Reading and the future of the human race

Good morning.

Apparently we have found something that we can have an actual conversation about, since I am going to answer to your answer to me.

First, about the reading and watching TV. You said in your last post I mean TV series and movies and videos have the exact same purpose as books: to tell a story. They tell it differently, sure, but they do tell it nonetheless.
And obviously, you're right. The purpose of both is to tell a story, and they both do it very well. That's not why I think people should read. The point is pretty much summarised in a song that I can't find on youtube right now, because apparently someone has thought the content is inappropriate and told youtube to block the video. They've been actually doing that a lot lately, which is really annoying, because at some point you couldn't find most of Dr. Horrible's music up there, because someone had marked them as inappropriate. Quite honestly, I'm pretty sure no matter what you look at, there is always someone who thinks it's inappropriate.
Anyway, back to my point. Here we go. Ok, so I'm not sure if you can see that video. But still. It's actually about A Game of Thrones, the point about how people don't read is pretty much the point I'm trying to make.
The point is that when our little brother says watching TV is just simply so much easier, he's right. Watching TV is a lot easier that reading a book. Even though listening, which is pretty much required to watch TV, is an active process and takes surprisingly a lot of effort (which I just had to explain in an exam a couple of weeks ago), reading takes even more effort than that. And somehow I see that the effort you put into it makes the time you spend reading a book more valuable than the time you spend watching a movie.
And yes, I do realise that this is a bad argument, because not always the way that takes more effort is the better way to do things, and I don't mean to undervalue the audiovisual format as a means of telling a story. There are series and movies that I keep watching over and over, because they're good.
What I'm saying is that it's a little bit the same thing as calculating easy things in your mind compared to doing it with a calculator. Sure, it's easier to type up 134,67+87,23 on a calculator than it is to count them together in your head, but you are perfectly capable of doing the summing up yourself, and every time you don't, it makes you a little lazier and your mind a little duller.
Because when you're watching TV, you don't have to think nearly as much as when you read. And thinking is generally good for you.

Another thing that you said about in your last post was nazis. So I want to say a few words about that. Before I start, though, I have to point out that I am definitely not a historian, and I completely screwed up even the lower level of high school history, so there might be things that I'm simply wrong about, not knowing any better. Although in IB history we did concentrate a lot on wars, including WWII, so I know more about this that I know about most thing in the history of history.
Ok, so my fist point is this: I don't think nazis were evil. I think Hitler was seriously screwed up, and had enough charisma to make people think what he wanted to do was a good idea. Which obviously it wasn't. But people feel the need to belong, and when everyone else started to join this party that we know as nazis, others kinda went with the flow.
And I'm not sure if you can say Hitler was evil either. He was just someone who really hated jews and gay people and non-white people and got way too much power. Today there are still people who hate jews and gays and non-white people and there are a bunch of them in power in different countries, but you don't call them evil. You call them idiots. Of course, I'm quite certain none of them would start a war to get rid of those people, so that makes a huge difference there.
So, thinking some group of people is inherently better than another group of people is ridiculous. Or at least thinking it's a good idea to kill everyone in the world you don't like is ridiculous. But the other point that they had, about trying to make the human race better, that I don't find ridiculous. Of course they were doing it all wrong, and they had a wrong idea of what better means.
Thought I realise that what better does mean is something that if you did start a conversation about it would never end. But I'd like to think, that everyone would agree on the fact that healthier, more intelligent people is better than sickly, stupid ones.
Ok, my point is this. With the progresses in technology it is pretty much possible to sequence the genome of an unborn child. Or, even better, if you're doing it in vitro, it is possible to check the twenty embryos' genome to check for hereditary disease and stuff, and then try to implant the ones with the best genomes. And I have heard people object to this with the fact that we shouldn't be the ones to choose who gets to live and die (since blobs of cells are already human beings and all), and that will lead to breeding better humans, just like the nazis did. And what I have to say to that is "Ok, so what?". The fact that nazis did something doesn't mean it's bad. Some of those embryos are going to die anyway, no matter what you choose. If there is going to be only one child, isn't it better that that child has good genes and not bad ones? How can it be bad to make sure the future child doesn't have hereditary diseases? The child is better off healthy. The human race is better of healthy.
Of course I realise that genetics isn't everything. Epigenetics and other environmental factors make a difference to what a person ends up like. But if it's possible to ensure that at least a child has good genes, why is that so terribly wrong?

Ok, imagine a situation, when the human race realises there really isn't space here on Earth, and we have used up all the resources, and the Earth can't sustain more than a billion people any more until it's given time to recover. (I don't know if this situation could ever come along, but still.)  What does the human kind do?
Ok, knowing the human kind, probably nothing.
But I see that the rational thing to do would be to figure out which traits will best ensure the survival of the future humans, and ensure that the next, much smaller generation of humans comes from the people who express those genes strongly. And then that generation will be the children of all of human race.
The problem is that no one will ever agree to this. Because there will be ethical debate about whether or not it's ok to stop the people with asthma, heart disease, diabetes, cancer or something else running in the family from having kids. And that ethical discussion will go on until the human kind has died out. Ok, I'm pretty sure you can't rid the human kind of all hereditary diseases, especially since to my understanding everyone has a few recessive alleles for some diseases in their genome.
The point is, I don't see how trying to make sure future generations have a little less problems arising from their genome than we do is a bad thing.
I have actually a very vague idea about writing a book some time in the future about a tribe that are some of the descendants of that small generation of people who's parents are chosen to keep the human race alive with their good genes.

Ookay, that's probably enough for today.
By the way, I am asking once again, where are those Cinnamon illustrations?
I'll hear from you on Friday.

~matu