Would you be OK with that if the Cebulons wiped out 90% of the human population? Because that's at least the scale of the genocide we're talking about.
Doesn't this misconstrue DanielBMarkham's argument, though? There's no attempt to justify the act of genocide, merely to point out that Monbiot's response to it ignores substantive differences between the relative merits of Western culture versus Native American culture, and what's more, does so willfully in service of a particular political agenda.
When discussing genocide, pointing out the merits of those who conducted the genocide vs. those who were slaughtered constitutes an implicit justification of the act.
Imagine if descriptions of Nazi concentration camps included lengthy treatises on how Jewish culture was backwards and savage, while German culture was refined and noble. Would you find this appropriate, or even relevant in any way?
I think you guys have fallen off in the weeds somewhere.
The point wasn't that somehow Europeans were "right" in the way they treated the natives, any more than the natives were "right". My thesis is, given any two sufficiently distant cultures, any interaction between them, no matter how principled, will be traumatic to the lesser culture.
That doesn't mean I approve of the side-effects of interaction, or that I'm a believer in social darwinism, or that we should kill a million people in order to make drugs to extend the lives of the billions of other humans. These are all extreme positions that I do NOT take. I'm simply pointing out the patterns from the past, which I fully expect to continue in the future. My personal opinions have no bearing on this anymore than whether or not I like the beach has anything to do with the migratory patterns of sea turtles. It's an observation, not a value judgement.
Even when I say I would send my kids to the schools and such, what I'm saying is that we must do what we have to in order to survive as a species. Not that I approve or somehow would be complicit in it. I'm saying that the personal attitude of survival and not moaning over things lost is what makes us able to move forward no matter what position we are in.
The more interesting question would be if the aliens arrived with all sorts of goodies, much like the Europeans did. What if we could eliminate death? Eliminate suffering? Live more fuller lives? But what if the interaction was bound to kill 90% of the population no matter how well it was handled?
I'm not in charge of making decisions like that and I quite plainly refuse to do so, even in a rhetorical sense. I'm much happier describing my personal reaction to such an event than trying to figure out what's best for an entire species over the long run. That's way above my pay grade.
But it's not a matter of me good, them bad. It's more like "some cultures are better than others, and when two cultures get significantly far apart mixing them becomes extremely traumatic to the lesser one"
You want an answer to the Fermi Paradox? I think it's right here.
If you need to measure it, the only way I can think of is seeing which one that comes away from a conflict more intact. Cultures are competitive collections of people.
This strikes me as patently false-- it is perfectly possible to discuss the relative merits of those who conducted genocide versus their victims without justifying the act.
The problem with attributing these kind of motives to those with whom you disagree is that all discussion then shift away from the logical merits of various positions and into the decidedly illogical territory of whose voice you think this the most "authentic". In short, instead of asserting that your opponents have different positions then they actually do, perhaps its worth asking whether or not that is their position.
I'm objecting to the bizarrely flippant tone of the post.
"You can say goodbye to a lot of what people think of when they talk about human culture"? More like "You can say goodbye to a lot of humans". But that's nothing to worry about when the remaining humans will be part of a 'better culture', right?
