firewritten
replied to your post
“like, okay, let’s be honest. art is not going to fix any given...”
The older I get the more I don't think societal ills are fixable, by anything, but all those things you mentioned can make it a bit easier to breathe, a bit easier to be alive on the same planet as the species that is full of the ills.
okay, but look at the history of disease. specifically, mass pandemics.
until as recently as the 1940s, mass pandemics were just a fact of life everywhere in the world. We’re talking cholera, smallpox, dysentery-- infectious diseases that killed hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people in one go. It would have been perfectly reasonable for a Very Serious Person to shake their finger and say, “ah, there are always going to be plagues and cities are always going to be cesspits of disease, because that’s just how people are; if you think otherwise, you are a hopeless dreamer.”
intense scientific study -- and practical policy changes-- fixed this. studying infectious diseases, learning what caused them and how they were spread, meant that scientists and doctors could figure out what made a bunch of people get sick out of the blue, and could treat them or even cure them. policy changes- mostly public health stuff, taking the handle off of the Broad Street pump on the grand scale- meant that the number of pandemics greatly decreased.
in the eighteenth century, smallpox killed 400,000 europeans every year (and many, many more people in other parts of the world). up to 10% of swedish infants died of smallpox every year. that’s four million people a decade.
today, that death toll is 0.
the other thing is- the work that went into getting rid of smallpox (and greatly decreasing the rate of other pandemic diseases, especially in the West) helped to fight a lot of other social ills. increased study of pandemic diseases meant that scientists studied other kinds of disease - so there’s less pellagra, less scurvy, fewer parasites. pandemics left a lot of widows and orphans behind, straining an already primitive social safety net; fewer plagues means fewer orphans. understanding that diseases spread by germs lowered the maternal mortality rate- doctors used to go straight from the autopsy room to the maternity ward without washing their hands first, and the horrible corpse germs they carried spread to mothers and their babies. understanding that disease is spread by germs, which reproduce in such-and-such a way, means that when you fight for public sanitation and food safety standards, you can convince people to listen to you.
no one dies of smallpox. no one. anywhere in the world. even in countries where pandemic diseases are still an issue. people- scientists, doctors, politicians, reformers- toiled for decades to make it so that no one died of smallpox. and it worked.
No, the world is never going to be perfect. It is pretty much inherently flawed because it is full of humans, and humans are flawed, messy, ridiculous creatures. But it’s more than possible to fix social ills, if you understand the underlying causes and can convince people to buy into that change.
We will never have a perfect world. But we might, someday, have a world where the biggest social ill is that people can’t legally marry their nonsapient anime waifu.
I think it’s worth trying to get there.
