I think you may have misunderstood drak and berka from the start. Neither claimed nothing had changed for anyone.
Possibly I have misunderstood them. There seems to be a lot of that going around. However, I am not saying that they specifically claimed that 'nothing had changed for anyone.' Just that they did not appear to consider those changes, in saying things like:
We are talking Humanity/Human Nature. It can't be held side-to-side with Technology and compared on the same scale.
And perhaps contrary to popular sentiment, I don't think Humans have advanced in humanity at all since the beginning. I think Humans Are all basically the same from recorded history at least.
In my opinion, the idea that civilized society has somehow grown more sophisticated, refined, and "better than those barbarians of the past" over time is laughable.
(emphasis mine)
And then Drak, responding:
I agree whole-heartedly here. It's ridiculous to assume that people have become better or more sophisticated or refined. These are all terms relative to the societies which founded them. They change over time. What we consider to be refined or sophisticated could easily be considered rude or absurd in a thousand years, our culture and beliefs might be considered simplistic, our lives easily classified. That's because this is the way humans deal with history, it sure as hell isn't the way the world works. How can we say that the people of the past were worse than we are when the very meaning of what is good and what is bad changes as time passes?
Now, Drak is arguing from a particular sort of relativism here, and I have not addressed that. Like I said, he and Berka weren't actually making the same point. However, I feel that it is pretty clear that both of their statements go beyond "society is built on violence/the threat of violence."
Ironically, it is partly
because I considered my point to be a digression, that I attempted to make it in a concise way -- in a way that I frankly expected would
probably be dismissed with an eye roll, but which I thought
might cause someone to stop and think about statements like "civilization hasn't changed things" or "we can't say the past was worse," from the perspective of someone like me.
Yes, I was also tired, and not, at that moment, in a position to spend upwards of three hours to explain my perspective more fully. But setting that aside, I also didn't want to
completely derail the topic, even as it already seemed to be drifting a bit.
Yes, yes, I
know how it actually worked out. >_<
