gland in the neck) which we call the adams apple makes the differeince between a cretin(dumb passive-aggressive entity with physical deformaties) to become civilised problem solving smart healthier entity..

move forward a couple millenia..
people follow kings and government. but know less about evolution. some think we are born from energy of the universe or made from devine beings made in our image.. even hitler had his armies re educating the world about the function of the thyroid gland with all his experiments. even now people dont realise the flouride, chloride, bromide impact the thyroid gland and happily accept poisoning ourselves with flouride water and chlorinatd chicken ecause our kings and governments say its good for us.

as for relationships
(note: i love sex and would never had held out till after marriage, and im agnostic. but im well researched )
100 years ago many people waited to have sex after marriage or 'courted' for months before getting laid. now with tinder and other dating apps,its all one night stands and aids,crabs, and lots of different fluid excretions due to it. so again we have took a step backwards in terms of being civilised.
aids, one night stands, STI's, children of single parents(bastards) has gone full circle. again millenia ago they knew about aids, gays, random sex, deadbeat dads and made laws(the bible is just a lawbook/campfires stories to teach the uneducated in a way they could understand about evolution) which meant to have originally taught people of evolution and having safe sex, but ended up lost in transation where its now thought as a religion where the stories have and will continue to change


things like street lights. did you know the first street light was invented in the middle east a millenia ago.. but that same regions is now left as rubble and treated like cave dwelling savages(if you watch fox news(note sarcasm))

if you think we are free from the kings and barons taxes and higway robberies..we are not.
taxes still continue. and border police very often seize funds for no reason than it being over $10k. or fine people just for parking on what amounts to be nothing more then a yellow line paintd on the edge of a road.

technology
even as far back as cavemen. we have always been looking to make tools to make our lives easier, faster, more efficient, to then be more lazy. so yes although technology moves forwards civilisation and the pursuit to find tools to do things for us has not changed so we have not even after thousands of millenia got to a point where everything is provided for us and we need nothing more.

in finance
in crypto, the new kings are the developers. setting the rules making changes mandatory or soft trojan without civilised conensus. and the barons(tax collectors) are the pools and offchain hubs. we foolishly belive our king developers that this new technology of independant PUSH payments cant work and the next generation of tech is to go back to lockng value into vaults and then just passing around unconfirmed unaudited receipts where there is a requirement of other people signing accepting alongside us.
so finaance is just full circling /unchanged. even though the medium has changed. then end result has just gone full circle

summary.
yes the method has changed over the millenia. but civilisation is still the same. it just goes in circles we learn something. go along with it for a few generations, the next generation get bored/revolt/want soemthing new. a new method is tried, the old method is forgotten or twisted into 'tales' /stories where the message is mis-translated. another generation passes and get bored, changes. and eventually the underlying path goes back to the first path.. a cycle that just goes around repeating and repeating.

Shit... I would imagine that members of the cryptocurrency community would be able to recognize that we are progressing as society. Do you guys not believe that blockchain is the next evolution of technology??

Our civilization appears to be advancing faster than ever. Yet anyone who looks will see the same.  The more advanced the community, the greater the intensity. Wages and interest fall, while rents rise. The rich get richer, the poor grow helpless, the middle class is swept away.
When the disparity of condition increases, democratic elections make it easy to seize the source of power. Many feel no connection with the conduct of government. Embittered by poverty, they are ready to sell their votes to the highest bidder or follow the most blatant demagogue. One class has become too rich to be stripped of its luxuries,Another class is so poor that promises of a few dollars will outweigh abstract considerations. A few roll in wealth, while the many seethe with discontent at things they don't know how to remedy.

As bad as it may be today, it absolutely better than yesterday. modern civilization is progressing in many aspect of life.
we have better knowledge
better way of life (though most people are still primitive)
better association and understanding among our self (though most people still don't agree).
better unity.

the only problem we have right now is population, in the past war cut down number of people around the world.
the earth is becoming saturated but their many ways to cope population and we are heading their.

so yes we are progressing    

It's declining.

You have people begging to get offended at the slightest thing...

Also men are turning into little bitches while females are becoming overtly masculine in their behaviour.

It's doomed.....

My answer to all of your questions is NO WAY. As a species we progressed so far at the back of science and civilisations have vastly improved from knowledge all the way to the standard of living. Just to get a glimpse at the type of scientific discoveries we experienced only this year, its astonishing really https://www.ranker.com/list/scientific-breakthroughs-of-2018/ranker-science

To be honest I'm slightly concerned you even asked this 

Science says the earth is around billion years.  
The bible says when calculated it was almost let's say three thousand years ago.  

In my own opinion, people from past thousand years doesn't have that good living it is only who had power and authority, the earth is composed of types of people.

