Great read! I hadn't seen the problem posed in the terms before and it reminded my of Álvaro Vieira Pinto's philosophy of technology from the 1970s, where he puts that the dominant classes can't dominate the future, so they have to dominate the ideas of the future in the present. This leads me to think about the political implications of the "mood of our times" - a lot of food for thought. Thank you!
The ‘mood of our times’ has been a constant since I was a too smart anxious kid in the 80s. As a child I didn’t know any Better and suffering from insomnia because my religious mom WANTED me to be terrified of sin and hell for independent thought amd action. Read my comment below I summarized 44 yrs of the end of the world. By 1999 I was and am skeptical. But my whole frat was too scared to party 12/31/99m! Young people lack the memory of a dozens of omg we’re all gonna die and are prone to fictional terrors.
As an 80s kid; I saw Apocalypse obsession in America ALL THE TIME. In the 80s it was widespread belief Cold war would end in Nuclear extinction. I was raised on TV; and The religious right megapastors ran informercials Sunday mornings spotlighting the imminent doom. I was taught the 4 horsemen, all this in brochures and more if u call now! Call now and learn how YOU can avoid all this by being raptured away! And my MAGA mom told me it was all true and dragged us to Orthodox church. Which is diametrically opposed to all that bullshit but Greek American Boomers swallowed all wackadoo Religious right theology.
90s - Y2K was the shadow. 9/11 supercharged extinction fears. The Great Recession brought more gloom. The Left panics over climate doom; the right cheers for a rapture. "Rapture Ready Index" websites have been predicting the world ending next week since 2002. Obama was the Antichrist. Blah blah blah.
In short, USA is just always obsessed with end of world. A very influential religious structure that swallows other Christian immigrant sects whole is always always preaching it. The secular side is terrified and exaggerating the threats. "You're actually going to have children with whats going on?" OverPopulation was an actual doomer obsession for a while; until very recently. I had visiting professors lecture and show videos about it: "zeropopulationgrowth" ZPG was an org of academics ngos and donors trying to bring contraception to 3rd world.
Color me exceptionally skeptical that AI chatbots will kill us all. Its just recycled Y2K; technological terror. Stock up on canned food, bottled water.
Great read though. I just feel younger people who didn't get fooled by 80s and 90s and 00s bullshit don't know that they WILL hear end of world panic the rest of their lives. By your 4th decade of living in America you gotta start getting skeptical. THIS time; its totally happening! No its not. America's various subgroups just love to obsess for different reasons about the Apocalypse.
I grew up in another country but these threatens about the end of the world were certainly common due to US cultural influence. Now, as a 43 yo grown up, I see my children dealing with the same influence, fears and, of course, effects (climate anxiety, asthma, skin allergies etc). At the same time, I try to believe life must be lived fully and help them believe there are still good things the world can give us. Being skeptical or not won’t save our generation to ethically think about the younger generations. This is what moves me - and worries me. How can we dispute this ideas of the future with dominant classes?
Well, the religious right is always going to be stoking fears of Apocalypse. For one it scares people into being faithful Christians. I was seeing Evangelical sect Infomercials (a half hour long commercial that pretends to be a show) on Sunday Mornings in the 80s that were basically selling their megachurch membership by scaring viewers. Beware the end is nigh, will you end up in heaven or eternal flames? It worked on me for a few years of childhood!! I was from a Greek Orthodox family was being dragged to Church after these 8am or 9am infomercials, and like I said, my mother WANTED me to be afraid for my soul by these infomercials even if it wasn't OUR sect. By 12 I had been reading the Bible and went right for Revelation and got the shit scared out of me...what an awful book, basically a fantasy of revenge on the then 99% of humanity that were not Christian. Eventually by 15, 16 I started thinking for myself.
