Tuesday, February 3, 2009

It's Getting Better All the Time

Recently I've had a couple of friends express to me their reluctance to have children in this messed up modern world. I must then convince them that the world today is better than it has ever been. Anyone who thinks that the past is a better place has not studied much history. And who can blame them when our history books and news media combine to present a thoroughly inaccurate picture of how folks are doing in the 21st century?

People today get their concepts of the past from three very untrustworthy sources: history books, movies and television. History textbooks, as a general rule, still tend to paint the United States with a manifest destiny behind it, where historical figures are larger-than-life heroes in the grand epic of the Western Civilization. Anyone who has read Lies My Teacher Told Me or Guns, Germs, and Steel can tell you that history is a much more complex web of human interaction.

Movies and television give us a sense of the past in a more visceral way. If we watch It's a Wonderful Life or Leave it to Beaver we feel like we get some sense of what life was like in those eras, but we need to be aware that these were illusory images even in their own time. For this reason I highly recommend both the book and movie version of Gangs of New York. Certainly the movie is cartoonish, but either way you learn that New York City in the late 19th century was a horrible place compared to today. People complain about gangs in the recent past, but at least they aren't mercenaries controlled by politicians the way they once were. People complain about government and corporate corruption today, but times were much worse in 1911, for example, when 146 people died at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire because the factory safety standards of the day were almost nonexistent. The life of man was truly, to quote Hobbes, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short," and continues to be so for many people. We must remind ourselves of this. No movie is going to fully show it to us because not many people would want to watch it.

Then there's the news media. 24-hour news in particular is a horrible lens through which to view the world. People forget that the definition of "news," going back to the dawn of newspapers, is "man bites dog" -- the exceptions to the rule, the strange and the tragic. Yes, there are wars, and the one in which we are currently embroiled is misbegotten and nigh intractable, but did you know that wars around the globe have been steadily declining over the last 100 years? Did you know there are currently fewer wars today than in previous decades even? No offense to my friends in the news media, but they make the most money when disaster strikes. Trust them to give you the facts on newsworthy events, but don't expect them to give you an accurate picture of the world in general.

Another part of the problem is how we raise our children. We present the universe to them as a place where justice and fairness prevail and everything makes sense. It's inevitable that we set them up for a fall as they grow to discover how much the world can truly suck.

The big picture is always hard to see, and for everything we gain we often lose something. If I had to give my estimation of it, I'd say the world is a pretty horrific place but that overall it is getting better in imperceptible, incremental ways every day.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

This is a really good point DS, and definitely uplifting. I may be one of those people u mentioned who is scared of bringing a child into this crazy world. Not to mention with all the recycling I do, and attempts at vegetarianism (occasionally thwarted by a really great bowl of chili) all in the interest of reducing my mark on the planet, it seems like NOT creating a whole other person and all the plastic they will throw out is one of the best things I could do. Not to mention just the terrifying prospect of childbirth.Don't even get me started on that one. Nobody has yet to be able to convince me that THAT is a natural occurrence.(Did you know that occurence, the mispelling of occurrence, has its own Wikipedia page?) Still, if I were to overcome all of those other mental, physical, and environmental hurdles, it's nice to consider that maybe the child would not be doomed to a miserable life lived out in the few final years before the apocalypse. Thanx dude!

colter said...

thanks, glad we could help change a mind.

and it's CM, by the way. I'm Colter. I write some blogs for DS. maybe soon there will be more of us.