Stitch *OT*
The subject of wether society has gotten worse or better on subjects such as crime, morals etc can provide hours of endless enjoyable debate, preferably over port and cigars(not the way Bill likes them).
In the end a lot of it comes down to a personal perception of the data.
I will point out a couple of reasons I believe perception of both the present and past is distorted. Regarding the present, we are bombarded with information by the proliferation of news sources. It has become trite to say good news does not sell papers but it is true. These services, in order to sell whatever, scour the world for stories that will attract attention. The result is that you can pretty much count on hearing bad news pretty quickly, particularly if it happens locally so that reporters will have easy access.
Regarding the salacious stories from the past, why don't we hear more of those? Sturgeon's Law. I first heard of Sturgeon's Law from, I believe, an Harlan Ellison essay. It was a discussion of literature. The question being, considering all the mediocre pulp fiction we have today, have we seen a major decline in Literature since, say, Dickens time? Sturgeon's Law stated that 95% of everything was crap(mediocre). There was plenty of crap published during Dickens time but 95% of it was so bad that nobody saved it. As a result we are only aware of Dickens, Austen etc and get an inflated impression of literature of the time. Sturgeon's Law has application in all fields. In the field of human behavior the same thing can me said. The impact on history is that we hear about the 5% that relates to great events such as wars, scientific advances etc. The 95% that is mundane and sometimes quite atrocious we just don't hear about unless you really dig into source material. This gives us a distorted view of the past.
One bit of anecdotal info. In the 1890s my grandfather's brother was killed by a teacher who beat him with a stick for speaking in class. At that time corporal punishment was considered routine in Germany and the teacher was not punished. Just think of the message of brutality in everyday life that that communicates. There is a book called 'Thou Shalt Not Be Aware' by Swiss psychologist Alice Miller which discusses child rearing techniques in various periods that echo much of this. Think of how much society has advanced in just this one regard.
Anyway, a very interesting subject to debate. |
