Demons everywhere!

(graphic from FreeClipartNow)

Here's an interesting post at Evolving Thoughts:

Take a deep breath and relax. These demons are not about to unleash hell upon you. ...

Look, the internet is nothing at heart more complex than other forms of public communication, like a noticeboard in a hallway. You pin open and private notes to the board, to be read by all and individuals. Sometimes others read what you put on that board who you didn’t intend to, so you take precautions, right? You don’t put private details that you do not want everyone to read on that noticeboard. ...

These are not the demons that they are painted to be, and we have a lot of demons to choose from these days. Child abuse is one of them. I doubt that there is any more child abuse today, proportionally, than there was in 1900, 1950 or even 20,000 BCE. Humans tend to treat their kids much the same in all places. What has changed is not the rate of abuse, but the reporting, and when you can hear about things daily that happen thousands of kilometres away rather than only in your own village or suburb, it raises the rate of fear and anxiety. We don’t need demons.

Child pornography is not about to warp your kids minds or put them at risk – we should prevent it, but not surrender everything about the internet that makes it great, and certainly not everything about our rights that makes this the most peaceful, best educated, healthiest, most survivable period in history in many places in the world, including mine. My predecessors and ancestors fought for those rights. I don’t want to see them restricted because we fear demons.

There are a lot of scary things in the world today. But that's no different than it's always been. Do you really think that our ancestors had it any easier?

The difference is that their demons were more likely to be real. OK, it wasn't really demons killing their children; it was germs. But the risk was certainly real. And life didn't get a whole lot safer as you got older. Certainly, people didn't have the social safety net we all take for granted today.

It's not so much that our demons aren't real as the fact that we exaggerate the likelihood that we'll encounter them. The media outdo each other in trying to publicize sensational, attention-grabbing incidents. But in a nation of more than 300 million people, you could expect a "one-in-a-million" incident nearly every day. And the U.S. population pales alongside the nearly 7 billion people on the whole planet.

We human beings didn't evolve in this kind of environment. We evolved to survive in small groups, almost all of whom were related. The next village was a strange and foreign place, and "news" was local gossip about people everyone already knew. So we can't use our gut these days; we have to use our brains.

These days, we are surrounded by strangers, many of whom look very different from us. We hear of the most horrific incidents from around the world, not of the far more common acts of charity and good-will. The media are businesses intent on making a profit. And when ranting blowhards like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck attract viewers and make a lot of money, that's the kind of thing we're going to get.

They appeal to the primitive reflexes of the human animal - the instinctive fear of people who are different, the fight-or-flight response of adrenaline, the gut reactions of a hairless primate. Rational thought is harder, slower, less instinctive. Relax, calm down, think it through. There's no tiger in the bushes who'll take the slowest in the group, not these days. But our instincts don't know that.

In fact, it's only our brains that will save us now from the real threats of the modern world. In an overpopulated world, our instincts still tell us to reproduce. In a world of nuclear weapons, our guts still tell us to hate and fear other people. In a diverse democratic society, we still innately separate our fellow citizens into "us" and "them." This isn't just wrong; it's dangerous in today's world.

The demons are in us. And they can only be combated by rational, evidence-based thinking, by good education, by the calm assessment of competing claims in the marketplace of ideas. They can only be combated by using our brains, instead of our guts.