Hulver's site || Comments || New year, old me.

Buck up, little buddy by marvin (4.00 / 1) #6 Sun Dec 30, 2007 at 10:27:23 PM EST

For some reason, your story brings Ecclesiastes to mind (my favourite book in the Old Testament).

The first time I read it through (in 1991), I was struck with how few things have changed over the past few thousand years, and in particular, how little change there has been in human nature. Same stuff, different day. Or century. Or millenia. Plus ça change....

It's not exactly the most comforting text in the world, but the sun is still going to come up tomorrow, so buck up little buddy. I'd quote my favourite bits, but you know how to use google if you want to find a copy (it's fairly short), and I doubt most people here are interested in seeing it.

Yeah, by blixco (2.00 / 0) #7 Sun Dec 30, 2007 at 10:54:13 PM EST

using the bible for cynicism is pretty new, though.

Sometimes, things change.

France in the revolution. The birth of America. The cultural changes in the 60s throughout the first world. Egypt from the pharoes to now.

Things can change. People can change. Thinking that everything is hopelessly the same is a cruel and stupid fiction.
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"You bring the weasel, I'll bring the whiskey." - kellnerin
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Perspective, not cynicism by marvin (4.00 / 1) #12 Mon Dec 31, 2007 at 12:01:29 AM EST

Sorry, but it put a few things into perspective for me. I'm still cynical, true, but that book and a few other things going on in my life at the time were like a 2x4 hitting me in the head. The motivations of people have not changed. Their actions have not. Their despair has not. The tapestry changes, but the actors remain the same.

Sometimes things change on a timeframe observable by living people. That doesn't necessarily make them unique historically. The cultural changes in the 60's differed hugely from the prevailing American culture in the 50's, certainly. However, with the possible exception of women's rights (although suffragetters had been around for a century by that point), how much of it was new to this planet?

Free love and sexual revolution? Ancient greeks had that, and then some - to a shocking degree by today's standards.

Youth movements? Childrens crusade, check (okay, so it came to a really cynical end, but many of the children of the 60's voted for GWB, which is an even more cynical end in my opinion).

What makes the birth of America any more significant than the birth of Rome, Sparta, or Athens?

Is the impact of France's revolution so different from Constantine's adoption of Christianity as Rome's religion (an event which, to the eternal dismay of Edward Gibbon, he considered key to the fall of Rome).

How is Iraq different from any of a hundred similar historical events, from Ghengis Khan to Shaka, apart from the fact that it is televised in the news every night?

I could go on, but you get my point. There probably even more extreme examples of almost every individual change somewhere in history. We've seen a lot of rapid change this past century, but little of it is truly unique. The impact of computers parallels the printing press in some ways, and the semaphore or the telegraph in others.

Thinking that everything is hopelessly the same is a cruel and stupid fiction.

Ah, that is where our perspectives and interpretations differ, as I have hope. My favourite section is probably Chapter 9, verse 9 in particular. What really matters in my life? How worked up should I get about people who are going to die, just as I am someday? The King James version uses the word "vanity" in the phrase "vanity of vanities; all is vanity", and some other versions use the word "meaningless". That's how the book begins, but it is not how it ends.

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Then vs. Now by lb008d (2.00 / 0) #20 Tue Jan 01, 2008 at 12:35:12 PM EST

We've seen a lot of rapid change this past century, but little of it is truly unique

The difference now is that the consequences are more dire, simply due to the effect of all the dead dinosaurs we've burned over the past 150 years.

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Ever read "Collapse" by Jared Diamond? by marvin (2.00 / 0) #21 Tue Jan 01, 2008 at 01:12:14 PM EST

"Collapse" contains a litany of societal / civilization collapses due to environmental degradation or resource depletion. We aren't doing anything entirely new in wrecking the world around us and having it kill us off in return, we're just doing it bigger, more efficiently, and faster than ever before.

The main difference now is that the consequences this time will be global. "Dire", as you termed it, could also be an understatement. Ocean acidification was the scariest thing I have read about in the past year, perhaps the past decade. Losing coral reefs would be bad enough, but losing plankton could pretty much lead to major changes in atmospheric oxygen concentrations (or basically, the loss of all aerobic life on the planet). Sea level rises and temperature change will be catastropic, but if we manage to screw up some of the really big, critical biological systems that keep this planet running, well, nuclear war isn't the only way to wipe out all life forms more complex than bacteria.

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: Read it. by lb008d (2.00 / 0) #22 Tue Jan 01, 2008 at 08:38:28 PM EST

Prior civilizations' mistakes didn't cause the extinction of humans. Our mistakes could very well do that - that's what I meant by dire.

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