In which I answer a question posed by a commenter at Fetch Me My Axe:
I like this logic, could be very interesting to apply it to other areas of life. Let’s see if we can think of some other things without which civilisations survived for thousands of years that we have today…
Cars;
Computers;
Universal suffrage (the Athenian city-state, for example, had very restricted suffrage in its democratic system, very few men, even, were allowed the vote);
Human rights are a fairly new invention, as is the concept of a “war crime”;
I wonder how many of these, and many other innovations it’s possible to list, the author of the above quotation would advocate doing without…?
I would recommend doing without universal suffrage, “human rights” and “war crimes”. The first subjects the citizenry to rule by an elite without accountability, the second is a popular fiction which is dependent upon those rights not conflicting with the granting authority – read your Universal Declaration of Human Rights and check out Article 29 section 3 if you didn’t understand that – and the concept of “war crimes” inherently presupposes a supra-national power that poses more potential danger to humanity than either war or war crimes.
I’m okay with cars and computers, though. You could certainly make a case against cars, but I don’t think it would be ultimately convincing.