What we're doing right

I find that as I get older, it's easier and easier to drop into a pessimistic view of things. The world is going to Hades; the new generation is a bunch of slackers. Hey you kids! Get off my lawn!

Steven Pinker give us some perspective, on the millennium scale, to show that in some very important ways, the world is not going to Hades. His TED talk about the Myth of Violence surgically disassembles the notion that the modern world is more violent than times of old, or even that modern industrial warfare is more deadly than ancient times.

In fact, this often isn't true; it's Confirmation Bias. As you age, you do gain experience. The flip side is that your earlier memories start to fade into the sepia-hued mists of time. Rolling back the curtain will sometimes restore perspective to something that's more solidly grounded.



Watching this, I was reminded of Eric Raymond's discussion The Myth Of Man The Killer. He approaches the same subject from a different perspective, and isolates one of the fundamental fallacies of modern leftist political philosophy:

If Hobbes underestimated the sociability of man, Rousseau and his followers overestimated it; or, at least, they overestimated the sociability of primitive man. By contrasting the nobility and tranquility they claimed to see in rural nature and the Noble Savage with the all-too-evident filth, poverty and crowding in the booming cities of the Industrial Revolution, they secularized the Fall of Man. As their spiritual descendants today still do, they overlooked the fact that the urban poor had unanimously voted with their feet to escape an even nastier rural poverty.

So, the State as an arbiter of stable markets has allowed - for centuries - an expanded view of "the other" as a potentially valuable partner. As Pinker says, one compelling reason that we should not bomb the Japanese is that they made my minivan (OK, he didn't say it exactly this way, but work with me).

The State, as a perfecter of the human spirit, not so much. Raymond, again:

Another, darker kind of romanticism is at work as well. To a person who feels fundamentally powerless, the belief that one is somehow intrinsically deadly can be a cherished illusion. Its marketers know full well that violence fantasy sells not to the accomplished, the wealthy and the wise, but rather to working stiffs trapped in dead-end jobs, to frustrated adolescents, to retirees — the marginalized, the lonely and the lost.

The Ancients spoke of the Golden Mean, and I dare say would not be surprised at the sad outcome of the last century's Statist experiments.

If you want a Mind Enhancing Ray, you're hard pressed to find one better than the TED lectures. Free as in speech, and free as in beer. It's a twofer!