For some reason Bill Maher’s latest comedy/news video, “New Rules: Guilt by Civilization”, is age-restricted (it must be the photo of Bianca Censori in her see-through outfit) , but you can see it by clicking either here or on the “Watch on YouTube” line below.
The beginning is great, as Maher claims that the Democrats won’t win elections unless they stop doing land acknowledgments, which. as he shows, was made by , by Julianne Hough in a cringeworthy announcement that kicked off the Oscars this year (I had no idea!) He says, and I agree, “Either give the land back, or shut the fuck up.” He adds, with tongue in cheek, “If you want to thank a tribe for Hollywood, start with the Jews.”
Maher then moves on to New Zealand’s wokeness, noting the recent recognition of a mountain sacred to the Māori as a person having all the rights of a human. He takes down “the authority of the sacred victim” by simply asking, “Can we please get over this idea that ancient people weren’t just as full of shit—in fact, more full of shit—than humans today? It’s so simplistic—this idea of ‘guilt by civilization’—that the ancient and indigenous and not us was always better than us. It wasn’t.” He highlights some of the problems with ancient Māori civilization in a way that’s not going to go down well in New Zealand.
Maher points out all the advantages of modern, “civilized” life, like anesthetics, refrigeration, medicine, etc. and disses the “but-they-lived-in-harmony-with nature” trope. He admits that what the European invaders did to the Indians was “not good”, but also “not unusual” since Native American tribes were not only constantly warring with each other, but often enslaving each other.
His final touting of fairly steady progress since ancient times—progress both technological and moral—could have been taken from the pages of Steve Pinker’s books The Better Angels of our Nature or Enlightenment Now. Those books have received a lot of criticism, but it’s hard to deny the data they adduce. And if you want to reject their thesis of centuries long improvement in moral and bodily well-being—the same as Maher’s thesis here—ask yourself this: “Would you rather have lived your life in the 14th century–or now?” If you answer “now,” then you’d probably have already been dead years ago.
I saw that OMG on the mark.
I think Maher and his writers read PCC(E)’s website – maybe Wilfred Reilly’s latest book.
Hasty IMHO : Pinker’s thesis of progress is the only important one to use as a guide for anything – but this means a simultaneous rejection of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s competing notion of “progress”, which is religious (see the intoxicating Phenomenon of Man, etc.).
Acronym PCC(E) and sometimes PCC on this website. Maybe it’s an American thing, but could someone please enlighten this non- native English speaker (Norwegian) what these acronym mean.
Professor Ceiling Cat, and Professor Ceiling Cat (Emeritus), since he retired.
Thanks
I always refer to this website as WEIT, but of course I know about the cat looking down from the ceiling
In your last sentence, didn’t you mean to say:
If you answer “in the 14th century,” then you’d probably have already been dead years ago?
Several centuries, too!
Maher was good as always, but he could have referenced Justin Baldoni, too, rather than singling out Blake Lively.
I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to see this, since Maher clearly has no fear of winding people up, but even so that was amazing. With so much blather and nonsense being spouted these days, it seems he is one of the few people cutting to the chase and saying what needs to be said.
There have been times when I have thought Maher was a bit misguided (see some of his pandemic rants), but lately, whew, he has been really nailing it.
Thank you. I have thought and argued this for years. Humans are what we are and have changed very little over eons. That’s why we developed “rules” in the form of religions. My “tribe” developed 613 of them which were knocked back to 10 by subsequent “tribes”. Though our technologies have vastly improved, our instincts remain solidly in the 8th millennium BCE. Thus the repetion of history, land grabs, migrations of people, hoarding of wealth, ad infinitum. And now so easily available for all to see, and yet, here we are. Go figure.
Wealth is far more evenly distributed than in the ancient world. And land grabs, while not extinct, bring about talk of morality and opposition. We may not always follow rules of warfare, but the fact that we talk about them is itself significant progress.
While my bleeding heart loves what you say, the data does not support it. The oligarchs on display at the inauguration represented a sizable amount of American ownership, those being the three richest men in the world, Musk, Bezos & Zuckerberg.
And even earlier, as of late 2022, according to Snopes, 735 billionaires collectively possessed more wealth than the bottom half of U.S. households ($4.5 trillion and $4.1 trillion respectively).
While its true that we no longer make spectacle of chopping off people’s heads to satisfy the gods, we have found other equally horrendous methods of human torture which need no illustration.
So, while our amazing technology has given us much, we are still beholden to our ancient instinctual lust for power.
No longer tribes of 50 or a hundred subservient to a few, now we are hundreds of millions whose futures are at risk of modern serfdom in America.
Globally, especially in the south, Asia and Africa are in constant turmoil over land and migration. And when that migration moves north, western reactions have often been less than welcoming.