I believe that the religious conservative influence on USA society as a whole is palpable. USA is the MOST religious democratic country in terms of visiting houses of worship. Authoritarian regimes its more mandated, but Americans go by choice. The left doesn't really believe in scripture but they come of age in a society that has been dooming AT LEAST since the era of Mutually Assured Destruction of the 1950s. Nuclear Apocalypse WAS an ever present possibility. Propaganda and Xenophobia has Americans always believing that rivals are EVILLLL. They might start WW3 just because they're so Evil. Since I was taught commies are not humans like us, with hopes and fears, the world was certainly going to end in nuclear apocalypse. THAT was a more difficult fear to dispel, having to convince a child that the 'evil' people aren't actually total evil. What are you a communist, trying to defend communists?
Your daughter will resist, because young people go along with the beliefs and attitudes of their peers. Which is usually a good thing because hatred of people you don't know is passed down....My Parents and their peers wanted to instill their Xenophobia and Right wing Christian bullshit and I wasn't having it; and that's exceptionally common. In this case you are a great parent and your daughter needs to learn Skepticism. The world is full of bullshit, and Dooming is just in the same bucket as Chemtrails, Moon Landing Hoax, Climate Science Denial, Evolution denial. Tell your daughter that.
Revelation is the perfect book for American Right wing, everyone who isn't us is going to suffer ENORMOUSLY on Earth, and then enjoy eternity in hell. It justifies inhumanity towards gays or Muslims, jews, atheists, etc. Because if you think THIS is bad, having zero rights, being beaten by ICE agents, etc, just wait until the scorpions with human heads, the ocean becoming blood, followed by eternal fire!
The religious right conveniently made up a fictional theology of "Rapture" where they and only they get raptured away straight to heaven, BEFORE all the horrible events of revelation.
Here's a website for those preparing for the end of world: https://www.raptureready.com/rapture-ready-index/ An index that measures the likelihood of world ending. Its rating has been "World is ending this week" since 2001. Its very funny to me so I check on them every few years.
All this talk about AI destroying the world is elitist and in a complete bubble that ignores the perspectives and experiences of real working people.
Do you think this “public mood” pervades the poor working people in this poor neighborhood I live in on the edge of town?
How much do you think the poor people working stocking shelves at Walmart worry about an AI apocalypse? How many even know who Dario Amodei and Jensen Huang are? They are too busy worrying about making rent. More than half of the people in America are living paycheck to paycheck.
That is the actual mood in America - so many of us struggling to barely get by. Émile, I know you are in Europe, but I really wish you and other people worried about this could see the world through the eyes of the poor people all around me. Their perspectives matter too even if they don’t all have Substacks to share them.
Also I would say that in the Old Testament there is quite a lot of anxiety that YWH is going to get really pissed off and kill everyone like he almost did in Noah’s flood. “No more water, the fire next time.” Not a criticism, obviously I liked this piece and am thinking about it a lot.
I’m a historian who studies premodern societies and I have an opinion on whether civilization is worth it. My main concern is about preserving the gains of the mortality and fertility transition, that dramatically lowered mortality for all ages (though especially for children), but also alleviated our disease burden and removed hunger as an all-consuming anxiety, and also greatly reduced the effort we must invest in reproduction freeing women’s energy for all sorts of other things. Other features of modernization that I think deserve high priority are universal education and a tendency toward more democratic governments. a) All of that rests on a rather fragile foundation that we have not prioritized for resiliency or sustainability. b) We also did not prioritize sharing these benefits equally instead of allowing a few rich societies (and even a few rich people) to Hoover up gigantic quantities of resources. c) It is very hard for people today to imagine what life was like in a peasant agricultural economy or in a foraging economy (before 11,000 years ago climate was much more volatile than now, and there is a strong case for “boom and bust” cycles in which groups lost a huge percentage of their population before recovering, or were wiped out altogether. There is a pretty good argument that we developed agriculture partly to support the larger number of people that flourished as climate stabilized.). It is big problem in my discipline that we have lost touch with that. I try to convey this perspective to my students so that they will understand the stakes of the decisions we make every day but it’s really hard. IMHO these are the only things that really matter. Nations don’t have to be rich to have all the nice features of civilization that I have described. We don’t need AI to have them or even, necessarily, computers or the internet (although I think fast communications are good because they potentially allow us to achieve similar levels of creativity with many fewer people). I do VERY frequently wonder whether ANY of the technological advances of my own lifetime have been worth it (this includes personal computers and internet and even the ATM machines that seemed like such a great idea when they came out. I never thought I’d miss bank tellers but here we are.)
