Our civilisations1 progressed a lot within relatively short timespan.
150 years ago, western medicine wasn’t efficient in treating issues of our brains/minds, didn’t understand underlying mechanisms for most of our bodily functions, and effectively couldn’t do much to extend our healthspans/lifespans. Today, we consider applying leeches as at best some supporting, exotic method - treating hypertension with them today would be very silly.
Huge leaps in science and technology probably made average westerner’s life more convenient than some of the monarchs of yore. I can communicate with you in a matter of seconds. Get my detailed portrait within a minute, with dinosaurs in the background, if I choose to. Technology is great nowadays, but won’t ever solve all our problems.
Yet I think that progress within these three fields, undoubtedly grand, is still something dwarfed by the development of our political philosophy and governance systems, resulting on a raise of liberal democracies. No matter how many issues we can find within them, if you were to be born again in any chosen society with random chance of getting into lowest depth or highest elites of it, I bet that you would take a chance in one of modern liberal democracies.
And liberal project is so new as well! Few hundred years after the theory was created, we are relatively free to live as we want.
After it was fully established in rebelling colonies of the New World (in Bill of Rights, not USA’s Constitution directly), it took considerable amount of time to match theory (my freedoms are only limited by freedoms of others and treating others as essentially equal) with practice:
- Many years passed until slavery got abolished.
- Even more time passed until people of colour became treated equally (at least by law).
- Then women, half of population, had to fight for getting equal(-ish) rights (let’s skip equality of outcomes vs equality of opportunities topic for now…)
It’s worth noticing this a perspective - what next generations might think of us and our customs, when we imagine them looking from perspective of continuing development in same spirit as drawn here, but in year 2200?
Famous misquote says: “The measure of a civilization is how it treats its weakest members”.
Maybe it is time to treat other species with compassion and respect?
Footnotes
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Sic! Plural. I find word Civilisation to bear too much of europe/west -centric baggage, even if I belong, identify as its product, and praise many of its outputs… ↩