Above average - sitting pretty.  
Average - free from slavery
Middle average - near to slave
Poor - slave

The reality is just live your life or else die.
You have skill then use it.  But if trees run out then it's the end. Cruelty causes poverty.  Intelligence causes pride.

Ancient times proves that everything is unexplainable, we just have to go with the ride that stops when we run out of oxygen.  

The answer is a universe of "why's" and "How's" .

Articles are worth reading somebody's opinion and point of view, What about your's?  

What I like about modern times are things that can rescue people from being wrongfully accuse. For example DNA evidence. Or woman accused cop of raping her, his body cam showed that absolutely nothing took place. Makes you wonder about the endless amount of people that were killed and punished for something that they didn't do. Even though such things still happen now.

Besides the genetic issue, I`d like to point out an Aldous Huxley statement, written in his marvellous book "The Island": "Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Gray Life.'

Even though the life expectancy has increased in the last century (please notice this just happened in some areas of the world), the new human plague is mental illness. Depression has become the first cause of violent death in many countries, for the people has "everything" but a sense of worth-living. As Huxley used to say, "Gray life is the new plague", and he spoke about that almost a century ago.
The human race is divided between those who died because of hunger and sickness and those who died because they can`t see the point of living anymore (having everything can lead to a feeling of despair as well).
Mental illness seems to be a "first world" problem, but how profound is it? We are talking about a species willing to death due to the lack of sense of their own existence.
How is the dehumanization of the human race leading towards a self-sense of pointless life? And, at the same time, how many people starve to death?
I think, ethologically speaking, that the human race is suffering the result of denaturalization, as Konrad Lorenz used to say. The most apart from nature an animal lives, the bigger probability of developing mental illness. Somehow we tend to forget about how important mental illness is into the development of a society, but it is a collateral damage in our path towards decay.

Besides, the way abstraction is taking place in its replacement of reality is making people get sick. For instance, social media, "cyberlife". How much are new mental illness appearing each day thanks to the new abstract way of communication between humans?

Just some more questions to add to the OP.

If we're talking about health, then yeah. Modern technology makes it so that more and more people with genetic problems live longer and longer, and naturally such people have more kids. A person with a heart condition that would had died in their teens now lives to their mid 30s lets say. In the past those genes would had been taken out of the gene pool, but now it's more spread out in the population. So in that sense it declines.

I believe this is true. I can't help but think social media, in particular, is responsible for people being offended by everything. The anonymity and the ability to cut others down without repercussions seems to embolden people to act with disrespect toward others and a hypersensitivity that leads to being overly defensive when confronted with an idea contrary to their personally held beliefs.

It is unfortunate 'ignorant' has such a negative connotation. We all think or say things that are ignorant. It isn't possible to view everything in life from a non-biased, educated point of view. It's just unfortunate that people are quick to stick to their guns when it comes to their opinions, even though they may have been exposed to something that can open their eyes a little more.

Well, it depends on what time in history are you asking about, and, also, about what means to you the concept of progress.

I am a PhD researched dedicated to ancient rock-art. In my studies, I`ve come to realize that the humans from the Palaeolithic time (from Magdaleniense, for instance, about 40.000- 10.000 when mostly of the great caves where painted) were used to live in harmony with nature. In that era, it is difficult to find signs of violence between humans in the rock art, on the contrary, most of the art show hunting scenes, mythical animals, some rituals, and so.
Once the era known as Neolithic appears, there was a huge change in human behaviour. For instance, citys began to be walled for the first time in history, and religious specialist appears, as long as war-scenes in rock art.
Maybe that was caused by a climate change, maybe this is just when the humanrace begin to spread too much.

I think over population is a big problem, to be honest. When people concentrate in a small place, then bad things happen, nature is attacked, natural resources are exploded, all is contaminated, and etc. So, under the point of getting adapted to the enviroment, I think human race is declining.

One another curiosity: dental cavities first appears in paleomedicine after the agriculture "revolution". Before that, it wasn`t an issue to human health and, also, they used to live longer (from paleolithic the average was about 40, in neolithic about 30, due to sick and war).

Now, there have been eras to humanity. One of my best friends is a genome researched. She always tell me how the human genes are declining, for they are not longer exposed to the nature, and all the people survives, even when their genetic information is not the best. In the past, a human with gen problem will not survive, and probably never has descendants. So, also, genetically speaking, we are declining.

Regarding the accomplishments of human race, ok, we have accomplished a lot, but, under my perspective, we haven`t resolv yet the most important issues of recent history:
- War.
- HUnger.
- The end of natural resources.

"Homo homini  lupus", I`m afraid.
Of course, I consider myself a naturalist, so I believe, in conclusion, we are declining.

