 The Scientific Method (Bora Zivkovic has a Problem with this diagram) |
Something I’m often complaining about is “common sense.” Lazy people are always just throwing up their hands and saying “Duh!” when you ask them to justify some statement that sounds right and is taken for granted. It’s always important to check and recheck our facts on a regular basis, either to reaffirm, refine, or discredit them. Remember, common sense is what tells you that the Earth is flat and the sun revolves around it.
One bit of common sense that drives me nuts is the “World’s going to hell in a hand basket meme.” Many of my own generation believe that things are progressively getting worse, their parents believed things were progressively getting worse, and their parents’ parents believed things were progressively getting worse. It seems like anyone over 30 looks at the youth of their age and sees them as less moral than they were themselves in their youth.
I mean, it makes sense right? Things must be getting worse. Every time we turn on the television, we’re assaulted with the incredible depravity of the world. Murders, rapes, terrorism, tortures–civilization must be in decline; I saw it on Faux News.
The Baby Boomers were so freaked out by what they perceived as the increased promiscuity, atheism, and rejection of traditional values in people like me, who were born between 1961 and 1981, that they labeled us Generation X. Once my generation got over the shock of being given a label with associations that evoked images of mad-scientists and freakish experiments, most of us learned to wear the label as a badge of honor; after all, my generation ushered in the Information Age, which has baffled and confused our elders to the point of making them mostly irrelevant.
Yet some members of my generation obviously hasn’t learned from this injustice visited upon us. Recently an acquaintance of mine said she was going to put her child in private school because schools today were much more dangerous than when she was a kid. Kids today have no morals, they don’t believe in god, and they have no respect for their elders. It should be noted that this person wasn’t some crotchety old lady, she was the same age as me.
I wanted to call “Bull$#!@” on her, but refrained because I didn’t have the data with me to do so properly. One should always have something empirical to fling like ninja stars painfully into the intestines of the self-righteous.
So I did some googling at my first available moment, and you know what I found? School Crime Statistics show that things have either gotten better or haven’t changed over the last few decades.
In fact, a table of overall crime statistics showed the numbers of most crimes have gone down significantly since 1985, and this despite a 55 million person increase in population.
Ninja Stars away!
Today’s America is significantly improved morally over the America of 20 years ago. So the next time some whiney-ass old foggy complains about the decline of American morals due to the dwindling belief in god or traditional values, point out that their America was a much more violent and immoral place. 50% more immoral in some cases.
But it’s not just America, overall human civilization has been improving for centuries. Consider this observation by Steven Pinker:
The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon, visible at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and years. It applies over several orders of magnitude of violence, from genocide to war to rioting to homicide to the treatment of children and animals. And it appears to be a worldwide trend, though not a homogeneous one. The leading edge has been in Western societies, especially England and Holland, and there seems to have been a tipping point at the onset of the Age of Reason in the early seventeenth century. (source)
Cosmos help us if we ever experience a recidivism to the “Good Old Days,” the same days when women couldn’t vote, African-Americans had to drink at separate water fountains, and child abuse was the “common sense” solution to getting your son to eat his spinach.
Screw the “good old days.” It’s like Dr. David Brin once said:
Let me avow up-front that I share the more recent, upstart belief in universities, democratic accountability, science and human improvability — one that questions the fated persistence of “eternal” stupidities. Above all, any ‘golden age’ lies in our future. It has to. Or what are we striving for?