Are we becoming more peaceful as we become smarter?

Agitated over certain things for sure but never out of control. I believe that certain things like child molestation or the media lying is a few of the reasons I get agitated for there's nothing I can do about the problem.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Surely there is a nice politically correct quote you can think of that should mend any agitation that you feel?

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

In the very near future a point in singularity will bring the need to strip away a persons rights for sure.

We will for sure be a one world goverment. Depending on where eugenics and other elitist influenced constructs takes us we may see a huge reduction in the world populations.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Okay. Okay Mister Know-it-all. Just kidding. But still, I get the feeling that you'd be able to trump any argument, albeit eloquently, that I can muster onto the playing field—so I'll briefly return to my original post; my original impression of the topic "are we becoming more peaceful as we become smarter?"

Where you see peacefulness—I can almost see it: like the season's first major blanket of snow, sparkling and all innocent, and just in time for Christmas, too—I see a simulation of it, a contrived semblance of civility, a temporary passage—an act.

The exclusion of mass aggressive violence in our time doesn't exclude the type of passive violence we see and even partake of on a daily basis. I mean, people sue one another for saying the wrong thing. The alcohol industry is huge, as is the pharmaceutical industry. People don't enact their violent streak, but I'm sure they think it—isn't the horror-movie genre a great success now-a-days, axe murderers and all that?

 

Interesting, we didn't talk about this in my cultural anthropology class...

According to that article, we did not really get into hierarchy and structure until we became agriculturists.

 

Suppose any of the following take place :

We realize immortality and preserve our physical appearances (young like the movie "in time").

Disease and other population stabilizers are completely eliminated.

Technology advances so rapidly that currency of money becomes null, etc.

Obviously a restructuring will take place within the next hundred years on a global-scales as a consequence of exponential advancements in technology and power (elitist groups )

 

If not more violent I can't help but wonder if we aren't becoming more cruel?

I have no statistics to share, but I've often heard from veteran teachers
and from veteran police officers that we are not getting more civil or peaceful.

I would think a smarter individual would be more likely to weigh the personal consequences of a violent action and may thus resort to more clever criminal behavior.

In the distant past, one couldn't commit a crime against another human unless you were within a short physical distance of your victim and your crime would -most likely?- be a violent one - robbery or bodily harm.

But now days I can be the victim of a crime by someone half-a-world away = "nonviolent". But is this offender a "better" societal member than a violent member? Should we be proud of our progress?

I actually think of nonviolent crimes over the history of mankind as being invented by the smarter individuals.

We are targets every day. Identlty theft statistics are sobering.

So, should I find comfort in the fact that my business partner embezzled from our company rather than shot me?

I don't know the answers to my questions. Humans are complex and our crimes are complex as well. I'd rather be yelled at than manipulated but that's just my opinion.

(I am in no way intending to devalue the cost and pain of a violent act on it's victim and the victim's family)

 

Here's something to consider. Paul J Zak claims that oxytocin is the "morality molecule". What is interesting here is that he also claims that 5% of the population do not have the propper receptors to actually be "moral" - in which he calls that portion of humanity the "bastards".

As the overall population grows, so grows the quantity of "bastards" - the morally disconnected.

This should not be confused with Pinker's point.

My interpretation of all this is that overall, the world is a much more peaceful place, but there is still a very small portion of the population that is morally corrupt. This will always be true.

In today's information age, we hear about the morally corrupt and their acts much more frequently, thus under the assumption that society is degrading and that the world is an incredibly violent and dangerous place.

 

When my depression hit a certain point...I forget when last year, I just stopped watching the news. I think something I heard -maybe about a school getting blown up-made me sit there at my desk at work and start crying, and I said...Ok, nope, not able to take that anymore.
If there's nothing you can usefully do, is it useful to know?
Well, if your taxes are paying for it, maybe it's moral that you know.
Not that you, by yourself, can actually change it.

On topic: technology is making it so much easier to kill people and not have to look them in the eye while you do it. Now our operators can kill people remotely from another continent and go home to their wife and kids when their eight or twelve-hour shift of killing maybe-terrorists or maybe-civilians is up. Killing as a videogame, except it's not pixel-people dying like when I go kill things on the computer. No refresh button.

It's not so much individuals who are randomly violent that bother me, it's the violence inherent in systems...Has anyone ever thought of a government as a system of real and implied violence? Maybe necessary, yes. Humans can only handle so much novel input before they go nuts. Nevertheless, all power does grow from the barrel of a gun.

