Decivilization.

The history of our civilization has seen some great peeks of growth — for example, the ancient Greek explosion of mathematics and philosophy combined with physics and culture, or the Renaissance and the Enlightenment — and now in our modern times technology is growing at an unseen speed. In one century Technology has grown more than in our whole history before it, surely that is proof of the corresponding growth in the level of our civilization?

How do we value the level of civilization? By the amount of knowledge, art and science? Or is there a deeper measuring, based on other characteristics of humanity like the level of respect for life, the level of solidarity between people all over the world, the global state of human rights? Then there are hidden variables: the level of trust of people in the governing institutions, in the objectives of the industrial complex, in the honesty of science when it is changed into commercial science acting as a valet of the industry and economy, in the fairness of economy which seems to strive for the concentration of almost all wealth on earth into the hands of a shrinking group of individuals nearing the 1% of the population, in the honesty of the ecology and the care for the well-being of the planet itself, in the aims of the pharmaceutical industry and a non-exploitive health care system, in the state of health of the concept “democracy”.

There are no statistical results for the changes in the hidden variables over longer periods, in fact I know no statistics at all about the evolution of the spectrum of hidden variables. But based on 60 years of observing and active thinking about this (since I was 16) I concluded for myself that there is a problem with those hidden variables and the obvious gain in technological level seems to be correlated to an equally big decline in the values related to the other ingredients of “civilization”. When did this up and down shift started? You may have noticed I did not yet mention the military and their inclination towards war, but I will do it now. After the first World War the focus was on defence and preventing another such war from ever happening again, yet less than 25 years later it did happen again and then with some real genocides of unseen proportion mixed in. In times of war, research for new applications of science in the weapon industry flourish and the ethics of scientists is corrupted by patriotism and money, to wit the making and using of the atom bomb holding the world in a strangler’s grip since then. After the peace and the construction of the UN and also the state of Israel supported by the European guilt for the holocaust — which had several smaller branches in pogroms in many countries — the war did not really stop because we invented the cold war and the arms race continued until today. We did not learn — and it seems we never will — that arms do not serve the creation of peace, someday the newest arms — even those for mass destruction — will be used for doing the job they are made for: kill! Remember the so-called A-boms have been used already. The gun lobby says “guns do not kill people” , sure but some people with guns do; one type being the police and another type being criminals and criminals to be. With arms it is the same, the killing will be done by the army on the official side and terrorists (or countries in an axis of evil) on the other side — only it will be on an international macro-scale compared to the guns on the local scale — the difference being that the police can stop some of the criminality, but the army cannot stop war, it can win or loose but to create peace one needs the governments, politicians, diplomats or protesters like with the Vietnam war. Funny that the capitalist ideas do not apply to arms; looking at the global cost of all arms in this world and the material destruction and pollution they produce, the gain being some shifts in influence and power and also some gain by a few capitalist rebuilding companies does not seem to be value — and note I did not even include the cost in human life and happiness of people, which I would estimate near infinity — for money. Imagine all the funds lost this way would have been spent in a worldwide web of good health care, that would be a giant step forward! In a similar vein Big Pharma creates medicine which is so expensive (of course gains for the share-holders and executives are very high but not for the researchers who are treated like mercenaries) only a relatively small group can pay them while in systems with real national health support those prices take all the cream out of the institutions budgets leaving a version of thin skimmed milk not enabling the health institutes to do their real jobs. This links also to the recent attack on the middle class, the high inflation (which is not even the true picture of the uncontrolled rise of prices) of course also pushing more people into poverty, and the breaking down of acquired social rights. Now all of this is going on in the so-called civilised countries and the rest of the world is in between the state of underdevelopment and absolute poverty and chaos. How can the system keep people from revolting? Well, again after WWII they remembered the war-propaganda actually worked rather well and that became a strategy of spreading disinformation. Mind you, those shouting “fake news” the hardest are probably involved in the creation of it! First create a common enemy, for example immigrants, fugitives also called illegal even when all people are “legal” on earth, the creation of borders was probably more illegal. Secondly create fear for the enemy, make them criminals, drug-dealers, focus on every criminal act of some of them and do not talk about the exploitation as slave-laborers or the work they do for example as cleaners or in nursing, at low wages. Thirdly: dehumanize them, like Nazis did with the Jews and in Israel now is done with Palestinians which are not all in Hamas. All of this is nicely spread out over the mass media where it is better to be ignorant than not knowing everything you know is fake and wrong.

There is not enough space here to go to deep in the social analysis of the attitude changes in individuals over the past 40 years, perhaps it started to become clear after 1972 already, with the oil-crisis. Many conflicts and a lot of crises big and small — remember the great bank crisis making the financial weakness of the system very clear and also highlighting the unethical activities in the banking world — political scandals and terrorist attacks all over the world now combined with more serious effects of the climate change, it all leads to people being insecure and frightened, misinformed and uncertain about almost everything except the advertisements and the sports results. many withdraw inside fortresses if they are rich or inside themselves if they have no other place to go to, loneliness is a disease of these times and people take pills for everything, natural resistance is low. And while life is drifting into a deeper artificial state the future is in … artificial intelligence. Well there is maybe an unexpected reason, the average intelligence over the world is measured every decade by some worldwide intelligence test and the most recent outcome gave a decline of average intelligence by thirteen points. of course this proves the failure of the education system globally and the effect is more surprizing in the countries with the so-called highest level of civilization. Now the education of our children is the only good weapon we have for maintaining the civilization in the future; again, like for health care the financing of the education( for everyone!) systems is not a priority of governments but high gains in some pockets, high costs in megalomaniac projects, higher cost in defence and supporting wars, these are always important. Well let us see where that will lead us!

Returning to the hidden variables for civilization, I propose these are in rapid decline while technology is partially dwelling in gadgets, science becomes less fundamental and more commercial, culture becomes more superficial and art also very commercial,…, money covers everything with a layer of dirt…the filthy lucre. Decivilization meets climate change,… could these result from the same source: the greed and hybris of our species?