We are still in the dark ages. (Albeit with vaccines and hypersonic missiles.)
You write about the richest men in the world having so much more wealth than the bottom half. But that doesn’t make your point unless you can show me that bottom half today is worse off than the bottom half were centuries and millennia ago. You’ve only drawn half a comparison. That is like saying that Drysdale had a better season than Koufax because Drysdale won 19 games without bothering to tell me how many Koufax won. Economist Deidre McCloskey makes a convincing case (see her website) that the lower socioeconomic classes are much better off than they were centuries and millennia ago. Steven Pinker argues the same. We have not advanced over our ancient lust for power? I wonder if the Germans and Japanese would agree after we defeated them and then helped them to become robust democratic countries. With our nuclear superiority we could have made them our slave states. That’s what would have happened millennia ago. Want more moral progress? How about rights for women, the widespread abolishment of slavery, and social safety nets to care for the poor?
The lower classes in most of the world have clean water, polio vaccine, treatment for tuberculosis, and cell phones. Even the most fabulously wealthy person didn’t have any of those things, not even the first until about 1910 or so. Income inequality today is mostly a matter of envy, not actual privation.
Oh, Leslie, there was no arrow allowing me to reply to you directly, but you ABSOLUTELY nailed it. I hope you see this.
For anyone interested, there is a great book written by former Senator Phil Graham and two others titled The Myth of American Inequality. Here is Amazon’s description of it:
Everything you know about income inequality, poverty, and other measures of economic well-being in America is wrong. In this provocative book, a former United States senator, eminent economist, and a former senior leader at the Bureau of Labor Statistics challenge the prevailing consensus that income inequality is a growing threat to American society. By taking readers on a deep dive into the way government measures economic well-being, they demonstrate that our official statistics dramatically overstate inequality. Getting the facts straight reveals that the key measures of well-being are greater than the official statistics of the country would lead us to believe. Income inequality is lower today than at any time in post- World War II America. The facts reveal a very different and better America than the one that is currently described by policy advocates across much of the political spectrum. The Myth of American Inequality provides clear and convincing evidence that the American Dream is alive and well.
Phil, you can be as rosey as as the morning dew, which in many ways, I admire, but the brutal, ancient lust for power and dominance is globally on the rise, right now, even as I type. Per my original point, technology is always changing but human instinct remains tribal, brutal and unchanged.
I did, thanks!
Deborah, you wrote above that we still live in the dark ages. Perhaps that is the crux of the disagreement between us. I believe that rational thought and science have led us out of the Dark Ages. We are living in the best of times (with even better times, I believe, to come). Some places, Africa especially, have been slower to leave the era of superstition and intolerance behind, but don’t think that Africans will stay down forever. According to africanews.com, “Healthy life expectancy in the African region has increased on average by 10 years per person between 2000 and 2019, a World Health Organization (WHO) assessment reports. This rise is greater than in any other region of the world during the same period.” That’s staggering: a decade of more life in just 19 years!
The parts of the world touched by the Enlightenment have shown that humans need not remain nasty and brutish forever. Do not rights for women, the outlawing of slavery, rights for children, rights for those who don’t happen to be heterosexual, the establishment of social safety nets, the establishment of rules of warfare (even if they are not always followed), freedom of speech and religion (and I could go on), all point toward significant moral improvement over the lives of those under the thumb of the Roman Emperor, or the Aztec King, or Genghis Khan, or the Papacy?
Aggression (defense) is indeed one of the recognized human instincts, but so is social bonding. And that is what I think you fail to give its due. As someone once said, “We are the products of our genes, but we are not slaves to them.” Social bonding has made us more caring (do you think Red Cross vans followed in the wake of the Assyrian Army to care for the injured?) and less tribal (as evidenced by the forming of nations, and then organizations of nations, like the UN, the World Trade Organization, and the International Criminal Court). Who, 75 years ago, could have imagined Jews and Arabs living together in peace in Israel with Arabs serving in the Israeli government? Of course, we all long for that day that they can also live together in peace in Arab nations. But one step at a time. Another way to see that we are not as tribal as we used to be is quite simple: just notice the great increase in interracial marriages around the world.
Despite a far greater population, the first quarter of this century has seen far less death by warfare than the first quarter of the previous century. And the last century as a whole, even with its two world wars, was less deadly than the century before that (See Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature for the documentation).
I’ll close by reminding you of a point I made before: We have not advanced over our ancient lust for power? I wonder if the Germans and Japanese would agree after we defeated them and then helped them to become robust democratic countries. With our nuclear superiority we could have made them our slave states. That’s what would have happened millennia ago. [or even centuries ago]
Oh, you’re welcome! You said so much in so few words, a skill I sadly lack. All the best.