Are issues like poverty/violence byproducts of modernizing?

Humans in the 21st century are still working with the brains that our ancestors had for the past 50,000 years, yet we've technologically changed and advanced so much in the past 200 years that the brain hasn't had time to catch up. Evolution is a process that takes thousands to millions of years, not mere hundreds. The technological advancement and the way of living has changed humans so much that if you teleported a man living in the 1400s to the 2010s, he'd probably die of shock. It would be culture shock multiplied by a thousand.

There is no way this profound change in the way we live our lives wasn't without consequences. The world of the 21st century is still moving forward technologically, and quickly too. Surely issues like poverty, terrorism, and even mental health disorders at least partially owe their existence to mankind's sudden lust for technological and social advancement and change? Surely the rapid changes in the way we live life made changes on the brain, right?

Am I on to something or just thinking too much (aka spouting bullshit)?

No, violence and poverty have most definitely always been around

No. Violence and poverty has existed long before the emergence of modern day technology. So has mental health disorders.

Man I can only imagine how shitty it would be to have paranoid schizophrenia in a hunter gatherer group. You'd probably get kicked out of the group and left to die in the wilderness. D:

this. it's only in recent history that "middle class" has even existed. most of human history has been a few wealthy and a whole lot of impoverished

even if we are dealing with old hardware, it is very adaptable.

we'll get by

Hmmm...by today's standards, hunter gatherers would definitely be considered impoverished, but that's how we lived for the past 100,000 years. In my opinion, poverty popped up when governments, economies, and money started being the way most people live. It started when income inequality became a thing.

The average Middle Easterner, Latin American, and African would probably disagree.

So.......basically throughout entire human history.

LOL no. Everyone was a hunter gatherer up until 10,000 years ago with the agricultural revolution. This allowed people to stay in one place for a long time, which gave rise to cities and governments, which led to jobs and money. Most of human history comprises groups of 50-100 people walking around scavenging for food and surviving the elements like any other animal.

I probably should have said throughout human civilization, but what does that matter to your original question? Poverty and violence is nothing new.

While slow changes can transpire over the course of thousands of years, tens of thousands, or even more, they can also transpire in as little as one to two generations in processes known as genetic drift, mutation, migration, and natural selection.

http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/evo_16

As for the rest, you might be onto something. Why not research it?

Given how long humans have been around, I would agree that violence is nothing new. Poverty, however, has really only existed as long as as governments, economies, and money have existed, which isn't long when compared to humans' 200,000 years of existence. Violence may be nothing new, but the ancient yet creative brain has figured out how to kill more effectively and quickly in the past 1,000 years. This is totally the result of increased technological advancement, yes?

Wut

great wall was made to keep out islam

Ooohhhh

Poverty, violence and mental health disorders have always been around, although poverty and mental health have changed significantly.

Developing countries are now kept in poverty so that people in developed countries can take advantage of the cheap labour and materials (sweatshops, cocoa beans etc) and poverty relative to developed countries is people being kept on minimum wage and zero-hour contracts so CEOs can pocket the savings from everyone else, which is why CEO salaries rose enormously during the "recession". Fortunately, poverty relative to developed countries for the most part means not being able to afford to buy the latest gadgets.

Mental health issues have been rising constantly, partially due to stresses and pressures of the modern world and partly due to how many psychological disorders are being discovered and made up by DSM.

Are issues like poverty/violence byproducts of modernizing?

NO

They become more evident thanks to modern day means of communication but they have always been there. Obviously, larger populations mean statistically more cases of poverty and violence.

no, violence and poverty go down as countries modernize.

You picked the wrong problems for the wrong 'change'.

@gamerguru100: Your point makes little sense.. If you look at the actual statistics, violence is down, poverty is down, life expectancy is up, literacy is up.... You make it sound like that these are new problems that much worse now, which is in fact not true what so ever... It's strange you bring the 1400s era, a much more violent, poverty stricken time... I am sure the man would be awestruck from the common things we depend on in life that we take fore granted every day. This idea that mental illness didn't exist back in those days or at far less numbers is patently absurd.... Oh you think our times are stressful? Yeah no.

