The Ingratitude of the Well-Fed

We need to cultivate an appreciation for the abundance that modernity has bestowed instead of taking it for granted.

When I think of the unbroken chain of generations leading to our time and of everything they have built for us, I am humbled. I am overwhelmed with gratitude; shocked by the enormity of the inheritance and at the impossibility of returning even the smallest fraction of the favour.
~Toby Ord, The Precipice

Progress is our escape from the status quo of suffering, our ejection seat from history.
~Derek Thompson, The Atlantic

In my June essay “The Enlightenment’s Gravediggers,” I examined the curious phenomenon of anti-Western self-loathing as a supply-side effect. People everywhere like to complain about their life (the demand side), but only free societies offer abundant opportunities to do so with impunity (the supply side). As a result of this asymmetry, free societies become victims of their own success, subject to relentless self-criticism in a way that unfree societies largely are not.

But there is a more literal sense in which the hand of modernity feeds its critics. When the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote his diatribe against the pursuit of knowledge, science had yet to deliver tangible benefits to ordinary people. In the 17th century, visionaries like Francis Bacon were predicting that the accumulation of knowledge would eventually improve the conditions of human life, but at the time, most people still lived in abject poverty, children died in droves, farmers relied on muscle power and draught animals, and even the wealthiest king could succumb to a simple infection that is now treatable with cheap, insurance-covered antibiotics.

LOL, such a self-satisfied vision that all the author needs to add as his element of virtue signaling is the appreciation of infrastructure.

I have news for him: biology is burning to the ground in a mass extinction event due to a lack of appreciation for the "biological infrastructure" taken by force from aboriginal peoples worldwide. We pretend to "protect" those lands sitting in our urban hovels not recognizing their historic dependence upon managed disturbance.

Yet there is an industry to be developed in land management by people living in mobile light-impact and yet comfortable housing. The work itself is both physically and intellectually demanding. The life is quiet, with time to think. The results are both immensely satisfying and critical to national survival, long term. In other words, there is a way out from the future Mr. Boudry posits, one sustainable only by intact families caring for what G_d gave us over generations, protecting it from the witless ravages of agro-urban development by working in harmony with it.

“We need to cultivate an appreciation for the abundance that modernity has bestowed instead of taking it for granted.”

That’s the definition of the disease called “Affluenza”.

It’s rampant in this country and it won’t end well.

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