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That chart shows quakes with a magnitude over 7.4. I think we have good records of the larger quakes in the 1900s. Maybe not. That’s nothing in geological terms, it’s practically meaningless (nothing personal!). I’d imagine there were horrific quakes after the end of the last Ice Age as the land recoiled from being buried for so long under heavy ice, or when the Black Sea filled up. I think the following are BIG concerns for our time (globally):
War, mass extinction, habitat destruction on a massive scale, famine, peak oil, energy generation, lack of clean drinking water, ozone hole (still there), overpopulation, drugs on a huge scale, irradiation and pollution, religious fundamentalism, overfishing, melting ice & rising sea levels, genocide, mass surveillance, the military-industrial complex, multinational monopolies, nuclear weapons being readily available and the potential to wipe all life off the face of the Earth.
Some of these are problems never faced before, others old problems but on scales we’ve never had before.
While I can see the arguments for saying it’s gotten worse I have thought there’s two reasons that help account for this. One is the law of large numbers. The world population has doubled in the last century. I would expect the number of horrific incidents to double as well.
Two is modern communication. Anytime some disaster happens or a massacre happens we know about it. Doesn’t matter where in the world. It makes it seem like it’s happening very frequently when really we’re just hearing about it all the time.
A couple of years ago I missed being in the Japanese tsunami by a couple of weeks. Places in Sendai where I’d stood just 2 weeks before were just washed away. I have friends there (all OK thankfully). After the tsunami it took about a day for me to hear they were ok. Mobile generators and cell towers helped them communicate. It was a miracle, truly.
Meanwhile the video was being broadcast 24 hours a day. The news channels updating casualty counts constantly. The whole world watched it all happening. I bet 150 years ago the same tsunami would have gotten a half page story in a newspaper days or weeks after it happened. Instead of hyper focus being on it the world would have collectively said “that sucks” and moved on. Also the population would have been tiny in comparison.
Unfortunately I think since tragedy is a part of the human experience the more humans the more tragedy. I don’t really think we can avoid natural disasters increasing in lethality. We should be stopping wars but honestly WW2 pales in comparison to past wars. Perhaps 1-2% of the world population died. China has had several wars in medieval times that killed 5% or more of world population and the mongol conquests killed possibly 17%. And that was 800 years ago. The old testament has Israelites committing genocide. Africa and mesoamerica have always been violent–they just have guns and a lot more people now.
The world has always been a violent place. Heck who knows what percentage of the population died when Cain killed Abel.
I don’t mean to sound morbid but I think the idea that its worsening is overblown. Disease, poverty, hunger, even war are all down in the last 50 years. We’ve been largely making progress. No country in western Europe has been in open war with another since 1945. That’s almost 70 years. Find another period of 70 years of peace in western Europe. Its hard…
In the US we lost more soldiers in the civil war than all years since. 2 world wars, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Korea, Philippines insurrection, spanish-american war, and who knows how many interventions in other countries and in all that time we haven’t equalled a 5 year period from 1860-1865.
I have running water, vaccines, food, this computer, electricity, subsidized education… I know most still don’t have all these but we’ve made progress.
Far from worse I think we are getting better. I know I don’t always sound it but I’m an idealist at heart and i really believe this.
The problem I have with people watching the world “get worse” until Jesus comes and saves us is that it turns people into doomsday preppers. People wanting to make sure they have a year’s worth of ammo to defend a year’s worth of food. Like Jesus would want them to shoot their hungry neighbors asking for help.
Instead of waiting for Zion to come we need to be building it.
wuwei wrote:The world has always been a violent place. Heck who knows what percentage of the population died when Cain killed Abel.
I don’t mean to sound morbid but I think the idea that its worsening is overblown. Disease, poverty, hunger, even war are all down in the last 50 years. We’ve been largely making progress. No country in western Europe has been in open war with another since 1945. That’s almost 70 years. Find another period of 70 years of peace in western Europe. Its hard…
In the US we lost more soldiers in the civil war than all years since. 2 world wars, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Korea, Philippines insurrection, spanish-american war, and who knows how many interventions in other countries and in all that time we haven’t equalled a 5 year period from 1860-1865.
I have running water, vaccines, food, this computer, electricity, subsidized education… I know most still don’t have all these but we’ve made progress.
Far from worse I think we are getting better. I know I don’t always sound it but I’m an idealist at heart and i really believe this.
The problem I have with people watching the world “get worse” until Jesus comes and saves us is that it turns people into doomsday preppers. People wanting to make sure they have a year’s worth of ammo to defend a year’s worth of food. Like Jesus would want them to shoot their hungry neighbors asking for help.
Instead of waiting for Zion to come we need to be building it.
Amen. This is an extraordinary reply to a topic I personally loathe. the nostalgic worlview that things were somehow better in the past, coupled with the idea that the future is bleak, removes us from the present reality. it is a manipulation that does not bring us cliser to the ultimate present reality: the “I AM”, the eternal moment.I first came to these boards as a result of my contempt for the eschatatogical worldview that thins are getting worse. my first post on NOM started this way:
wayfarer wrote:I was sitting in HP group last Sunday as the topic of ‘signs of the times’ was being discussed. Paying as little attention as I could, the teacher evidently was having each of the group identify one sign of the times, and then called out my name.
