Are things really better than they were 50 years ago?
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www.commonwealmagazine.org11/6/11
He writes: Progress cannot usefully be discussed without discrimination among orders of progress, since human knowledge obviously expands. Scientific knowledge progresses, as does technological knowledge, invention, …
Regimes And The People Who Could Change … – History In Progress
worldsways.com11/3/11
"Regimes And The People Who Could Change Them" by Jerry Waxman. Cameroon just had an election. Paul Biya, who has held the office of president was re-elected for a 6th term, received an overwhelming 78% of the vote …
Children have far less chance of being raised by both parents.
Teachers are now more often assaulted than valued.
Children now spend much less time with their parents and juvenile crime is up by 500% etc etc
“The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families”.
It seems that things have got much worse in spite of having machines and gadgets to make our life easier.
Please give some hope and inspiration.
Related posts:
We’ll I always had a kind of nagging feeling for a long that things have gotten worse and not better, but I always thought about local shops getting replaced by cash and carry stores etc. and maybe kids losing the ability to relate ‘live’ to other kids etc.
I thought about the death of our small towns and villages and how what used to be a day out to a nearby town to buy shoes or whatever, meant sitting down with the seller and chatting about local changes etc – and how that no longer exists.
Instead we’re confronted by somebody that we don’t know that wears a false smile, offers an ever falser greeting, and who’s only interest in us is whether well buy something or not.
But a look at your chart makes it clear to me that we’ve gone backwards big time, and the stats on juvenile delinquency are mind blowing.
Things are a lot easier now than they were fifty years ago, technology has given us more time to spend on leisure and enjoy the finer things in life.
Medical breakthroughs have helped stop spread the diseases that once ravaged cities and countries, and people are living longer and are in better health as they age.
Travel is easier and that’s help people’s opinions to evolve and to broaden.
Life is generally getting easier, but the bad news is that relationships are becoming more strained and people are slowly becoming lazier and fatter due to the rapid increase in technology.
“Are things getting better or worse” depends somewhat on if you want to answer the question subjectively or objectively.
Objectively, things are getting better for some people but worse for others.
Take a look at longevity for example.
United Nations data show that from 1950 to 1990 human life expectancy at birth rose almost 30 years, despite some 150 bloody conflicts.
Other data show however that human fertility is rapidly falling, which suggests that the population time bomb is going to defuse itself.
So the population bomb might diffuse itself but couples that want children may be unable to have them.
Subjectively I doubt that people are either more or less happy because of modern inventions.
Before things are invented we have no yardstick to judge by.
You only have to look at the chart to see that many more people are getting divorced now, and that children spend much less time with their parents, if in fact they even have two parents.
Is a couple happier because there is electricity?
Ask them when they’re having a romantic candlelit dinner.
Are women happier now that they go to work and spend less time at home with their families?
Modern machines such as refrigerators and vacuum cleaners obviously make modern life less physically demanding, but the automobile now means that many people spend hours every day driving to work and polluting the environment instead of working locally.
I’d say that how you see your life is what is most relevant.
If you live in a nice home with a good income and the future looks rosy then you’d most likely feel that “things are getting better”.
If you’re sitting in a prison in Iran after getting flogged and maybe getting raped on a regular basis and are waiting to be stoned to death, then you’d most likely feel that, “Life is not getting any better”.
Sadly, I don’t see any improvement in man’s/woman’s behavior.
Even if you don’t believe in God then you’d most likely agree that numbers 5-10 would be a g(o)od code to live by.
But how many people do you know that obey (or live according to) numbers 5-10 ?
* The Ten Commandments were given in 1445B.C , according to the New Living Translation Study Bible .
Is the world becoming a better or worse place?
That’s a very, very difficult question, and I’m not really sure of the answer.
But like Knopfman says it depends in many ways on how you look at it.
One thing I am sure of however is that because of the increases in communications far more people are aware of all the bad events that happen in the world, compared to say, fifty years ago.
So maybe it seems like a worse place, but maybe it isn’t, and it’s just that we are better informed.
My bottom line is that in spite of seemingly overwhelming evidence, that I’d like to believe that the world is becoming a better, if not much better place.
