What aspects of today's society will we be ashamed of in sixty years?

[IlliniDave]

These are just guesses. Of course the answer to this requires speculation on where we'll be 60 years from now. "Ashamed" probably won't happen, it's not something humans do well except in extreme situations, plus it hard to feel shame for something you didn't personally do, but there will be regrets. I think in the USA it will be that we allowed a combination of fear and an overstretched concept of equality to erode too much of our personal freedom and blunt much of the energy in our society/economy. Worldwide it might be that we tolerated some of the violent extremist groups for too long.

[7Wannabe5]

IlliniDave said: I think in the USA it will be that we allowed a combination of fear and an overstretched concept of equality to erode too much of our personal freedom and blunt much of the energy in our society/economy. Worldwide it might be that we tolerated some of the violent extremist groups for too long.

I was having a discussion with a friend who was of almost exactly your opinion recently. I reminded him that as recently as 100 years ago, the last remnant of nobility in Poland had the freedom to "ride their horses across all the lands." I said "Now, don't you kind of wish you had the freedom to ride your horse across all the land because I mentioned the possibility, even though you never had that freedom?", and he replied rather sheepishly, " Well, I always thought that we were middle-class, but my father kept getting promotions, and I grew up with horses on a large suburban property outside of Chicago next to a forest preserve with trails."

My point here being that what some view as contraction of personal freedom due to overstretched concept of equality, might as readily be viewed as loss of affluence due to increased need for spending on security, inclusive of keeping the hordes happy, due to over-stretched planetary resource base because there are now over 7 billion of us. I am also of the opinion that this pressure in combination with racial identity politics is highly correlated with violent extremism. As recently as 40 years ago, there were business establishments in England (great bastion of enlightened Western Culture!!!) that had signs on the door that read "No dogs or Pakis." and as a child I lived in a neighborhood and attended a school that was located within 20 minutes of Detroit, but had not a single black person residing or attending. That sh*t was f*cked up and it's nothing like 3 generations underground yet.

[IlliniDave]

7Wannabe5, that seems like an equally overstretched concept of freedom allowed for the elite. The kinds of things I'm thinking about is the dumbing-down and politicization of public schools, standardized tests and curricula, zero-tolerance policies, "tough" crime laws and over-incarceration, surrender of medical privacy, surrender of communication privacy. In 60 years it's plausible to see things like early retirement disallowed or made very painful to keep people paying into the system. By overstretched equality I mean the concept that we're moving towards that everyone should get the same result, irrespective of anything else. I'm all for everyone having as close to the same opportunity as possible, though that is an impossible ideal, we can continue to work towards it.

[tonyedgecombe]

By overstretched equality I mean the concept that we're moving towards that everyone should get the same result, irrespective of anything else.

But the English speaking world has been moving away from that for the last forty years.

[jacob]

Shame will come from either remembering unique deviations from standard values or being associated with the values of the losing side of a greater conflict.

As an example of the former, the use of "enhanced interrogation"/torture of prisoners will likely be seen as shameful because it was an aberration from past practices and it was short lived. It might even be relegated to a footnote of history that "we don't talk about"; kinda how we don't talk about how the US was the first country force sterilization as part of an eugenics program.

Guessing who will win the values battle is much harder. As an example of the latter, fascist values are currently considered shameful because fascism was thoroughly defeated in WWII. Had the Axis won, then democratic values would have been on the receiving end of shaming now.

One way to view the current global situation is not as the complex battle between various nations and NGOs (referred to as terrorists in the standard framework) over resources and control but as a low-intensity global civil war (with a few hotspots) of values representing the rich and the poor or more accurately the powerful and the disenfranchised. This framework makes it a lot easier to explain the homegrown terrorism that seem to appear all over the rich world.

I can easily imagine the future adopting a framework more like this where people associate themselves with powerful/disenfranchised or rich/poor and consider nationality, religion, or grouping to be secondary. It's not clear who will win this but the losing values of this conflict will be shameful in the future. Part of that shame will be in not recognizing what the current conflict is all about because in retrospect it will be unbelievably obvious.

[7Wannabe5]

@jacob

You may be right, but I think it's still more like 50 Shades of Arrogance. IOW, it's not just about money. It's about respect. It's about swagger. One message any terrorist is putting out there, loud and clear, is "No need for much money to say f*ck you and your power structure." When nomadic tribes did battle, they would have a party afterwards and then give away all the won goods they couldn't carry. What they retained was their Arabic-word-that-I-can't-remember, which means something like Macho-pride. Just like when U of M plays Michigan State except more gruesome, or like stags-in-heat except more advanced weaponry. That pumped up feeling you get when your team wins. That's what its about. The money, the land, the bride-of-the-right-hand, the many sons, heads of cattle, corporate stock options, classic Harley; that's just the sh*t that requires some maintenance in down time.

[cmonkey]

Industrialism combined with the religion of infinite progress. I think this is a sub-cause for many of the things listed in this thread.

We had a twelve hour layover in Tokyo. Inside the airport Toto created a functional gallery to exhibit all of their state-of-the-art toilets.

http://www.toto.co.jp/gallerytoto/en/

Over the course of the day I tried every single one just for the hell of it. I had never, you know, used one of those before. They are fabulous.

I guess there's only so much to do when you live on an island and your population has run its course? When I see some of the stuff Japan comes up with I often think they have entered a state of 'well we've done most everything we can do, lets just do the weirdest thing we can think of'.

