I appreciate your comments and your perspective. And I think many would cheer the "glass half full" pov. I do not have time today to respond again. Unfortunately, I have something rather unpleasant and unavoidable to deal with right now. But suffice to say, counter claims can be made.
One specific point of order - yes, life expectancy is decreasing in the United States (where I live), but it has long been decreasing in other countries like Russia. And after the Fukushima Daiichi explosion, I would withhold any proclamation about life expectancy in Japan. The short and long-term effects of that melt-through are far greater than we know.
"But that is not witch burning. It isn't. That isn't any of a number of tortures used by, just to pick an example, the Inquisition in Western Europe. It also isn't widespread. It is vanishingly improbable that anyone reading these words lives in fear that the church will burst through their door and drag them kicking and screaming to their doom with no due process of law just because someone said "my dog died, she's a witch!"
Please, please, please understand that violence or other social unpleasantness isn't a binary switch. The logic you appear to be using above is that if there is ANY violence or torture then violence and torture have not been reduced. But that doesn't work. Let's say that there were 15K homicides in the US last year and 10,000 this year. Would that not be an improvement? Or should we say that 10,000 murders is the same as 15,000 and so nothing has improved? I would argue that the fact that witch burning is *unknown* in the West and hasn't happened either in Western Europe or North American in about 200 years! This can be true even IF water boarding is still going on. What's more, look at the difference of reaction--in the West--to water boarding now and witch burning (or lynching) in the past. I'll take lynching first. Within the lifetime of my parents (born in 1922) lynching went from a Saturday or Sunday afternoon diversion for the whole family (presuming the family was white) to a *crime*. People used to send *postcards* of lynchings and now anyone even suggesting doing so would regret it immediately. Consider that the men who killed James Byrd in Texas were convicted of murder while their grandfathers would have walked for the same crime (probably their fathers as well). That is vast improvement. Isn't one lynching in 1997 an *improvement* over 10 lynchings in 1907? I would say that is a fantastic improvement.
Much the same applies here. Again, I am not saying that violence or cruelty has disappeared. I AM saying that it has *drastically* been reduced and become far *less* socially acceptable. Michael Vick went to jail for dog fighting. In 1940 he would never have even had a run-in with the law over dog fighting. Does dog fighting still go on? Regrettably, yes. Is it legal in the United States or Western Europe? No. Is it socially acceptable? In most communities, no. Does that mean that dog fighting never occurs anywhere on the planet? No. Does that mean that dog fighting is socially unacceptable *everywhere* on the planet? No. It doesn't have to be either there's no murders or there's a bloodbath, there's either no animal cruelty or it is rampant, there's either no witch burning or torture is ubiquitous and socially acceptable.
Wait, are you putting the potential economic collapse on the same category as war? Sure, this long peace *may* end in 5 minutes but every minute that it continues is *still* the longest contiguous peace that Western Europe has seen since the height of the Roman Empire. I'm not talking about internal harmony nor am I talking about economic prosperity, I'm talking about war. Could an economic collapse bring war to Western Europe again? Yes, but I doubt it will happen. No one has anything to gain from a great power shooting war in Europe that can't more easily be gained through trade.
Okay but that doesn't change the fact that Western Europe, to a country, has abandoned the death penalty. Nor does it change the fact that number of crimes for which one could get the death penalty has gone from multiple to a very few.
Yes, I'm aware of it but it is no longer socially acceptable. The point isn't that marital rape *never* happens or that spousal abuse *never* happens. It is that it is no longer socially acceptable in the English speaking world or Western Europe *at all*.
Okay, here's an example of what I'm talking about. Your student is struggling with this, my mother didn't struggle with it. She made me walk into a hospital on a broken leg because I had a hairline fracture and I could not tell her what I had done. If she had pulled that kind of stunt just 10 years later (this was 1981), chances are the doctor would have reported her to CPS.
