Is the Brave New World the end-stage of all civilization?

[josephpalazzo]

Star Trek is our future.

[Solitary]

Civilization ended when superstitious nonsense started, contrary to the believers of this nonsense. If they keep believing in magic instead of reality they will succeed in bringing about the Apocalypse to make the nonsense come true.  :roll: Solitary

People would rather die than think and many do.

[zarus tathra]

I would say that the decline in literacy and mathematical invention started with Roman dominance and not with Christianity.

[Thumpalumpacus]

I would say that the decline in literacy and mathematical invention started with Roman dominance and not with Christianity.

This isn't borne out by the facts.  Literacy rates in ancient Rome were at around 10%. In medieval Europe, where the clergy discouraged the teaching of reading and writing, less than 10% of the men, and virtually none of the women, were literate.

And while it's true that the Romans were no great mathematicians (they cribbed off the Greeks, mainly), I don't think there was much, if any, decline between 300AD and the beginning of the Renaissance. And the resurgence in mathematics around 1600AD was driven by two factors: the need for accurate navigation over the open oceans, and the filtering back into Europe of Greek math, along with the widening acceptance of Arabic numerals.

[NatsuTerran]

What the hell is wrong with contented hedonism? Maybe the words mean something different to me. But why should people be ideally forced to NOT simply relax and be hedonistic if the technology in society allowed such a heaven? You can still strive for things if you want. I still have a striving for bettering myself in certain areas even if I could lay back and dumb myself down. I fucking hate naturalists who want to force people to think philosophically or to not have an easy life by default. People just instinctively dislike change, but this kind of thing is a good change. Judge the setting not by your perspective now, but by how your perspective would be if you were born into the situation and it was all you knew.  Just like we wouldn't want to go back to ancient civilizations, these "BNW" people would not want to go back to our current setting. Stop having a knee-jerk reaction to change.