Umm, you don’t have to time travel to see see back breaking farm work, finding people with measeles, children working, or being mauled a by bear.
“If traveling to non-touristic locations in second and third world countries was available.”
I hear the Appalachians are beautiful this time of year.
If we ever develop Time Travel and time travel tourism we’d have a load of people going back in time and screaming that it’s “woke” because it doesn’t match their exact idea of the past.
The opposite is also true; ancient Greece now has a cultural reputation for being very progressive when it comes to homosexuality, but… If you actually read the kinds of things Ancient Greeks say about it… I mean sure, they mention gay a lot more, but there’s a lot of making fun of gayness.
Imagine going back in time to touristically “immerse” yourself in the “progressive” ancient Greeks, and all you find are rich people and states owning slaves and everyone making fun of gay people.
I mean, if we developed it tomorrow, sure.
I don’t know how, but I still have hope that at some point in the future, the majority of people aren’t idiots. And then we manage to get it to stay that way.
There are two constants in life; idiots and death.
People don’t get that we can have healthier more natural food, access to nature, and still live in and industrial society.
The other points tho. Valid.
What, measles is more healthy than not? It is deadly, even after you get over it, it cancels your immune system learning up until you got measles.
Measles is the actual opposite of healthy.
No I’m agreeing with the satirical point not the literal one present lol. Measles is a disease lmfao ofc it’s shit. And those kids are suffering
The last panel has a point though.
We have literally lost our connection to nature to the point we are actively destroying our ability to survive on this planet as a species for ephemeral, arbitrary gain for a few elite individuals and the majority of people see no problems with it.
The biggest mistake man ever made was to believe ourselves to be above nature, that it is something to which we were divinely given ownership over, to be used and discarded as we saw fit, instead of something we are intrinsically part of.
Humans are above nature in many very real and very tangible ways, and have been since the invention of fire or clothing or farming or any number of other things. It is not a mistake to believe that.
The mistake is in believing that the foundation doesn’t matter because you’re above it.
We are above nature like an anteater that can destroy an entire ant nest is above nature. Except we do it at a scale that the rest of nature can not replenish itself. But it is our nature. Unfortunately.
We’re above nature in a far more profound way than the ant-eater, because for the most part humans don’t rely on nature replenishing itself – we have agriculture. None of the problems facing us really have to do with replenishment so much as they do with unchecked consumption. For example with climate change the problem isn’t that we’re burning fossil fuels faster than they replenish, but rather the fact that we’re burning them at all.
People making this point probably usually think of climate change destroying humanity, but the truth is that even completely unchecked climate change will not make humans go extinct. It may destroy our global society, lead to the death of a large chunk of our population and set us back hundreds of years, but it almost certainly won’t kill us all. That, I think, goes to show just how far above nature we are, for better and for worse.
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This is an overly pessimistic (though sadly all too common) view that disregards all the good parts of humanity in favour of dooming and glooming over all the bad parts. On the whole humans are doing pretty damn well, and we’re constantly improving.
As for making it though some apocalypse - so will fish and flies rats and microbes. Are they too above nature? Damn we evolved from the shrew-like proto-mammals that survived the dinosaur apocalypse. I guess being above nature is in the entire mammal ancestry then.
The difference is that such creatures will survive by pure chance, while humans will survive by the thing that elevates us above nature: technology. In a purely natural environment large animals like humans would be the first to go extinct in a major extinction event.
I’d argue that once humans are no longer controlled by primal urges and not dependent on carbon based nutrition for the microbial flora that consists our entire being, then we can start talking about being above nature. But are we then even human any more?
Humans are not controlled by their primal urges, so we’re already halfway clear. As for nutrition, almost none of what the typical human eats comes from nature. Instead it comes from crops grown and engineered by humans.
Nature isn’t about being carbon-based, it’s about whether the ship is adrift on the whims of natural selection or steered deliberately by an intelligent actor, and the entire story of the human species has been about increasing our control of the ship.
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You have a fairly unrealistic view of what an apocalyptic scenario would look like. Existing technology would not go bad overnight. A lot of stuff works without electricity (a relatively recent invention in the tech tree, all things considered), and electricity isn’t that difficult to get going “from scratch” to begin with. Not to even mention that a world-ending meteor is something humans can, from our lofty heights far above nature, detect and even divert before it hits Earth.
Actual hunter-gatherers would be among the first to die out in an apocalypse like that, because they’re wholly dependent on the ecosystem, and would lose their only source of food when prey animals go extinct. The survivors would be developed humans in whatever area happens to both not be hit particularly hard (so in the case of global ash/dust clouds, probably somewhere near the equator where farming will still be possible) and that manages to stay relatively cohesive societally.
So on an individual level survival would be down to mostly luck, but on a species-wide level it would not be.
