Hermes, I’m an introvert too, but even the other activities I enjoy make sense only in the context of social relations. There may be some exceptions to this, but they verge on the sociopathic. So I disagree: “being social” (by which I don’t just mean going out for a drink with friends) is both necessary and sufficient to be happy, for most people. The rest is icing on the cake. At least for most human beings.
Xenophobia: that’s why the Stoics taught that Nature gives us the beginnings of wisdom, but it is up to us to use reason to cultivate such beginnings. Nobody would consider road rage, or any kind of rage, to be virtuous.
To say that happiness is virtue is not a stretch, it’s an axiom of Stoic philosophy. One can take it or leave it. It is not meant as a description of the state of things, but as a prescription for our attitudes.
Your hedonism / happiness argument begs the question, since you seem to be defining happiness in hedonist terms. You will find any serious student of philosophy who equates hedonism with Stoicism, which ought to be a warning that there is something wrong with your reasoning.
Entropy will ultimately defeat everything. So what? We don’t live in the “ultimate,” whatever that is, we live now. And, again, I’m not sure why you keep bringing up utopias.
And I don’t understand why you keep saying that belief in social progress requires a benevolent nature of the world. It simply does not, it’s a non sequitur based on a category mistake. The world isn’t benevolent or malevolent, it just is. We are benevolent or malevolent, because we are moral agents.
We know absolutely nothing about the conditions for life on other planets, so let’s postpone that discussion until if and when we know.
Intelligence arose multiple times on earth. So did flying. Or photosynthesis. This guarantees absolutely nothing about intelligence, flying, or photosynthesis in the universe.
The “tendency” of the universe to develop complexity is the result of the fact that the universe started simple. The only way to go was a bit less simple. Again, so what? For billions of years the most complex life forms on earth were bacteria. And they did just fine. There is no directionality to evolution, as far as we can tell.
That the universe is “able” to develop systems that reason, like us, is trivially true. That is no comfort for the ancient Stoic notion that the universe itself reasons. And without that, no providence. The fact that you like that aspect of Stoicism, unfortunately, doesn’t make it true. I like it as well. But lots of things I like don’t exist.
I’m a progressive too, but I’m not as naively optimistic as Pinker. Yes, we have made progress, slowly and painfully, in a number of areas. And that progress could be undone in an instant. We have also taken a number of steps back, not to mention the big elephant in the room: our “progress” toward the destruction of most of earth’s ecosystems.
I have no idea why you concluded that I’m a nihilist.