This is a good read, though I have my quibbles, specifically at the end with the doomsday clock section.
>Hence, if there had been a Doomsday Clock in, say, 1850, it would have been set at something like 0.5 seconds after midnight on the day of doom — i.e., roughly 24 hours before the clock ticks to the dreaded moment of annihilation.
To offer a counter-example, if you sent the Doomsday Clock back in time to the Medieval ages, to the peak of the Black Plague, it absolutely would have set it close to midnight. Some might argue it would've been set at midnight, due to people believing the Plague was God's wrath. Similar arguments could be made for the Fall of the Roman Empire. It depends on the time
>Think about how wild this is. Never before in our 300,000-year history has humanity been so at risk of global catastrophe.
This is also a weak claim to make considering the Clock has only existed since 1947 (about 79 years) which is less than a mere fraction of our 300,000 year human history. It's possible there were points where we were closer that have been lost to time. Or other points in history where the clock would be set to around about where it is today (like I provided above).
“I know asking the question, “Was civilization worth it,” is opening a can of worms! I don’t have a settled answer, and I’m curious to know what you think.”
I have long said that agriculture was a mistake. “Civilization” has entirely been a mistake. It’s just a euphemism for imperialism and slavery. We would have been better off staying in the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
Great read! I hadn't seen the problem posed in the terms before and it reminded my of Álvaro Vieira Pinto's philosophy of technology from the 1970s, where he puts that the dominant classes can't dominate the future, so they have to dominate the ideas of the future in the present. This leads me to think about the political implications of the "mood of our times" - a lot of food for thought. Thank you!
Your contribution to Émile text made me think about how can we spread different ideas of the future, alternative - I dare to say realistic - ones.
The ‘mood of our times’ has been a constant since I was a too smart anxious kid in the 80s. As a child I didn’t know any Better and suffering from insomnia because my religious mom WANTED me to be terrified of sin and hell for independent thought amd action. Read my comment below I summarized 44 yrs of the end of the world. By 1999 I was and am skeptical. But my whole frat was too scared to party 12/31/99m! Young people lack the memory of a dozens of omg we’re all gonna die and are prone to fictional terrors.
As an 80s kid; I saw Apocalypse obsession in America ALL THE TIME. In the 80s it was widespread belief Cold war would end in Nuclear extinction. I was raised on TV; and The religious right megapastors ran informercials Sunday mornings spotlighting the imminent doom. I was taught the 4 horsemen, all this in brochures and more if u call now! Call now and learn how YOU can avoid all this by being raptured away! And my MAGA mom told me it was all true and dragged us to Orthodox church. Which is diametrically opposed to all that bullshit but Greek American Boomers swallowed all wackadoo Religious right theology.
90s - Y2K was the shadow. 9/11 supercharged extinction fears. The Great Recession brought more gloom. The Left panics over climate doom; the right cheers for a rapture. "Rapture Ready Index" websites have been predicting the world ending next week since 2002. Obama was the Antichrist. Blah blah blah.
In short, USA is just always obsessed with end of world. A very influential religious structure that swallows other Christian immigrant sects whole is always always preaching it. The secular side is terrified and exaggerating the threats. "You're actually going to have children with whats going on?" OverPopulation was an actual doomer obsession for a while; until very recently. I had visiting professors lecture and show videos about it: "zeropopulationgrowth" ZPG was an org of academics ngos and donors trying to bring contraception to 3rd world.
Color me exceptionally skeptical that AI chatbots will kill us all. Its just recycled Y2K; technological terror. Stock up on canned food, bottled water.