[Ego]

Industrialism combined with the myth of infinite progress. I think this is a sub-cause for many of the things listed in this thread.

I think you might be right. But then again my bottom carriage had never been so clean and shiny as it was when I boarded the 787 that evening. Sadly, I will probably never experience that ticklishly pleasant sensation again and will from now on measure my "bathroom experience" against it. Hedonic inflation of a different sort.

[Ego]

Lab grown meat will end animal agriculture as we know it.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... ry-animals

It will cause future humans to marvel at the fact that we were complicit in our current system. They will be perplexed at how we willfully deluded ourselves into believing that grazing animals was compatible with a sustained future for humans when there was a perfectly suitable alternative.

Replacing the meat in our diets with soya spectacularly reduces the land area required per kilo of protein: by 70% in the case of chicken, 89% in the case of pork and 97% in the case of beef.

[oldbeyond]

I'd bet environmental stuff, entitlements/debt and class are likely suspects. "How could they treat the earth like a sewer, saddle us with debt and turn society into a pyramid scheme for the benefit of the 0.1%?"

[BRUTE]

Replacing the meat in our diets with soya spectacularly reduces the land area required per kilo of protein: by 70% in the case of chicken, 89% in the case of pork and 97% in the case of beef.

good thing the country isn't 98% empty with tons of grazing land.

[Campitor]

good thing the country isn't 98% empty with tons of grazing land.

But too bad we use factory farming for animals which concentrates their populations into small land plots which allows the concentrated waste runoff to pollutes our streams. You wouldn't want to live downwind or downriver from a giant hog farm: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... vironment/

I wish animal production was more spread out but that would be too expensive for the meat industry.

[7Wannabe5]

Giant mono-fields of soy aren't fantastic either. If wildlife preservation or ecological resilience was primary concern, then very thoughtful stewardship of any micro-region towards primarily local varied human food procurement/production would be ideal. If you run a model that maximizes human population being fed on fields of soy, you will witness species after species dying off (birds are particularly vulnerable to destruction of trees necessary for field crop production.) Dependency on one food crop has and will greatly effect resilience of our species. We have been successful because we are such flexible, observant, omnivorous scavengers. We are not bold predators. We are not gentle herbivores. Only a vague belief in some sort of imparted animism allows us to believe that we can essentially change our nature through the process of digestion.

[Seppia]

I agree 100%, the focus should always be sustainability.
I hope in the future meat is only harvested from sustainable farms, thus reflecting its real cost.
Now it's artificially low, as the negative externalities resulting from pollution (for example) are not factored in.

[BRUTE]

yay for grazed animals

[Campitor]

Giant mono-fields of soy aren't fantastic either.

I can't remember the name of the documentary or its source, but there are some farmers who are using green manure and diverse/interspersed crop planting to drastically reduce the amount of water needed for irrigation and the amount of pesticides and herbicides used; some have eliminated chemicals altogether. Nothing like sustainable agriculture that saves money to incentivize changes in behavior that lessens the negative footprint of intensive farming. We need more of this in our meat/plant production.

[Ego]

If you run a model that maximizes human population being fed on fields of soy, you will witness species after species dying off (birds are particularly vulnerable to destruction of trees necessary for field crop production.)

I think you might find that study interesting. Here is the full pdf...

http://www.cof.orst.edu/leopold/papers/ ... a_2015.pdf

Right now we are feeding soy to the cattle and then we eat them. If we were to remove the incredibly inefficient middle-man (the cattle) we'd need 97% less farmland. Meat consumption is the largest driver of extinctions. Grasslands are disappearing.

We've got to eat. Why not do the least possible damage?

Does anyone here other than the animal exclusively consume sustainable meat?

[Riggerjack]

Taxing the working man, to pay subsidies to agricorps to not farm the land.

Vegans.

Fecundity. Only slightly offset by starvation, among the most fecund among us. That this happens at the same time and on the same planet as the subsidies above is mind boggling, even today.

[Riggerjack]

Meat consumption is the largest driver of extinctions. Grasslands are disappearing.

We've got to eat. Why not do the least possible damage?

Or, we could try a lower planetary human load. You know, using birth control, like we were intelligent, considerate sapients, rather than locusts waiting for a plague to do to us, what we are unwilling to do for ourselves.

And since the Extinction argument came up again:
www.iucnredlist.org/search
For the 61 species that are extinct in the wild. Got that? 61. That's not the 61 that died off last year, that's the 61 species that have been observed, that cannot currently be observed. So no dinosaurs, or large North American species. There are definitely issues of species not identified, that now never will be. But the storyline of humans wiping out species left and right is rooted in mythology, not science.

When you look up the territory of these species, you see that most were only on one island, or similarly geographically isolated.

This does nothing to relieve us of culpability, but I would rather address a real problem with real solutions, than waste our time feeling bad about a myth we have adopted to help us feel like our fellow humans suck, but we feel better by comparison. The world is full of real reasons to feel superior to the average human, we don't need to make up stories to artificially lower our perceptions of the human average.

[Ego]

And since the Extinction argument came up again:
www.iucnredlist.org/search
For the 61 species that are extinct in the wild. Got that? 61. That's not the 61 that died off last year, that's the 61 species that have been observed, that cannot currently be observed.

The link above does not work. Here is the correct link.
http://www.iucnredlist.org/search

I must be misunderstand. When I did a search for 2016 alone it showed 844 extinctions. Am I reading that wrong?