What I think is plausible is one of those old natural self regulation that have played out over and over in the history of the planet When one exploitative species grows over beyond available resources they starve to death until a new equilibrium is reached.
This is another one of those strangely common romanticized views of nature, but it’s also incongruent with reality. By definition nothing about what humans are doing to the planet (i.e. climate change, anthropocenic extinctions, what have you) is natural, and as such the consequences aren’t a natural mechanism either. Humans just practically won’t be able to wipe ourselves out in the same way that e.g. island animal populations may go extinct if balance is thrown off.
We can shoot ourselves in the foot real bad, but making ourselves extinct probably just straight up isn’t something we’re capable of. Sure, there would absolutely be a certain kind of poetic irony in humans, in our hubris, making the planet inhospitable to modern civilization (and it’s possible, too), but this common metaphor of Mother Earth’s immune system working to restore a natural balance is, if you forgive my being crass, complete hippie nonsense.
Are we though? You might think we conquered it, but time had proven natural and physical phenomena can out power us. Just look into the future, anything can happen, including human extinction.
Saying we’re above nature sounds like we’re better than it/better without it (which some people seem to think but please, let’s not give that idea more traction by declaring it a fact).
I think it’s more like humans are trying to separate themselves from nature.
This is just semantics, but I mean… nature isn’t good. Nature is really terrible, actually. It’s an endless cycle of violence, death and entropy that has killed literally all of our ancestors and will kill us just as quickly if we give it the chance (to paraphrase one of my favourite games, The Talos Principle II). Being better than nature is an ideal anyone who isn’t some kind of insane social darwinist should strive for.
While I’m pretty sure I wholly agree with the sentiment of the majority of people saying it, I resent this “man is part of nature” argument because at face value it romanticizes suffering. Nature is dying by 40 if you’re lucky, and by 5 if you’re not. It’s your entire tribe starving to death because a volcano you didn’t even know about erupted on the other side of the world. It’s being killed or enslaved by another tribe’s raiding party because they want something you have (you may argue that this is human action, not nature, but chimps go to war and chimps are animals in nature, ergo war is part of nature). I am glad to be above a lot of that, and I hope future humans can be even further removed from it.
Of course what most people mean when they say that humans aren’t (or shouldn’t be) above nature is just that they think we should stop destroying the planet in the various completely unnecessary ways we do, and that if we don’t it’ll bite us in the ass, and I fully agree with that. I just don’t vibe with the way it’s phrased.
I agree this is all about semantics, you seem to consider nature only for its bad sides (but don’t forget we also get all our food from nature).
Nature is really terrible, actually. It’s an endless cycle of violence, death
Dying sucks but I don’t think we should ever stop doing that (at a reasonable age, let’s be clear).
I agree that being above the violent killing part of nature should be an ideal, but I’m sorry to say I don’t believe we’re there yet, people are still killing; for food, for fun, for greed, just look at the news… :'(
I resent this “man is part of nature” argument because at face value it romanticizes suffering.
Here you raise an important question: does being part of nature exclude us from using technology?
I don’t believe so. To me being part of nature does not mean to live like our ancestors did when there was no manmade things, or when you would get burned at the stake for doing science…
(I’m not sure in what periods of history you would consider we were part of nature).The way I see it, we could be part of nature while using a lot of the technologies we use today. We would just need to tweak (a lot) of them and drop the use of many more, but I’m convinced that, if everybody started taking their responsibilities, we could find effective ways to produce enough medicine and food without the damage that those currently cause.
So yeah, I get you, you get me, we just don’t mean the same thing when we say nature :)
Chimps don’t have buttons that can annihilate entire cities at once. They don’t go out their way to spends years, decades, centuries to develop items and techniques to inflict the maximum amount of pain onto another chimp.
Yeah and crows don’t have electric drills yet they are still capable of tool use. What is your point?
That we (as a species, not inviduals) totally do outdo chimps, or any other animal species, in cruelty. In my mind, the peak of cruelty isn’t mindlessly tearing someone apart maenad-style, but instead calmly designing and building and using instruments for the sole purpose of being cruel.
Mostly no disagreement there, though I want to say that chimps do not go to war out of cruelty. Chimps go to war because they live in scarcity and it increases the war gene’s odds of survival.
In the past this was also the primary reason humans went to war. In modern times we have invented many new reasons, but usually even those do not boil down to simple cruelty (though there’s many cases in history where one could argue cruelty was the primary motivation). Usually war wields cruelty as an instrument, not the other way around.
Fire wasn’t invented. Ants can and do farm. You are not above or more worthy than any animal, and you should acknowledge that.
Fire was invented – just because it existed before humans harnessed does not mean harnessing it was not an invention, just like how hammer-shaped rocks existing doesn’t invalidate the invention of hammers, or the Sun doing nuclear fusion doesn’t invalidate the invention of the fusion reactor. Ants and bees absolutely suck at farming compared to humans. Both me and you are way above and better than every animal, and you should acknowledge that.
