I’m not sure I trust a lot of the evidence that has been reported to me about “how functional is civilization?”. Information about this is heavily politicized, and anecdotes that reach me are selected for being outrageous.
How easy it is to maintain and improve the civilization, seems to be a fundamental political question. To put it simply, “civilization is super difficult, we should be grateful for the one we have and protect it at all costs” seems like the essence of conservatism; and “civilization is quite easy, we just need to destroy the current power structures and it will automatically rebuild in much better way” seems like the essence of progressivism.
How functional is the civilization, that is a bit more nuanced. A conservative might say something like “about as functional as we can reasonably expect (which is not perfect, because making an imperfect thing is already quite difficult), minus the things recently introduced by the progressives”; while a progressive might say something like “the things we have introduced recently are great, but there is still a long way to go”.
So in an ironic way, both would agree that we are kinda in the middle, but for very different reasons (in the middle of dismantling vs building the civilization). Similarly, both would provide outrageous anecdotes, but of a completely different type; and both would object against anecdotes provided by the other side.
How easy it is to maintain and improve the civilization, seems to be a fundamental political question. To put it simply, “civilization is super difficult, we should be grateful for the one we have and protect it at all costs” seems like the essence of conservatism; and “civilization is quite easy, we just need to destroy the current power structures and it will automatically rebuild in much better way” seems like the essence of progressivism.
How functional is the civilization, that is a bit more nuanced. A conservative might say something like “about as functional as we can reasonably expect (which is not perfect, because making an imperfect thing is already quite difficult), minus the things recently introduced by the progressives”; while a progressive might say something like “the things we have introduced recently are great, but there is still a long way to go”.
So in an ironic way, both would agree that we are kinda in the middle, but for very different reasons (in the middle of dismantling vs building the civilization). Similarly, both would provide outrageous anecdotes, but of a completely different type; and both would object against anecdotes provided by the other side.