An interesting book about it is "Anarchy evolution", by Greg Graffin (Bad Religion singer and also PhD in evolution research).
And, also, there is one of my favourites books, related: Konrad Lorenz, "Civilized man's eight deadly sins", you can download it for free in here: http://www.freepdf.info/index.php?post/Lorenz-Konrad-Civilized-man-s-eight-deadly-sins
(it is one of my favourites author, also winner of a well-deserved Nobel price for his amazing contribution to humanity, in Medicine, Ethology, history.. a wise man)

I think you are going to love it.

technically and opportunity wise we are much better off than in the past. in general (at least developed societies) disease and starvation are fairly rare. education is the main (IMO) way society advances.

however.

we now (here in the USA) have programs that encourage laziness and leeching from the government so work is entirely optional. free housing, food, healthcare. sit around and breed so you get more subsidies for every extra child. why bother bettering yourself and society when you are paid to watch tv, eat, and complain you need more handouts because you dont have what that guy who works for a living has.

the human race... we are devolving, not evolving.

(some of) the latest generations seems to just want easy living, no stress, and more money and status without earning it, just because they feel entitled. "snowflakes"  yeah right.. they need to learn how life really is.

my parents and myself made ourselves what we are. not that we havent screwed up here and there, but when we did we learned from our mistakes and bettered ourselves on our own. we didnt go cry to the government for handouts.

BTW, yes some on welfare do need it, im not saying all take advantage of it. safety nets are needed. but it seems that its being abused beyond belief today.



 

I'm fully convinced that when we lived in caves, we were far better off. We lacked iphones, however we had contentment. I've come to this realization truly and fully after living in third world countries where people are far happier than they are in the first world country where I'm from. They're also more emotionally intelligent even when lacking in what we perceive as intellectual intelligence.

When you take psychedelics, you're pulled out of the matrix and see the world for what it really is. That's our natural state in the cave. The "modern civilization" is a torturous prison when you fully see it for what it is. You don't need to take prozac when you're in the cave.

I definitely understand that we have many problems nowadays while the high level of comfort in everyday life is possibly one of the reasons for all those disorders and global laziness, as shown in Idiocracy. Although I understand that not every person will become a genius, I guess that we now live in a transitional period. The system of education is still mostly working to train people who will be only parts of the machinery. However, I think it won`t take long, and young people will use all the opportunities that modern world gives because they will have more knowledge and freedom, not only higher level of general comfort. I still believe that the desire of knowledge and development is the natural feeling of mankind.

Maybe civilization nowadays are more advance in technology, but i think they are declining and pathetic when it comes to the earth conservation. We are continuing destroying our planet, global warming, floods, famine or great hunger are occurring all around the world. I hope with this advancing technologies, we can make the world a better place for all of us..

It's hard to compare in that sense, I think.
In the short view, surely we must agree on that today's civilization is better for people.
We have better housing, easier access to many types of food, large variety of healthy food, human life is more valued, diseases that killed people in the past are nothing today.

But, in a longer view, what are the things we value in life?
I think today's society is too 'rigid'. The majority of people basically grow up, go to school, work 8-5, possibly take a loan and end up in a life of debt, buy a house, produce some kids, that's life.
To mix it up a little, people go on vacations to 'insert popular tourist place'.
Does the value of life only come from relations? And possibly, what one owns?

I think living in the past would be different.
I mean, surely the vast majority would still be slaves, or farmers, or the like in the relevant time we're discussing,
but I can't help but romanticize the past. In general, every day life surely seemed harsher, but also more of value.
If we somehow could keep the general quality of life, while moving back in time, I believe there would be more 'genuine' quality of life.
To reap what one sow, literally, seems great in a sense. How many people are stuck working in grocery stores, or filling in excel sheets, or doing phone support, or repairing cars, and so on?
I'd like to describe it as our society is just a layer on top of our old society, and each layer adds a new layer of meaningless-ness.
While it develops our society further, what's the point of having a super society, if we're just losing touch with the meaning of life, more and more?
One day we might have robots doing everything for us, what will we do then? Sit around? Will everyone become a scientist working on new stuff?

In the past, a general person's day was a work out by itself. Today, we pay to get the pleasure to lift some weights!

I know I generalize alot, sure there are many things people can do, some lives completely off grid, or go exploring the world all their life,
but in general - we're all just parts of the machinery.

A fun movie is 'Idiocracy' which basically shows how our society looks like in the future. Maybe we'll consider it a documentary some day

In a sense, it seems like we're all just going further and further into this 'soft' life, it's all cushy and there are no problems, things just go on, day in and day out.
At some point, I fear that we'll lose meaning.