I invite you to present actual arguments instead of what are basically just tired catchphrases.
On what grounds do you think that ants suck at farming? They are able to sustain large communities without causing ecological catastrophes. (of course, size is a factor in this specific aspect)
And, intelligence or skill doesn’t make any animal species better than others. You are an animal, deal with it.
On what grounds do you think that ants suck at farming?
For example on the metric of how much of their populace has to be farming to sustain the colony. For modern industrialized humans it’s some single-digit percentage, while for ants it’s probably something like 50%-80% (with the rest of the ants doing nursing).
And, intelligence or skill doesn’t make any animal species better than others. You are an animal, deal with it.
Having the intelligence and capability to rise above nature like humans have done is precisely what makes one animal species better than others. The fact that all current humans are animals was never in dispute – though as far as I’m concerned, being human is not contingent upon being an animal.
I presume, based on prior experience, that the fixation on humans not being better/more worthy/above other animals stems from some kind of anarchist opposition to any and all hierarchies, and so I feel like I need to clarify: being above the natural world does not absolve humans of responsibility to it nor is it a carte blanche to treat lower animals however we desire. Quite the contrary. A lion is incapable of considering the ethical implications of eating meat, so we can hardly fault it for running down a gazelle, forcing it down and then slowly killing it over several minutes before eating it. Humans are capable of that, so we can fault humans for factory farming meat.
plus we get a lot of health issues by the loss of the microbiota we used to cultivate from closer contact with nature
Yeah, what we’re doing now is exactly because we detached outself from the nature, which makes us couldn’t see how the change of the natural environment would affect our own survival. We’re literally blind by our own power.
That was not at all the point the comic was making, so whoosh? 💨
@JUNlPER
this is always one that gets me. so many people are unable to realize that you can present characters doing something bad without endorsing it. not sure when this kind of baby brained thing started but its so silly to see so often@ducktales2020
more than anything they conflate Presenting Something with Agreeing With Something, but don’t apply it to good guy/bad guy narratives. when everyone’s bad they short circuitYour general point is very accurate, but applying that to this comic would allow the correct interpretation that the author was satirising people who think everything was better in the past. (Without this understanding, we’d be forced to think that the author meant that things were better in the past in spite of disease, hard labour, deprivation, and… bear attacks)
The person you replied to is saying that the last panel is a partial exception to the pictured couple being dumbasses
The point the comic is trying to make is that things were not better in the past, right?
That’s a pretty broad take that is obviously full of holes.
Pretty sure no whoosh happened here and the person you’re replying to was just pointing at one of those holes.
The point the comic
Sort of: I thought it was mocking the superficiality of a golden age fallacy that romanticizes the past & advocates restoring it while devaluing & squandering all the hardships we solved with our unprecedented standard of living.
While the unsustainability of expending more resources than the planet can regenerate is a problem, that’s not necessarily the meaning of “losing our connection with nature”. We could start living sustainably while remaining as disconnected.
Pretty sure no whoosh happened here
Then they stated themselves poorly with
The last panel has a point though.
The panel satirizes the time traveler’s comment, so the panel’s point is to undermine that comment. Either we have to assume they expressed themselves ineptly & meant something else, or they know how to express themselves & misinterpreted the panel. Not sound either way.
Excluding that statement entirely would have made more sense, but we aren’t mind readers.
Thanks for a well thought, well written answer!
I guess I missed the point of the comic a bit…
I think you’re right, they either expressed themselves wrong or misinterpreted the panel.
So, for this I guess there was whoosh! My bad.
I should’ve thought some more before replying to you.
I saw someone defending ecology under a post that could be seen as ridiculing it so my brain went all white knight towards what seemed to me like a pedant dick… But turns out I was the dick.
I would love to visit revolutionary Catalonia, just to witness its glory before it was stamped out by the cold boot of fascism
*betrayed by the USSR and then taken over by fascists
Yes it was sad that the Republicans did what they did yet still they were the only people whom the anarchists could have worked with
You definitely fit the theme of this meme
It wasn’t perfect by any means and the quality of life in modern day Vietnam far outpases it, still there’s a certain beauty that can’t be understated of the most successful anarchist experement
The scenery in Vietnam is very beautiful
Calling it successful is quite a stretch. If anything, it’s can accurately be categorized as a failure.
I didn’t say it was successful only that it was the most successful :c (there haven’t been any successful modern anarchist experiments)
Almost a political compass… almost…
If they had someone visitng the french revolution talking about how awesome it is we’d have one for each quadrant and the antivaxxer can go as a centrist panel
Is THAT why they call gay men “bears”? I always thought it was just because they were hairy…
No, it’s just hairy + fat = bear.
No, it’s just beary + hat = Cher
No, it’s because their noses are their penises.
No, it’s just hairy + fat = bear.
