Things Worse, or Better?
Are things getting worse, or better? That question bedevils me of late. Maybe it’s because I am 77 and sometimes feel as old as dirt or because for years I have had a generally downcast mood. I am hoping, and thinking, that well-educated millennials feel, in contrast, they can conquer the world, as I did back in my day.
So, which is it? I say worse, though I will note below that several esteemed scholars say better.
After World War II, Americans felt invincible. The post-war depression never materialized, the economy fueled by pent-up savings and the GI Bill. Even small towns like mine in central Illinois prospered, young fellows in town going off to Caterpillar, Harvester and Deere to pull down relatively big bucks.
By the 1970s, or so, the upward trajectory began to level off and is maybe even pointing downward now.
At the global level, I worry that my generation is perhaps leaving the orb with so much excess CO2 that an ever-more volatile, warming environment may leave much of the world uninhabitable in a generation of two.
Here in the US, we are pulling apart. Fully half the youngsters in Illinois public schools are eligible for free and reduced-price lunches, while more and more prosperous double-professional families seclude themselves behind gated communities.
The US seems adrift, undisciplined, polarized.
As I have written, the US is at war with China, and we are losing. In the medieval world, war was economic development; today, economic development is war. The Chinese are focused laser-like on a drive to become, once again, the “central kingdom” of the world.
In sharp contrast, we in the US lay back, still basking in our long past World War II invincibility. We demand more of everything, except of ourselves. We can’t get enough of expensive health care, when we should be investing more of our treasure in scientific advancement, infrastructure and disciplined education for our youngsters, not school that gets out at 3 after but five or six hours.
My State of Illinois can’t get its act together, losing people and wealth, while new Gov. J.B. Pritzker seems more interested in pleasing people than in taking the tough actions needed to right the ship of our state.
Finally, the small town that provided me such a memorable childhood struggles, like thousands of others, to keep from becoming just a grease spot along the hard road.
(I told you I was in a dark mood.)
Yet scholars of acclaim contend just the opposite. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker in “The Better Angels of Our Nature” notes how rates of homicide have dropped dramatically, especially since the Middle Ages, when most everyone had a good chance of falling to the spear.
Further, in a recent Wall Street Journal article that I can’t find at the moment (I filed it somewhere), the author notes with great authority that rates of worldwide poverty have plummeted in recent decades, especially in developing countries, and most especially in China.
And we should keep in mind, as Barbara Tuchman reminds us in “A Distant Mirror,” things have been even worse that I try to outline them above. We could have lived in the 1300s, when the Black Death, or Great Plague, wiped a big part of humanity in Europe and Asia off the globe.
Since we won’t resolve m musings in 700 words, let us assume for the moment that there is something to my concerns. What to do?
I think it mostly comes down to leadership, and its concomitant, followership. Both George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were incredibly dogged in their pursuits of independence and union, respectively, even in the face of clamoring on all sides for early peace. And enough followers stuck with them to see the conflicts through to positive resolution.
Franklin Roosevelt saw the nation through the Depression and Great War, and he did so in the face of hateful opposition. My Uncle John Sanner, a housepainter and county GOP chair, reviled FDR as bitterly as the Right did Obama and the Left does Trump.
In addition to leadership from the top, there have been instances of mass movements that appeared to generate upward, as in a rolling wave. The Great Awakenings of the late 18th and early 19th centuries in the US represented fundamentalist religious crusades that refreshed many Americans to renewed moral vigor.
We need both top-down leadership and a bottoms-up secular Great Awakening. Easier said than done at any time, and especially today, when tearing down has trumped building up.
Whatever, a reawakening will take from work from you and me, not just from others. Gad, I sound like a preacher.
