Lots of things have existed throughout history, yet we have overcome them in the last few hundred years. There is peace in Europe (west of Russia) which had as ancient conflict as Yemen; there is democracy, freedom, women have equal rights in much of the world, starvation and many diseases are mostly overcome, warfare is very rare and not an omnipresent threat, ...

Thank goodness our predecessors didn't think this way. They thought that through reason, hard word, and humanism they could overcome these things, and they did. No doubt there were plenty of naysayers.

What will we do with our turn?

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laughing_man 31 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I wouldn't get too complacent about peace in Europe. The peace in the last 80 years or so was the result of very specific conditions that no longer apply.

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boringg 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

While I commend the positive attitude and I tend to have a positive view on the trajectory of humanity.

This part of the planet has been almost intractable since the age of Hammurabi - it is quite fractured without any current overarching unity or framework. There isn't a dominant religion (similar to Europe) or shared values. I could say almost meaningless things like "thought that through reason, hard word, and humanism they could overcome these things" which would make little of the hard truths of the long histories of the varied peoples and fractions of the area.

It would almost seem naive to say things like because we've solved some tough problems in the last century we can solve all problems.

I think you gloss over much and certainly give yourself a mightier than thou feeling with your "Thank goodness our predecessors didn't think this way".

I too hope for peaceful resolution and stability but fall back to the historic record of success especially in a place that is constantly, recently and historically decimated by war among fiefdoms.

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ifwinterco 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Europe didn’t have a common religion after the Reformation (at least not in the sense people who lived there at the time would recognise).

In fact it was wars with a strong religious element between Protestant and catholic factions that tore Europe apart for centuries afterwards

	▲	usrnm 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Europe didn't have a common religion before the reformation as well. There were literal crusades inside Europe including against other christians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Crusades

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fakedang 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

No dominant religion in the Middle East? Haha!

The reason is fractured is because of the inherent tribalism within the cultures of the region. Strip away the tribalism (Oman, Qatar, UAE to an extent), concentrate the people near a few cities (Egypt), or provide them a unifying overarching culture (Iran, Turkey), and you get some success. In fact, the early Islamic empires were heavily mired in infighting even though they were "unified" under the Caliphate, in spite of the Prophet's calls for the "Ummah" (One Islamic Nation). I would even argue that Islam's biggest contribution to the region was in providing a specific administrative framework with which to shed the tribal infighting and unite culturally similar but disparate peoples together. It's also why Israel succeeded as a nation with its European flavor of nation-state identity.

An Israeli intelligence officer perhaps correctly attributed it to the past culture of water scarcity and needing to protect your water sources. That is, in the desert, there are only so many sources of water, and if someone steals it away from you, you simply die. So that created a culture of inherent suspicion of outsiders and people outside the clan, even though they all share the same customs and culture.