It's a Bit of Vanity, Actually

K and I had to meet with her priest and brother so we could get E baptised in the Orthodox church this weekend in addition to checking our marriage certificate ¹, E's birth certificate ², and K and her brother's baptism certificates ³, he gave us a bit of a lecture about the importance of keeping E in the church. Now, personally, I'm not really convinced that being in the church makes you a better person. I've met too many vile people who were very active in their church to buy that one, but that's not what this post is about. Instead, the comment that struck me was the one about how the world just keep getting worse. You hear this comment all the time, especially from the older crowd and I just can't buy this. It's just not true.

If you want to argue morals, sure there are some traditional Christian values that aren't stressed as much now as they were 50 years or more ago. Homosexuality is more accepted, sex outside of marriage is more accepted, and other religions or lack of religious belief are more tolerated. Actually, I'm not so sure that those are really all that horrible of sins. None necessarily involve hurting or taking advantage of others, and the only sins I care about are those that involve harming or infringing on the rights of others. I may choose to abstain from those things myself, but it's not my business if you want to boink your same-sex partner while rejecting God. If it hurts anyone, it's just those willing participants.

But lets say that those things really are sins and really are bad enough that we need to stick our noses into the lives of others to control them. Does that make the world worse off than it was in the past. How does violent crime compare from past decades? It's actually down drastically, and although juvenile violent crime is up, the totals mean more than the subgroups. Also, keep in mind that fist fights are much less tolerated by the legal system now than they were in the past and that is going to drive up those violent crime rates now when they weren't in the older, higher crime rates of the past. Remember, New York is one of the safest cities in America now when it was extremely seedy and dangerous in the middle of the 1900s. That's not because the other cities got worse, it's because New York, and the culture as a whole, became safer.

Of course violent crime rates fluctuate. The Old West and 1920s really were lawless and extremely dangerous, but the 1950s and 1990s to present were relatively safe. Some things that seem to have gone the way of the dodo and for the better really make our current culture culture morally superior than to those of old. Slavery is gone. I find it difficult to argue that as a morally acceptable practice. We finally ceased the slow, steady genocide of the American Indian in the early 1900s even if we do still turn a blind eyes to ethnic slurs and stereotypes involving Indians that we would find unacceptable involving other races. We no longer think it's ok to lynch a black man for flirting with a white woman (and don't think many of those murders made the violent crime reports back in the 1920s-60s). We've even cleaned up the environment and at least are starting to take it seriously even though that still is a work in progress. We don't see many burning rivers like they did in the industrialized cities back mid century.

Actually, it seems human life as a whole is more widely respected that it was the further back in history you go. War is much less common now than it was in the past. Sure we have a few small ones going on, but it's nothing like the large scale lifetaking of the World Wars or the constant battling of the 1800s and prior. Besides, since Vietnam you can't have a good war without protestors shouting out against it. You can't tell me that a peaceful culture is more morally sound than a warlike culture that hates gay people and abortion.

This isn't just in the US. Even in Africa, things are slowly getting better. The Democratic Republic of Congo had democratic elections within the past two years. Both major candidates had large standing militias, but both men pulled out their armies before the election was announced and the loser, instead of starting a new civil war, quietly fought his loss through legal channels and then peacefully acknowledged defeat before long. Liberia is currently back onto a path toward stability, as is Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Uganda and Angola. None of these are perfect yet, but the trends seem to be up instead of down.

I'm not saying we're perfect. We're lazy, self-indulgent, and don't take things seriously enough sometimes, but don't try to tell me the past was peachy just because you were young then. It's an incredible act of vanity and just not true. I'm just saying that at worse, we are no better off morally than our ancestors and at best we are riding a wave of increasing morality. For that, I'm thankful.

1. I guess this was to make sure E wasn't a bastard. Nobody likes bastards. They can all go to you know where.
2. This was to insure that he was real. Apparently there's been a rash of attempted baby doll baptisms in the area.
3. This made sure that K and her brother weren't evil protestants, or, worse, Catholics. You know how all those Baptists and Roman Catholics are clamoring for those Orthodox baptisms.