(1) there are more sovereign nations now than ever,
(2) all the big empires (from Babylonian, to Alexander's, to Roman, to Byzantium, to Persian, to Incas, all the way to the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, British and French colonial empires, USSR, and more) -aside from the Chinese and Indian who are more homogenous racially/culturally - have collapsed
(3) there is way more infighting that on any time in the previous 40 years
(4) nations that were held together for half a century as a single country have nonetheless split at the first chance, often under fierce wars (e.g. Yugoslavia), and even centuries old countries like Canada, Belgium, UK, Spain, etc, still have infighting, and even votes to break up...
(5) a worsening of climate change and economy will more than likely see every-nation-for-itself than some unity, even if there's a coordinated effort to reduce emissions and so on, there will also be huge pressure to ascertain certain resources, safety, etc at a country by country level (sharing is only good for those that need it. For those that have the power to avoid it, or even grab from others, it just gives you moral points)
>You can find kfc, coca cola in societies as diverse as Mongolia and Madagascar.
Yeah, that's a huge cultural (and dietary) destruction...
Do you know how many different empires, rulers, internal wars and government systems China and India have gone through in 2000 years, and how many "races" and "cultures" they have?
>Do you know how many different empires, rulers, internal wars and government systems China and India have gone through in 2000 years, and how many "races" and "cultures" they have?
Yes. Still more homogeneous and stable than most other empires...
Oh you mean like that time when the Mongol conquered and ruled china for like, 100+ years, ushering in the largest case of minority rule the world had ever seen to that point.
I mean like that time when this was just an episode in millennia of history...
I also mean like that time when the eventual demise of most empires and huge nations was my point, which China and India managed to avoid, and not China and India themselves (which are totally orthogonal to the point I was making, and in fact an exception to the rule I posited)
India is called a sub-continent for a reason. Its extremely diverse in race, languages, culture, climate, religions,genes etc. Definitely more diverse than Australia and probably more diverse than Europe.
>Its extremely diverse in race, languages, culture, climate, religions,genes etc.
I believe you meant ethnicity, not race. Also as for the diversity, the two major ethnicities in India are Indio-Aryan and Dravidian, at 73% and 24% respectively, leaving the rest of the 'massive diversity' spread across 3% of the population. Same holds true for language. So I'd argue that the actual ethnic/language diversity in India is rather small in practice.
>aside from the Chinese and Indian who are more homogenous racially/culturally
China and India are not very homogenous at all, now or historically. I can bring up plenty of examples, but here's one that caused huge amounts of political unrest and dispute just last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaveri_River_water_dispute
>Yeah, that's a huge cultural (and dietary) destruction...
Culture only has value if people decide it have value. There is nothing innate in the concept of culture that makes it valuable or positive. Certain aspects of existing cultures I think most people on HN would agree are detrimental to humanity - things that result in harm, control, removal of agency, etc. from the unwilling. Those shouldn't be protected just because they're part of culture. And by the same token, if a more homogenous culture is required for humanity's descendants to become a spacefaring civilization (which is ultimately required for something resembling humans to survive in the long run), people might value that over cultural diversity. I'm not really convinced that that is required, as diversity generally makes us better, but there might be aspects that are incompatible.
But even focusing on something like food - there's nothing inherently wrong with people deciding they prefer to eat some type of food more than what may have historically arisen in their culture or geographic location. I love trying different types of food and hope that it is preserved in some way, but no ones owes it to me, or anyone else, to eat something they don't want to in the name of preserving culture. Every individual has agency, and we should let the people that want to preserve aspects of their culture do so, and those that want to shed aspects should certainly be allowed to do so as well. At any rate, I doubt the people eating KFC and drinking Coke in Mongolia and Madagascar need or appreciate those of us on Hackernews telling them they should or shouldn't eat and drink.
> even centuries old countries like Canada, Belgium, UK, Spain, etc, still have infighting, and even votes to break up...
1. Not all of these are centuries old.
2. The fact that they generally agree on a legal system to bring about the changes each side wants by voting on these separatist policies within the scope of that agreed system is impressive in and of itself. They simply want some decisions about their government to be made by different people in a different place which is quite compatible with some hypothetical global federalist system.
> (1) there are more sovereign nations now than ever,
Yeah, but the power of the nation state has also weakened. Try subtracting many of the EU member nations as individual sovereign countries for instance, or look to the outsized influence of multinationals.
2. The West is essentially one large empire.
> (3) there is way more infighting that on any time in the previous 40 years
Source? 40 years is a bad timescale - bring that up to a few hundred or thousand and we are at an almost all-time low.
Still, India as of today remains huge (1.4 billion people) and mostly homogenous and more long lived than most other nations, the claim wasn't that it was a monolithic thing that never had any splits/ethnic issues...
The comparison I explicitly made was to e.g. the Babylonian empire (now totally gone), the Roman empire (now totally gone), the British colonial empire (now almost totally gone), Austro-Hungarian empire (now gone), and so on...
Well,
(1) there are more sovereign nations now than ever,
(2) all the big empires (from Babylonian, to Alexander's, to Roman, to Byzantium, to Persian, to Incas, all the way to the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, British and French colonial empires, USSR, and more) -aside from the Chinese and Indian who are more homogenous racially/culturally - have collapsed
(3) there is way more infighting that on any time in the previous 40 years
(4) nations that were held together for half a century as a single country have nonetheless split at the first chance, often under fierce wars (e.g. Yugoslavia), and even centuries old countries like Canada, Belgium, UK, Spain, etc, still have infighting, and even votes to break up...
(5) a worsening of climate change and economy will more than likely see every-nation-for-itself than some unity, even if there's a coordinated effort to reduce emissions and so on, there will also be huge pressure to ascertain certain resources, safety, etc at a country by country level (sharing is only good for those that need it. For those that have the power to avoid it, or even grab from others, it just gives you moral points)
>You can find kfc, coca cola in societies as diverse as Mongolia and Madagascar.
Yeah, that's a huge cultural (and dietary) destruction...