Steven Pinker is a professor of psychology at Harvard. Click here for his Harvard website, which has lots of bio information and interviews, etc. This is a talk he gave at the annual TED conference. TED stands for "Technology, Entertainment, Design" and it's basically a weeklong slew of heady lectures on how to save the world, "progressive" style. Check it out if you're interested at the TED website where all the talks are stored and organized by category.
I guess the two questions re: this particular talk are 1) do you buy that the world is exponentially safer than it was, say, 400 years ago? and 2) if so, why do you think that is? (If not, of course, why not?)
I do think that the world is safer than 400 years. Diseases are far less prevalent and most of the diseases that effects people today are easily treatable or at least we know what we are dealing with. No longer do people die of "Natural Causes" of "Old Age," but instead we define what ailments they have and why they got it. It reminds me of Jack's plight in White Noise. He is exposed to Nyodene-D and thinks he will die in 15-30 years. This facts remains with him and he cannot escape it. Nowadays, instead of a doctor saying "Oh, you're just getting old..." they can now say "You have lung cancer from the cigarettes you smoked for 10 years, even though you quit 20 years ago." Perhaps this helps younger people avoid health obstacles like smoking, but it also instills a fear that anything can contribute to a cancer that they would get in 30 years.
ReplyDeleteI think technology has made our lives "safer." Like Steven said, people live longer and healthier. Even though more diseases are being discovered, even more can be treated. A hundred years ago, if one person in the family is sick, half the family will die. But now...remember SARS, only 774 people died in the whole world due to SARS.
ReplyDeletePinker makes a very good point about modern safety in that we have longer lives with "fewer" health problems. But the change goes unnoticed because the levels of fear have remained so similar (if not increased)... we find things to be afraid about- whether these fears are directly relevant to us or not. We feed from a global network of violence instead of the violence in surrounding communities; thats, say, a one hundred mile radius versus the entire breadth of the globe! It makes a paradoxical experience for a modern american- our personal ("real") experience is combined with all that we experience through media, which collectively seems far more violent than the past...
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