Coming to my senses, I exclaimed, “You know, I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in this topic. Personally, it seems to me that Jesus said in Matthew 24 that ‘all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet’ — basically means that there is no correlation between earthquakes, wars, rumors of war, and everything else we have just listed and the coming of Christ. For two thousand years people have been trying to read signs to no avail, and all it seems to do is scare the crap of us. What’s the point?”
Needless to say, the reception to my comment wasn’t very warm, but I was encouraged with the dialog started to go to “You know, it seems like our ‘second coming’ could come at any time, so we probably need to live each day as if it’s our last…”
I feel a little bad about ruining the teacher’s lesson — his heart is in the right place, but it’s such a misplaced topic. After the lesson, a former bishop sent out an email to the entire group with an Ensign Article from Dallin Oaks about how we should study the signs…
(sigh)
I wrote this in 2011. Since then, Pres Uchtdorf wrote an article in the Ensign saying, “we are in the middle of our eternal lives”, and even BKP distanced us from the idea that the big one is about to happen. i feel a bit vindicated.sieze the moment. we have no control over the past, but we can make a difference today in our attitude. adopting a wordview that things are getting worse is destructive to our ability to be grateful for the glorious present, and absolves us of our responsibility to authentically be engaged in the here and now.
There are at least 150 wars going on right now. Around seventy million people have died in wars since 1945, That’s excluding people whose families are still affected by nuclear related genetc defects in Japan, or the use of depleted uranium, or chemical weapons. As for Western Europe, it is more peaceful, but one can still see the fruits of British colonialism in Northern Ireland with attendant violence (Good Friday hasn’t ended at at all); rioting (incl. race riots) and police-related deaths; the Basque conflict and various other terrorist groups, which include the Baader-Meinhof, Brigada Rossa, Muslim groups and animal rights folk.
EU states which have been at war in this period (not necessarily in western Europe) i
Thanks to my phone, the end of the last message keeps on going missing. The following EU members have been to war since WWII, not all in Western Europe:
UK (at least *twenty five times*, five under Tony Blair), France (from Algeria and Indo-China to present day Mali), Portugal, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany (ironically not much of a participating role), Greece, Cyprus, Slovenia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia (as it then was), Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia
The UK and France come off this list as the most bloodthirsty.
That’s the ones I can think of. Probably Austria, Denmark and Sweden too.
Non-EU European states (not all recognised) which have been to war since WWII:
USSR, Yugoslavia, Albania, Kosovo, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia, Croatia, Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova, Transnistria, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Chechnya, North Ossetia, South Ossetia, Ingushetia, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Abkhazia, FYR Macedonia, Nagorno-Karabakh, Kazakhstan (like Turkey slightly just within Europe)
Possibly Norway. Mostly Caucasus & Former Yugoslavia, but not all. Many of these are within the past twenty years.
Wars the UK has been involved in (off the top of my head and excluding Ireland) since WWII including covert support: *Afghanistan (twice – supplied arms to Mujahadeen), *Iraq (twice), Sierra Leone, *Cyprus, *Bosnia, *Kosovo, *Malaya, *Falklands, Kenya (Mau Mau), Israel-Palestine (started under end of British occupation), Rhodesia (Zimbabwe on at least one occasion), *Suez, India-Pakistan (started under end of British occupation), Seychelles, Syria, Libya, *Korea, Bougainville, Angola, Congo, Honduras, Biafra, Mali
Also armed Iraq during war against Iran, some possible involvement in Burma and Sri Lanka, Sudan and Haiti.
If I started mentioning all the wars that the USA has been involved in since WWII, I’d be here all day.
European States which have not been to war since WWII: Iceland: But also NATO member with American base, with one group of territorial disputes with UK verging on violence and military stand offs see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cod_Wars Republic of Ireland; Territorial dispute with UK, base for one of the most violent terrorist movements in modern Europe e.g. IRA, INLA, Provos etc, supplies troops to UN. Irish citizens have always been entitled to fight in British Military (see above) and many have.
?Finland: Territorial disputes with Russia and Sweden, may have sent troops overseas. NATO involvement at some level.
?Poland: Poles work in British and French armies, Warsaw Pact, NATO, prob send/sent troops elsewhere.
?Malta: Appears to be still partly supplying British Navy.
Microstates and bankers: Switzerland, Luxembourg, Andorra, Lichtenstein, Monaco, San Marino, Vatican.
Bankers directly fund wars and gun runners and manufacture weapons. Lichtenstein produced ball bearing used in machine guns, gun turrets, caterpillar tracks etc.
Iceland, Andorra, Monaco, San Marino and Lichtenstein have no military of their own, Switzerland supplies Vatican and Lichtenstein military, USA had base in Iceland, several of these microstates would be defended by neighbors.