Want to know how times have changed? We had people freaking the **** out with Ebola which only claimed a few people in the US and around a few thousand people infected in third world countries... Meanwhile in eras like that one and earlier we had things like the black death claim over 50% of the population places like Europe, to the point they couldn't bury the bodies fast enough.

No it wasn't. China had been building large walls around their borders for around a thousand years before Islam even came into existence.

The great wall was basically a reconstruction of those old walls and merged into one huge wall. It was done primarily to keep out the Mongolians who were mainly Buddhists.

In Europe, the US, and much of East Asia, yes. But what about most of Africa, Latin America, and the Indian subcontinent?

No. But, I mean, modernization in effect created the definitions of income inequality, consumerism, etc. as we know them today. If there wasn't any psychological acceptance of the terms then there would not be any of those things in theory. I don't think it's just a game of semantics though. All these things contribute to poverty and violence, some in less tangible degrees. But I believe in a butterfly effect like model going on with everything we accept universally to be true, or for things we're completely ignorant of for that matter. There has always been violence and poverty, but, I think the nature of it now is worse, though there may be less. I don't think you'd even have to go back thousands of years to satisfy that claim. The Native Americans took the scalp of their enemies as a sign of their dominion or whatever, now it's like some guy skins his girlfriend because he likes to make her parts into furniture. Where does that come from? Overall, in light of mankinds history, modernization is a good thing. I don't think it's sustainable if business practices aren't checked.

Which is weird considering how developed countries should be considerably more stress free compared to war torn poverty stricken countries.

You might be on to something ! I mean what if some special ed peeps aren't slow, what if they are just from a different time and age. Hmmmm ?

LOL I was in special ed in public school. I'm 22, in university, and still pretty slow sometimes.

Such plagues have always been around. They simply adapt to the era.

What the Christ?

Why in your right mind do you think that poverty, violence, and frigging mental health problems are because of modernizing?

To clarify, I hypothesize that there might be reason for additional or more severe poverty and triggers for sickness rather than there being none before civilization.

The average person (in any place) is the last person you should ever ask to get a reliable statistical trend for anything. This is the sort of thing that human intuition is utterly incapable of determining. Read Steven Pinker's book "The Better Angels of Our Nature" for pretty irrefutable evidence that violence has dropped hugely over human history. The reason most people think the exact opposite is because of what's known as the Availability Heuristic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic).

As for poverty. The thing that you'll almost never get told is that there are really 2 different definitions of poverty. The left wing and right wing versions (they're never called that but that's who uses them). The left wing tends to define poverty in terms of relative income. It's important to point out that that guarantees that poverty always exists (unless everyone's earning the same, which will never happen). The right wing version is defined in terms of total wealth. By this definition, poverty has almost entirely been eradicated in the developed world. Someone born into modern day left-wing poverty is richer than a king was 2000 years ago by the right wing definition.

So to answer your question, by the left-wing version the modern world has created poverty in a sense because it's created these vast interconnected societies where the people on the bottom feel much worse because they're more aware of how many people are above them (although it hasn't created the initial imbalances, that's mostly biology). By the right-wing version, no the modern world is the only reason we're not ALL poor. Which is essentially what we used to be. The scientific, industrial and technological revolutions have been responsible for vastly increasing the amount of total wealth for almost everyone they've touched.

It's really worth trying to understand these differences so when you have someone from either the left-wing or right-wing trying to emotionally get you on board a particular agenda, you can analyse exactly what they're saying instead of just letting yourself be conditioned to react to single words in the way they want you to.

Thanks for the informed reply instead of a "WTF" comment that people keep throwing around. :P

Maybe you're referring to relative poverty and the scale of violence?