Right now I'm reading a book on family systems theory...We all think our parents are gods at first and can do no wrong, we love them helplessly. A good parent tries to lead, and model behavior, but many parents practice rule-by-fear. A system of real and implied violence. I could never reasonably tell what would set mine off. It wasn't strict-but-fair, it was random violence based on what kind of day they were having combined with what it is I just did to piss them off.

Alright, I stop rambling at you...

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

Ahh Chimpkin such a lovely post and all I can do is stare at this one line.

 

Beery, Beery, *shakes head ruefully*
Just because a watery tart threw a sword at you...

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

(Bolding in quote is mine, Blue Baby.)

I still wonder then, how are we a more peaceful people if the quantity of these bastards grows with our population?

I still don't believe if you ask most people that they would actually say their country, neighborhoods, schools, etc have become more peaceful.

I also don't believe the world seems more violent because I get more news easier. I used to travel a lot and I am glad I did when I did because many of the beautiful countries I loved so much are unsafe to return to.

I do believe the US sucks at peacekeeping and embassadorial (right word?) endeavors, but --- I can't blame the world's leaders for all the world violence.

And as far as the military, today it is also easier to kill more people in one shot because of populaton densities.

From those "who know" I've heard criminal behavior has become much more cruel and nasty with no rhyme or reason needed. Sorry, I did not word this last sentence the way I wanted but maybe one can decipher my meaning anyway.

I am not arguing just offering my layman's point of view. More in a question format than facts, I don't know the answers or even all the questions.


Interesting topic

BB

 

Most news is negative apparently because it gets better ratings, so I've read. I've been avoiding most news for a while because of the decisive negative lean in content.

Yes, but it's also even harder to get away with it, and crime in general. You followed up with a military example, but I wanted to note that.

 

Good questions.

We need to keep all of this in context - I am saying that more "peaceful" is relative to witnessing murder or being murdered, raped or violently injured at the hands of another.


My position is that as long as the "bastards" are not in power (ie Hitler, Moa, Stalin, Pol Pot etc...) the world is a more "peaceful" place. Thanks to today's incredible level of connectedness the global accountabilty will only increase (as long as there is electricity).


Egypt, Lybia and Tunisia are perfect examples of what revolution now looks like in the information age. The fall of major regimes without mass casualties.


What I think is often confused on this point is that this has nothing to do with "mood" or "sentiment" or "ethos", but more about nature of dying.


The global population has doubled since 1964, and while there are still horrible slums on the planet, the standard of living has increased dramatically as well. Better medicine, less war, longer life spans, more people - it amounts to something (from a natural selection perspective) going "right".

 

It just occurred to me that violence, the act, doesn't stand alone.

Much is at play for a violent act to be put into motion—deliberation, planning, motivation, will, decisiveness, impetus, is also very much involved.

And if the paintings at Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave suggests anything about the process of preparedness involved in which ancient man apparently understood something of before committing an act of aggression, they also exercised in that preparedness… spirituality.

 

But it's easy enough to whip up a mob to murder them. Close association sometimes breeds contempt.

 

Just got this nuke story today on the browser when I opened it.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

http://news.yahoo.com/russian-military-chief-war-risks-grown-140553975.html

 

We aren't less violent today. We do our violence via proxy. We have specialists for violence, and even these specialists often do not need to directly engage their opponents. So instead of hot skills - the ability to be worked up and harness that anger - detachment, coldness and precision are the main parts of the training. And this can go further down the line of command than in the past where the generals usually had hand to hand weapons, were on the field of battle, and knew they might in fact actually use these weapons.

But we kill and we are much better at it.

And really it pisses me off, this whole 'civilization is less violent than the savages' jingoism self-congratulatory BS.

Like when European civilization encountered Native Americans the best way to sum it up is to point to how much less violent the Europeans were. Duh.

It's like if the way we kill involves less yelling and we have shirts on, we are less violent.

 

The 20th century, in my mind, makes a mockery of this. Civilization kills rationally. It uses abstractions, which allow millions to be killed and killed efficiently with technology. I see nothing in our civilized behavior to indicate we will not kill on a mass scale rationally in the future.

And yes, there are irrational premises in these rational mass killings. A priori get used in rational formulas and killing is carried out effectively and efficiently using rationality. Where the barbarian run out of rage, rationally design killing machines keep the process going.