"Of the three great revolutionary -isms of the past two centuries, it is capitalism that has managed to secure a level of material affluence that has improved even the condition of the world’s poor from where it was fifty years ago".
"Yet there is a widespread sense that things are getting worse. Capitalism’s great failure is to create or sustain a moral order that is essential to people’s well being".
- Franz Schurmann, a professor emeritus of history and sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.
Capitalism’s great failure was to create and sustain a moral order, which is something that is essential to people’s well being.
Many observers would most likely argue that things are getting better for some but worse for others, and it’s true that there is a growing gap between rich and poor.
But even as the rich get richer, there is plenty of evidence that the poor are also far better off than they were a half century ago!
At a 1974 Rome food conference Marxists joined the Pope in denouncing maldistribution of wealth as the main reason for persisting hunger and poverty, but capitalism can make limitless quantities of seemingly inflation-proof money that buys ever greater quantities of goods and services.
Wheras post-modernists might argue that progress has lost its meaning, the real answer is that while capitalism has succeeded in improving people’s material condition, it failed to produce a moral order, and without moral order people feel deprived of the three human values essential to their sense of well being, love, work and justice.
From its beginnings, capitalism has preached one fundamental value which is greed and its main philosophy, utilitarianism, argues that universal greed will produce universal affluence, but what it failed to account is the destructive power of greed.
In the last two centuries revolutionary socialism and communism arose as violent reactions against the massive tilt by capitalism towards the self, and now the revolutionary torch has passed for the most part, to two fundamentalist religions, Islam and Evangelical Christianity.
Whether from the left or the right, the revolutionary impulse is to wrench the pendulum back to some communal imperative, and as revolutionary communist and fundamentalist regimes have both discovered, as soon as morality comes into power, greed, which is the hunger for material affluence, returns!
The world today takes its direction from forces at the bottom as well as at the top, which is perhaps proof that its condition is getting better and worse at the same time.
The answer?
Hopefully, when material affluence and moral order are available to all, at the same time, then the world will grow better and not worse at the same time.
I guess people just behaved better 50 years ago than now. There are so many factors that have contributed to the decline in attitude and character of people. Materialism and Consumerism may be just a couple.
We can see it on the chart above that life and community is better 50 years ago than now. Let’s just face it, as the technology takes place, the humanity disintegrates.
Wow.That was nice.People before behave in a better way than people today.Today is worst.
You can see the bad effects of technology in today’s community. Now think about what would happen 50 years from now? The youth are supposed to be the provider of good future but bow its just pure destruction. Thank you for letting me speak my mind. ^_^
I think the answer to a question like this is often, “it depends”- the same technology that can create distance between families can also be the technology that keeps families bonded. Let’s say, for instance, we take a site like Facebook. Sure, the kids are always on it, and might not be spending time with Mom and Dad, but maybe Grandma and Grandpa enjoy the peek into their grandkid’s lives through Facebook as well. I guess what I’m trying to say is that technology itself isn’t good or bad- it’s how it’s used. Similarly, when we look at crime statistics, it’s hard to know if crime is really going up, or crimes are more routinely reported. Again, statistics can be shaped and read to mean almost anything. So it’s hard to know if we really are better- or not- or worse- or not.
I agree Crystal. Are things better or worse? I remember growing up with no relatives around and contact with them once every 3 years – Skype or low cost phone calling would have been a wonderful way to keep in touch. Now when grandma wants to visit with their grandchildren it’s easy and cheap.
Do you remember the old wringer washing machines? I remember that one whole day a week would be set aside to do the laundry – in the old washing machine and hanging the clothes either outside in nice weather or inside in not so nice weather. It was really hard work. I would much prefer our new washer/dryers. It makes laundry day whenever you want it.
Anyway, I think there are many positive things in our modern world. I wonder what my grandchildren will be saying in 50 years?
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thanks for the comment, we take a site like Facebook. Sure, the kids are always on it, and might not be spending time with Mom and Dad, but maybe Grandma and Grandpa enjoy the peek into their grandkid’s lives through Facebook as well. I guess what I’m trying to say is that technology itself isn’t good or bad- it’s how it’s used.