It's pretty clear that both relative poverty and the scale of violence is greater now than it was 100,000 years ago due precisely to more modern constructs. Technology directly increases the scale of potential violence through devices such as atomic bombs and biological weapons, to name some extreme examples. Relative poverty is increased through technology as well (or, more precisely, the use of that technology and capital to create more wealth/capital). Of course, this is also an affect of scale, as it allows one to gain wealth beyond the means of their own labor.

I'm pretty sure a king 2000 years ago would be able to house and feed himself.

Sure no problem.

Although I should correct 1 ambiguity. When I said imbalances down to biology, I meant that in terms of 1 individual to the next. That could've been interpreted as me saying that maybe some races are biologically superior to others. Which I don't think is true. I think the inequality between races is a product of differences in culture and historical accidents.

You're making the exact mistake I was trying to warn about. You're using concepts that contain social assumptions and aren't simply a matter of total material wealth. Any time you bring a social aspect into it as well, well then yes it becomes hugely relative to the society you're in and it's probably going to be better as a king. That's why I was trying to stress the importance of defining it in terms of total material wealth. In that sense, yes I think the modern "poor" person is definitely better off. But you'd have to unpack the concepts of "house" and "feed" and redefinine in the proper ways in order to gauge that. But you also have to keep in mind that poverty isn't just defined in terms of those 2 things. You'd also have to include all of the other things that a modern poor person has that a king did not. All of the technology on offer to them, the healthcare etc etc.

Poverty in the strict use of the word is almost non-existent. You can't be living in poverty and still have a home, car, cell phone, and television. At least from the historical definition of poverty. If anything modernization has eliminated strict poverty. We are far richer now then in all of human history. Violence and threat of violence is also far less common. We are protected with alarm systems, sophisticated surveillance, and highly specialized police forces. Does this mean we are completely violence free? Of course not, but we don't go to bed at night in fear that renegades will break in an kill us. Modernization has eliminated many of these problems humanity has faced throughout most of it's existence. The world still isn't perfect but it's a far cry better then it has been throughout history.

poverty is a real issue. competing against cheap labor sucks, i'll tell ya. ever since i lost my job here, it's been a rough ride. i have to take up 2 jobs, one at burger king and one at chipotle, just to get by. it's rough but i know people will come around to my reviews one day :)

they are linked though, with poverty comes crime

And it has been decreasing with the advancement of technology.

OK, please enlighten me. How are the following people more wealthy than a king 2000 ago?

A person sleeping under the boardwalk in Miami

People sharing tents on public land who now have to relocate because the city kicked them off that land

People sleeping in the lobby of the public library during the winter so they don't freeze to death (a friend of mine risked his job to make that happen - really good guy)

A child who insists on taking half of her school lunch home with her to her mother so she can eat

Well some of those might be more wealthy, I have no idea because once again you've defined them in terms of just 1 or 2 aspects instead of their total wealth.

But you're changing what I was saying. I never said the very bottom of modern society was wealthier than a king. I said what's often meant by left-wing poverty in the west is wealthier than a king. In europe, the left-wing definition of poverty is something like "Less than 50% of the median income". Which is the whole point I was trying to get at that you really need to unpack these concepts so you're not just pulled into political agendas based on confusion with words.

I'm pretty sure both of those things have always been around, and are in fact decreasing as civilizations modernize. So no?

They get medical attention, they have protection under the government and basic laws of the society.

.. They have received some of the biggest improvements in the past few decades of anyone.. Look up their average life expectancies currently and only a few decades ago, it is staggering. Same goes for things like education and literacy.. This idea that you some how think time periods like the 1400s are more peaceful and less stressful is absolute bullshit.. Its just like those jackasses at the Renaissance festival who love to act and talk about how great the Middle Ages and High Middle Ages are compared today.. Without reading a single page in a history text in those time periods.. The collective world has seen massive improvements in the wellbeing of humans.. Sure horrible things still happen, but clearly your completely ignorant of the horrible things that happen throughout human history if your acting like things are worse than they have ever been.