@ NoXion:
I like a good argument.
” Most of Europe was feudal with low rates of literacy. That heavily implies "backward" even if it doesn't explicitly state it.
Considering that these people lived well before the invention of the printing press, and that the majority of them were neither noble nor genteel, how would they use writing? I’m not at all suggesting illiteracy is a good thing. Unlike in our own time, however, literacy wasn’t necessary for functioning in everyday life.
They were not backward. They were simply developing developing architecture for the Church, reasserting rule of law through documents such as the Magna Carta (1215), banking (among others, the Medici had their own bank, starting in 1397). Numerous universities were founded, of various quality (then as now). If you insist, I could go hunt down a laundry list of medieval achievements (I’m speaking of Europe, mind) achievements which grew more nuanced and complex as time went forward.
Of course there was pestilence. There still IS...everywhere around the world there is virulent and untreated pestilence. The West is immunised from this to a certain extent because we vaccinate, because we have easy access to potable water, because we are careful with our waste, and in part because we control a lot of resources.
Because of bacterial adaptation, we may soon lose the advantage of common antibiotics, which means people will have to sit through the hells that haunted their ancestors and our neighbors in far less privileged countries.
We’re not entirely immune, however: My mother contracted H1N1. She told me she was vomiting blood clots. The hospital told her to stay clear of them unless her breathing worsened. My husband went into hospital for kidney surgery, acquired a “superbug.” They couldn’t really treat it, so he had to ride out, and so did I.
I contracted the same bacterial infection my husband had. They offered a course of strong antibiotics that might help. My husband said yes, and had to be on IV for weeks. I said no. I hoped I had enough in my genetics to withstand it and develop my own sort of immunity. I stayed home for a few weeks, and family hung food on our door handle because they did NOT want what I had.
But our old nemeses of Cholera, Polio, and others are still alive. Ebola stalks parts of the Earth: (http://www.who.int/csr/disease/ebola/ebola-6-months/myths/en/)
And so we come once again to the matter of population density and its effects on people. Where there are more people, there is a greater opportunity for the fast spread of some vile pestilence.
” But there was plenty disease and infection at the same time that there was no conception of bacteria and viruses. A much greater proportion of the population suffered from famines. If starvation or sickness didn't get you, then there was always the possibility of being drafted into the army of the local lord, or conversely getting casually murdered by some other lord's troops."
Before the telescope, stars were just a milky dust in the night sky, some of which could be used for celestial navigation by ancient sailors.
After the telescope, however, astronomy was born.
Before Germ Theory, Miasma Theory predominated in the medical field pretty much forever until around 1890. People grow, adapt; it’s what we do. Our ancestors were not inferior copies of us. They were not backward. They were moving ahead structure by structure, law by law, collecting an ever growing corpus of knowledge.
As for the amount of killing that went on...um...there are seven billion of us, and we stand on the brink of all out war. Even if not, the smaller wars that are always going on around the world still brutalise and take lives. That has not changed. The feudal lord is now a chancellor or a president.
As to famine...795 million persons are suffering malnutrition, most of them in the developing countries we use for our dumping grounds. (https://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats)
There is also a positive and significant relationship between population DENSITY and crime rate:
http://theipti.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/covariance.pdf
http://pear.accc.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/bsi/article/viewFile/334/204
(Of course some believe density gives a natural advantage in that neighbours would watch for criminals. Ha! Thanks to diffusion of responsibility, it seems unlikely that people would actually be safer in crowded areas as opposed to in more open ones.)
What happens when there are too many people and not enough supply for their survival? The question is rhetorical. The answer is chaos a Dark Age in earnest.
” Shit like that still happens today of course, but bad as those selling the news seem to make the world appear, more people are living in times of relative peace and plenty than ever before.”
We you and I are living in unparalleled peace...for the near term, anyway. A lot of the world isn’t that lucky.
” Oh hai Malthus. Note that UN estimates of future global population are based on current trends, not on the actual carrying capacity of an unknown future world. Because the UN aren't as ignorant as poor old Malthus.
We have this world, and we understand its limitations pretty well.
I agree with Malthus - note, I said Malthus, not Galton -and am not the least bit ashamed of it. He published his treatise, his Essay on the Principles of Population, in 1798. He predicted geometric growth and that is exactly what we’re getting.
Yes there have been in advances in farming and other industry that can increase the carrying capacity of the planet, but that doesn’t change the nature of this growth nor the fact that we will eventually hit a wall where supply of food and other essentials falls far short of demand.
And beyond that, why should nature suffer, and deforestation continue, merely so humanity can extend its reach to nine or ten billion persons? Why do we HAVE to take it to the wall?
In places where the Catholic Church holds sway, they discourage the use of prophylactics as birth control and don’t care that condoms can also act as barriers to STIs. ..so some people in such hands are having five or six kids to the one or two we have, and they’re open to disease. We try to limit population, but...
” Yeah, people are so terrible aren't they? Perhaps we should make the world a better place and kill off a huge chunk of the global population. Forget trying to actually solve everyone's problems, that's too hard and in any case that would just encourage the useless eaters to breed.”
You’re reaching further than you know with a statement like that.
No, I do not think people are bad. I know from personal experience, however, that people will do very bad things if it means they can bring needed resources back to their families.
People aren’t the problem. Too many people are the problem.
On a personal note, my husband has a cruel genetic condition that has left him physically deformed and unable to walk. His intelligence his extremely high intelligence remains untouched. But we don’t have natural-born children. We worry that any child we have could be born with the same condition, or worse; there’s a lethal variant of my husband’s condition and the oldest survivor of it was nine when she died. For us to procreate means we may pass on a terrible defect one small piece of one small gene in the whole of the genome, and my husband is crippled to the point where even his joints have started to fail. And the child born thus might have the lethal variant and live a short life filled with agony before dying (at best) at nine. That is not living for such a child; it’s just surviving until the lungs or heart fail.
I’m not saying people should be restricted in breeding.
No. That’s been tried and it’s total bullshit.
Positive eugenics, on the other hand, I am all for that. If you carry a recessive and your mate carries the same for some god-awful disorder one that could merely physically cripple someone right down to one that leaves a fourth of the children you bear with profound mental disabilities then please get genetic counselling. (One could end up with a family like that of Mattie Stepanek, who watched all three of his siblings die from the rare form of Muscular Dystrophy that eventually killed him at age 13. His mother didn’t realise when she had her kids that she herself was affected by an adult onset form of MD. Now she uses a wheelchair, and she, too, will die young after having survived all four of her children.)
Disability does NOT make life less worth the living, and nor should people affected be treated as anything but what they are people.
But ask a disabled person if gene surgery were available to correct or at least ease the conditions, would he do it? I’m willing to bet the answer is yes.
Beyond that, any effort at curbing the population would have to be global, and not based on some weak theory about the alleged benefits of negative eugenics. A large part of the species would have to see the wall.
I see your point about lowering carbon emissions and other solutions that allow people maximum freedom to make their own choices. But what happens when our population reaches 10 billion, 11 billion, 12 billion, 13 billion, 14 billion? We're relying on a science that does not yet exist to save us from the horrors of global famine, water starvation, and disease.
