On the whole, taking into account quality of life, safety, socioeconomic equality, environmental cleanliness, and just your subjective opinion of the general happiness, friendliness, morality, and sincerity of the people around you, have things improved, changed but not dramatically, or regressed during your lifetime?
IOW, do you consider the world of the 21st century a better place than the 20th? Why or why not?
My father, who unfortunately died before he got to the 21st Century, did offer some reflections on life. If you don’t mind, I’ll answer for him.
Pluses:
Improvements in medicine that made many of the old time epidemics obsolete.
Better overall education, fewer poor people trapped by illiteracy.
Technological improvements in every area that made work less physically demanding and chores easier. This meant that people didn’t have to be either the “strongest brain or the strongest back” to be employable.
An overall improved social net including Social Security, Medicaid, etc. For someone who grew up during the Depression, the prospect of people starving to death was very real.
Nuclear weapons. I know this sounds weird, but he was convinced that Mutually Assured Destruction would keep wars smaller and prevent another World War that ground up entire generations like hamburger.
Minuses:
Decayed sense of community where people no longer took an interest in each other.
The growth of short-term thinking, where people no longer cared about (or even considered) the long term consequences of business or personal actions.
Denial of personal responsibility, related to the two above.
The loss of aspiration and striving among those at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder.
In short, he believed that life had gotten better, but that people had gotten worse.
Sadly, that’s just the answer I was expecting.
Since there probably aren’t too many dopers from the Greatest Generation now that I think about it, I’m going to open this one up to Baby Boomers, or anyone who has discussed this issue with someone older.
Is it possible that people really are getting worse?
It’s possible, but I don’t really think so. People’s memories are honest but selective. By that I mean that we don’t intentionally lie, but our minds retain good and pleasant memories from earlier days, leaving the perception that things are worse now. It’s hard to avoid tangible evidence of technological improvement, but easy to forget that there were real sons of bitches 50 years ago, too. Also we are exposed to more information now. 50 or 74 years ago, nobody in New York would have even known who Laci Peterson was or what happened in Columbine. Most people in Los Angeles would have remained blissfully ignorant of the two wastes of skin that went around shooting people in the Washington D.C. area. Today everybody hears about every sad story or scandal anywhere in the country. (I’m sure there are analogous stories in countries other than the U.S.) What you don’t generally hear about are the ordinary, friendly and caring things that people do in everyone’s neighborhood, because they don’t make good news copy.
I agree with all this.
I think this might be a case of “our minds retain good and pleasant memories from earlier days, leaving the perception that things are worse now.”
Things that caught the public’s imagination became media circuses back then too. Take a look at the Lindburgh kidnapping and trial, or how outlaws such as Bonnie and Clyde were media darlings (not that the media loved them, but people ate up whatever was written about them, therefore a lot was written about them.) Things really haven’t changed that much, there’s just more of it, and more people to lap it up, and more ways to see and comment on it all.
This has always been true too though.