Posted on 07/21/2018 3:31:35 PM PDT by Simon Green
For all their disagreements, the left and the right concur on one thing: The world is getting worse. Whether the decline is visible in inequality, racism and pollution, or in terrorism, crime and moral decay, both sides see profound failings in modernity and a deepening crisis in the West. They look back to various golden ages when America was great, blue-collar workers thrived in unionized jobs, and people found meaning in religion, family, community and nature.
Such gloominess is decidedly un-American. The U.S. was founded on the Enlightenment ideal that human ingenuity and benevolence could be channeled by institutions and result in progress. This concept may feel naive as we confront our biggest predicaments, but we can only understand where we are if we know how far we’ve come.
You can always fool yourself into seeing a decline if you compare rose-tinted images of the past with bleeding headlines of the present. What do the trajectories of the nation and world look like when we measure human well-being over time with a constant yardstick? Let’s look at the numbers (most of which can be found on websites such as OurWorldinData, HumanProgress and Gapminder).
Consider the U.S. just three decades ago. Our annual homicide rate was 8.5 per 100,000. Eleven percent of us fell below the poverty line (as measured by consumption). And we spewed 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide and 34.5 million tons of particulate matter into the atmosphere.
Fast forward to the most recent numbers available today. The homicide rate is 5.3 (a blip up from 4.4 in 2014). Three percent of us fall below the consumption poverty line. And we emit four million tons of sulfur dioxide and 20.6 million tons of particulates, despite generating more wealth and driving more miles.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
“In the shuffling madness
Of the locomotive breath,
Runs the all, time loser,
Headlong to his death
He feels the piston scraping
Steam breaking on his brow
Old Charlie stole the handle and
The train it won’t stop going
No way to slow down”
Ian Anderson Locomotive Breath Classical
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHoeXnIgZVg
“Old Charlie stole the handle”
Old Charlie is of course Darwin.
I thought the vandals took the handles.
The Vandels are tangled up in blue.
They better start swimming or they’ll sink like a stone.
I would disagree with the article in an important way.
The founding fathers realized an important truism: that if you classify people as either inherently good or inherently bad, there are so many exceptions that your classification becomes useless.
So instead they created our constitution based on the principle that people are inherently *weak*. This, and the mechanisms to cope with it, have proven themselves over time.
CAN YOU GET ME PAST THE PAYWALL, SIMON?
I don't believe this. When did they start teaching this theory?
The U.S. was founded on the Enlightenment ideal that human ingenuity and benevolence could be channeled by institutions and result in progress.
The also believed that humans were by nature flawed, and had to be controlled by their religious values.
If you google "bypass paywall" you'll find all sorts of interesting info.
...The U.S. was founded on the Enlightenment ideal that human ingenuity and benevolence could be channeled by institutions and result in progress...
Ronald Reagan.
“How do you tell who’s a Communist?
It’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin.
And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands what Marx and Lenin wrote.”
Ain’t that the truth.
I’m shocked about this but it helps explain everything.
Steven Pinker needs to learn this:
...the colonies that in 1776 became the United States of America were settled by men and women of deep religious convictions who in the seventeenth century crossed the Atlantic Ocean to practice their faith freely. That the religious intensity of the original settlers would diminish to some extent over time was perhaps to be expected, but new waves of eighteenth century immigrants brought their own religious fervor across the Atlantic and the nation’s first major religious revival in the middle of the eighteenth century injected new vigor into American religion.
https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/religion/
Thanks, that’s the first thing I tried. I found a lot of articles responding to this one, some of them quoting chunks of it, but nothing reprinting the article itself. All links lead you back to the WSJ, which then paywalls you.
The article isn’t cached, either.
But thanks anyway.
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