I didn't say that people weren't getting vicarious thrills from violent movies, I said that, for instance, Western Europe, Canada, Japan and Australia no longer consider war part and parcel of their national pride. At the start of WW I, young men poured out to fight seeking glory they were *eager* to sign up and go fight. That doesn't happen as often any more. All of this can be true even IF the top grossing movies are all violent. Would you rather have people watching violent movies or playing violent video games or engaging in actual trench warfare? Another item. Consider the body counts of wars. While American presidents are too eager to send kids into combat, they are also VERY sensitive to the body counts in ways they weren't before. We are also far more restrained in warfare than we were.
Consider that no President could survive an American casualty total like WW II (407K), the Civil War (650K) and Vietnam (58K). An American president who sent kids into combat and broke the 10K casualty mark would probably be in for a very tough election cycle unless the US had been attacked. Also consider that nothing like the firebombing of Dresden or Tokyo could happen again. Yes, I know, lots of people were killed in both the Second Gulf and Afghanistan wars but no Iraqi or Afghani city was bombed anywhere *near* what Dresden or Tokyo endured in WW II. Nothing even close. Dresden was reduced to rubble. Then there's this number--zero. That is the number of times a nuclear weapon has been used in anger since the August of 1945. We *could* have used them in Korea but we didn't. We *could* have used them in Vietnam--and even considered it--but we didn't. We *could* have used it in Afghanistan-and yet again we didn't. Neither has anyone else. Israel could solve its Iranian problem with a nuclear bomb but it has restrained from doing so. India and Pakistan have fought three wars in just over 60 years and have managed not to go nuclear. Then there's the war that *didn't* happen--the Soviet Union never crossed into West Germany which almost *certainly* would have resulted in a nuclear exchange. Have there been wars between 1945 and 2011? yes. None of them have involved nuclear weapons even though the United States has lots of them.
I think that if you want a dystopia, work for a utopia. It's not that dystopias scare me less, it's that dystopias *terrify* me because my reading of history is that if you really, really want to get people to do absolutely horrific things to other people all you need do is convince your people that there's a plan that will make it all right, that the land of milk and honey is just over the hill and
as soon as the people standing in the way or resisting the glorious plan to take us to utopia are removed from the scene, then paradise will be here on Earth.
Alexander Solzhentisyn, who knew a thing or two about what happens when nations become gripped by ideological fanatics said it best:
To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions.
Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble—and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.
This is not a dystopia, not even by half. How do I know? George Bush was a warmonger who approved the torture of people in contravention of international law. Barack Obama, for all his virtues, is a little too conciliatory to deal with the madness that is the Republican Congressional majority. John Boehner is a little tin-post oompa-loompa. Eric Cantor is a smarmy little twit.
Now, one of two things is going to happen. Either I'm going to be arrested and put in prison for those statements or I'm not. In a dystopia, I would NEVER write those things about the national leadership because I know what would happen to me. People in North Korea, if they *had* Internet access, would never dare to say something like that about either Kim the Elder or Kim the Younger. America is far from a perfect society but I'll take the US over North Korea, Iran or Saudi Arabia.
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As far as your paradise or purgatory question, I think neither. But I do think that now is a better time to be alive, for larger numbers of humanity, ever. Even in poor nations the average life expectancy has crossed over the 40 year mark and in rich nations it is pushing up toward 90. At the end of the 18th century the average lifespan was ~37 years. At the end of the 19th it was about 45. At the end of the twentieth it was about 75. We have almost *doubled* the number of years people live on average in about a century and almost trebled it in about two centuries.
Actually that trend is reversing in the United States. The trend continues in Japan, Canada, Germany, England, France, Spain, and Belgium. It is reversing in the United States and it is doing so for reasons that are both predictable *and* fixable.
Again, happening for very predictable reasons and of the major industrialized nations ONLY in the United States. We are the outliers in the overall trend.
I do not think we can, nor do I think we should try. I think we reform what we can and ameliorate that which cannot be reformed for whatever systemic reason.
Cheers
Aj
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