Great read though. I just feel younger people who didn't get fooled by 80s and 90s and 00s bullshit don't know that they WILL hear end of world panic the rest of their lives. By your 4th decade of living in America you gotta start getting skeptical. THIS time; its totally happening! No its not. America's various subgroups just love to obsess for different reasons about the Apocalypse.
I grew up in another country but these threatens about the end of the world were certainly common due to US cultural influence. Now, as a 43 yo grown up, I see my children dealing with the same influence, fears and, of course, effects (climate anxiety, asthma, skin allergies etc). At the same time, I try to believe life must be lived fully and help them believe there are still good things the world can give us. Being skeptical or not won’t save our generation to ethically think about the younger generations. This is what moves me - and worries me. How can we dispute this ideas of the future with dominant classes?
Well, the religious right is always going to be stoking fears of Apocalypse. For one it scares people into being faithful Christians. I was seeing Evangelical sect Infomercials (a half hour long commercial that pretends to be a show) on Sunday Mornings in the 80s that were basically selling their megachurch membership by scaring viewers. Beware the end is nigh, will you end up in heaven or eternal flames? It worked on me for a few years of childhood!! I was from a Greek Orthodox family was being dragged to Church after these 8am or 9am infomercials, and like I said, my mother WANTED me to be afraid for my soul by these infomercials even if it wasn't OUR sect. By 12 I had been reading the Bible and went right for Revelation and got the shit scared out of me...what an awful book, basically a fantasy of revenge on the then 99% of humanity that were not Christian. Eventually by 15, 16 I started thinking for myself.
I believe that the religious conservative influence on USA society as a whole is palpable. USA is the MOST religious democratic country in terms of visiting houses of worship. Authoritarian regimes its more mandated, but Americans go by choice. The left doesn't really believe in scripture but they come of age in a society that has been dooming AT LEAST since the era of Mutually Assured Destruction of the 1950s. Nuclear Apocalypse WAS an ever present possibility. Propaganda and Xenophobia has Americans always believing that rivals are EVILLLL. They might start WW3 just because they're so Evil. Since I was taught commies are not humans like us, with hopes and fears, the world was certainly going to end in nuclear apocalypse. THAT was a more difficult fear to dispel, having to convince a child that the 'evil' people aren't actually total evil. What are you a communist, trying to defend communists?
Dispute the bullshit with FACTS.
https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2023/04/50-ways-the-world-is-getting-better-2/
https://www.vox.com/2014/11/24/7272929/global-poverty-health-crime-literacy-good-news
Your daughter will resist, because young people go along with the beliefs and attitudes of their peers. Which is usually a good thing because hatred of people you don't know is passed down....My Parents and their peers wanted to instill their Xenophobia and Right wing Christian bullshit and I wasn't having it; and that's exceptionally common. In this case you are a great parent and your daughter needs to learn Skepticism. The world is full of bullshit, and Dooming is just in the same bucket as Chemtrails, Moon Landing Hoax, Climate Science Denial, Evolution denial. Tell your daughter that.
Revelation is the perfect book for American Right wing, everyone who isn't us is going to suffer ENORMOUSLY on Earth, and then enjoy eternity in hell. It justifies inhumanity towards gays or Muslims, jews, atheists, etc. Because if you think THIS is bad, having zero rights, being beaten by ICE agents, etc, just wait until the scorpions with human heads, the ocean becoming blood, followed by eternal fire!
The religious right conveniently made up a fictional theology of "Rapture" where they and only they get raptured away straight to heaven, BEFORE all the horrible events of revelation.
Here's a website for those preparing for the end of world: https://www.raptureready.com/rapture-ready-index/ An index that measures the likelihood of world ending. Its rating has been "World is ending this week" since 2001. Its very funny to me so I check on them every few years.
There is no such thing as a “public mood.”
All this talk about AI destroying the world is elitist and in a complete bubble that ignores the perspectives and experiences of real working people.
Do you think this “public mood” pervades the poor working people in this poor neighborhood I live in on the edge of town?
How much do you think the poor people working stocking shelves at Walmart worry about an AI apocalypse? How many even know who Dario Amodei and Jensen Huang are? They are too busy worrying about making rent. More than half of the people in America are living paycheck to paycheck.