Not a very impressive list. The truth is that Europeans don’t fight much at home anymore (the Balkans and the Caucasus excepted), but
they are exporting war elsewhere, and have massive arms industriesnotably UK, France, Switzerland, Germany and Russia. Sam, I agree that the scale of war has risen dramatically as the world-wide population has increased exponentially – but I am a history teacher by training and inclination, and I know that the general pattern of war hasn’t changed one bit in thousands of years. Nations have fought nations and people have killed people for as long as we have recorded history. Furthermore, every degradation that exists now has existed previously. I honestly don’t believe we have any new sins now that haven’t existed for a long, long time. I believe the extremes have gotten more extreme, at both the good and bad end of the spectrum – so I wouldn’t say the world is getting worse. Rather, I might say the world’s extremes are getting more pronounced and distant – but then I would quibble with myself about that.
Perhaps, I would say that both good and bad are getting more efficient and numerous. In other words, I would frame it in numerical, mathematical terms rather than moral terms.
Quote:The general pattern of war hasn’t changed one bit in thousands of years
Disagree – could the Mongols wipe out hundreds of thousands or even millions in a minute or less? We can. We can easily terminate all multicellular life on the surface of the planet, if we wish to or make it permanently uninhabitable.We also now have weapons that make those of WWII look like peashooters.
Thank you wuwei and wayfarer and ray. It is easy to come to conclusions to the negative and even far negative in this by looking at a small scale if human history of hundreds or even several thousand years and forget about the almost 100,000 years of human history and its cycle. It has its cycle of ups and downs but on the whole has made much progress. You simply can’t look at numbers and compare with the past that would be like comparing numbers of Los Angeles and New York to a small town. Percent of population is vital to coming to a more logical
Conclusion. Likewise, women gays, minorities and the amount of people starting to take a stand for responsibility Nd accountability of the earth and its creatures has improved greatly.
Sam the fact that weapons become more powerful and seemingly more people “could potentially” be destroyed is irealivent to the question “is the world getting worse”. Wether it’s 1% of population in 1 day or a year dies not adjust the slider for “more evil”. It’s still a handful of men making those decisions and not the % of population growing bigger and bigger deciding these things. It’s more objective to look at it at % of population making destructive decisions to another or earth. Looking back at all the entire history aviadable, it can’t be said that a bigger or much bigger % if population is acting more evil then before. The data doesn’t support this. Simeraly these claims have been made for 1000s of years by quite a few people. It’s even more common then the claim that it’s the latter days and Jesus will arrive “soon”.
On the whole for the world being ever more mixed of beliefs together and crowded as it is I am surprised it isn’t far worse. We have come a long ways in the whole. But I feel like the law if physics, you take or add to one thing only to take or add
From another.
The biggest draw back to hearing “the world is getting worse” in a frequent basis is that it can drastically impact a good % of population into a chronic negative thinking and severe depression. It’s well studied and known the huge emotional impact this has on a good % of the population because of the way the human mind works.
It also promotes people to wait of a second coming instead offline Zion for themselves(which we are fully capable of). Don’t wait for the world to be better by a second coming, make it better by educating and sharing compassion where ever you go.
My point is that war has never gone away, but the weapons get worse. WMDs have opened Pandora’s Box. The greatest tragedy is the combination of industry and with war.
Huge sections of the American, European, Israeli etc economies are devoted to making weapons. Arms now constitute the biggest manufacturing industry in the UK, a situation which has only arisen since the 1980s. Some US weapons have a component built in every state. War pays.
Quote:My point is that war has never gone away, but the weapons get worse.
Sam, we are agreeing with each other on that point.
I said the
SCALEof war has changed dramatically (due to the evolution of weaponry and the explosion of population), but the PATTERNof war has remained the same. War, in the case of the most industrialized countries, also has become more impersonal in some ways (drone planes killing people in almost a video game fashion), and that is a terrible thing – but so was the carnage of older wars fought exclusively hand-to-hand and leaving a higher population maimed physically. SamBee wrote:My point is that war has never gone away, but the weapons get worse. WMDs have opened Pandora’s Box.
The greatest tragedy is the combination of industry and with war.
Huge sections of the American, European, Israeli etc economies are devoted to making weapons. Arms now constitute the biggest manufacturing industry in the UK, a situation which has only arisen since the 1980s. Some US weapons have a component built in every state. War pays.
sambee, i am so not on the same page as you are on this.most of the examples you lay out are at this point moot. i am currently, professionally involved in around forty nations’ border protection programmes, and most nations, today, are eager to facilitate travel and trade rather than continue internecine tribal conflicts. while there are rogue states and individuals, by far and large, the world is far more interested in mammon than in warfare.
as for nuclear annihilation, the cold war was in fact more of a cold peace. mutually assurred destruction kept most staes at peace.
Some of my comments about Europe appear to have been misinterpreted… I think others have already argued back though. Thanks.
Ultimately I am passionate about this. I hate the idea that the world is going to get impossibly evil and horrible and have to be cleansed. Is this imminent, NO!
You might say it was prophesied…well so was the destruction of Ninevah.
Why we tend to think God would prefer cleansing the earth with fire to humans repenting and improving and solving our own problems is beyond me.
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