That is the actual mood in America - so many of us struggling to barely get by. Émile, I know you are in Europe, but I really wish you and other people worried about this could see the world through the eyes of the poor people all around me. Their perspectives matter too even if they don’t all have Substacks to share them.
Also I would say that in the Old Testament there is quite a lot of anxiety that YWH is going to get really pissed off and kill everyone like he almost did in Noah’s flood. “No more water, the fire next time.” Not a criticism, obviously I liked this piece and am thinking about it a lot.
I’m a historian who studies premodern societies and I have an opinion on whether civilization is worth it. My main concern is about preserving the gains of the mortality and fertility transition, that dramatically lowered mortality for all ages (though especially for children), but also alleviated our disease burden and removed hunger as an all-consuming anxiety, and also greatly reduced the effort we must invest in reproduction freeing women’s energy for all sorts of other things. Other features of modernization that I think deserve high priority are universal education and a tendency toward more democratic governments. a) All of that rests on a rather fragile foundation that we have not prioritized for resiliency or sustainability. b) We also did not prioritize sharing these benefits equally instead of allowing a few rich societies (and even a few rich people) to Hoover up gigantic quantities of resources. c) It is very hard for people today to imagine what life was like in a peasant agricultural economy or in a foraging economy (before 11,000 years ago climate was much more volatile than now, and there is a strong case for “boom and bust” cycles in which groups lost a huge percentage of their population before recovering, or were wiped out altogether. There is a pretty good argument that we developed agriculture partly to support the larger number of people that flourished as climate stabilized.). It is big problem in my discipline that we have lost touch with that. I try to convey this perspective to my students so that they will understand the stakes of the decisions we make every day but it’s really hard. IMHO these are the only things that really matter. Nations don’t have to be rich to have all the nice features of civilization that I have described. We don’t need AI to have them or even, necessarily, computers or the internet (although I think fast communications are good because they potentially allow us to achieve similar levels of creativity with many fewer people). I do VERY frequently wonder whether ANY of the technological advances of my own lifetime have been worth it (this includes personal computers and internet and even the ATM machines that seemed like such a great idea when they came out. I never thought I’d miss bank tellers but here we are.)
This is a good read, though I have my quibbles, specifically at the end with the doomsday clock section.
>Hence, if there had been a Doomsday Clock in, say, 1850, it would have been set at something like 0.5 seconds after midnight on the day of doom — i.e., roughly 24 hours before the clock ticks to the dreaded moment of annihilation.
To offer a counter-example, if you sent the Doomsday Clock back in time to the Medieval ages, to the peak of the Black Plague, it absolutely would have set it close to midnight. Some might argue it would've been set at midnight, due to people believing the Plague was God's wrath. Similar arguments could be made for the Fall of the Roman Empire. It depends on the time
>Think about how wild this is. Never before in our 300,000-year history has humanity been so at risk of global catastrophe.
This is also a weak claim to make considering the Clock has only existed since 1947 (about 79 years) which is less than a mere fraction of our 300,000 year human history. It's possible there were points where we were closer that have been lost to time. Or other points in history where the clock would be set to around about where it is today (like I provided above).
To end off, I'd like to recommend a series of threads full of good news climate stories over on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/climatechange/comments/1wdr7k0/climate_hopium_thread_11/ this is only the latest instalment
Have a good day everyone!
After some brief research, I've managed to find articles that our ancestors had incredibly close brushes with extinction https://www.history.com/articles/prehistoric-ancestors-population-decline there was another article with more examples that I am unfortunately unable to find again.
Thanks Emile. Nice condensation. I don’t have an answer either, but I’m way closer to No than I used to be.
“I know asking the question, “Was civilization worth it,” is opening a can of worms! I don’t have a settled answer, and I’m curious to know what you think.”
I have long said that agriculture was a mistake. “Civilization” has entirely been a mistake. It’s just a euphemism for imperialism and slavery. We would have been better off staying in the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.