Do you think people get better or worse from one generation to the next? For example: the generation whose young men (and some young women) fought World War II sometimes is referred to as the Greatest Generation. Do you think that generation really was more virtuous than, say, the generations that came immediately before or after?
I was in my 20s during the Reagan era. That era, in retrospect, comes across as relatively conservative and, in some ways, perhaps rather self-centered (e.g. it was the time of The Yuppie). Any validity to that?
I think it's commonly believed that young people today are kinder and more idealistic than were the young people in the days of my youth. Kind of like the 60s without Vietnam and with legal pot. Do you think that's true?
No particular point in my asking this question. I read something earlier tonight that got me idly wondering whether humans really do make progress on some of these questions like, Are we really making the world a better place? Of course, during this time of terrorism and retaliation in the Middle East, war in Ukraine, relations deteriorating with China, the anti-immigrant strain in the US seemingly coming to the fore, a distressingly large fraction of the American populace apparently detached from reality, climate change continuing apace, marriage and birthrates stagnating or declining, religious attachment waning, and so on, perhaps the world is as awful as it's always been.
I think we have made material progress. There are fewer people living in starvation and poverty than in times past, even though those things still exist. We have definitely made progress in science and medicine. Human nature remains the same, though. But I think the impulse to strive and try to make things better for ourselves and others is God-given; we build on what others have done in the past.
ReplyDeleteIf we view life as a school, every generation, and really, every person has to learn the same lessons. The youth today don't have to deal with the same challenges as , for instance mine did with Vietnam, or our parents and grandparents with the Depression and two world wars. But they have their own. I think there is more anxiety in young people now, probably related to an overwhelming amount of information from the online world and a social media environment in which no thought goes unshared.
Some things get better like tolerance of races and gays. But the addiction to cyberspace is scary. My generation or a good portion of it demonstrated against the Viet Nam war but that died down with the volunteer army. Then constant war is ok. I guess the mass media of the time is used to manipulate thought. Radio and newspapers in my parent's generation. TV, radio and newspapers in mine. Now it's the internet and social media with its manipulative algorithms. We've always been handled one way or the other.
ReplyDeleteLook how the media portrays this most recent incident in Israel and Palestine. Pretty one-sided, as far as I can see. Is it wrong to kill Israeli civilians? Sure. But Palestinian civilians have been killed for years. The Pope and I want peace for all the semites, Israeli and Arab.
To get back to Jim's topic, I'd say overall people are about the same but society and community are worse. I'll defer, at this point to our resident sociologist, Jack.
BTW, the opinion of my OR nurse friend is that the new nurses are mostly bad.
Stanley, I wonder if dealing with Covid, added to the way our health system is run for profit rather than patients has anything to do with it. I know there is a lot of burnout in health care workers.
DeleteI think it's the corporate takeover, Katherine. Hopefully, the strikes like that against Kaiser-Permanente will succeed. Traveling nurses are used as scabs. The high costs to the corporation are worth it to break the strike. My friend says that frustrated experienced people leave and are replaced by totally unprepared graduates. The corporation doesn't care.
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DeleteSorry. That was unnecessarily caustic and TMI. Back to lurk, Bad Jean.
DeleteHas the human race gotten "better" or less sinful? No. We've gotten better at making laws and rules against torture, executions, slavery, war crimes, bigotry, sexual exploitation, animal and child cruelty, etc. We aren't very good at enforcing them en masse.
ReplyDeleteIf I were a conservative Catholic, I'd probably be even more pessimistic because my definition of sin would cut much finer than it does in my fallen-away state. I would bemoan the loss of strict laws and traditions governing divorce, birth control, abortion, gays, transgender surgery, fornication, having to pay for public education, what women do and wear outside the home, and people who don't fast an hour before Communion.
Bottom line: People can't agree about what it means for things to get better. So things never do.
I don't know that human nature changes, but our environment and therefore our experience of life and our behavior changes.
ReplyDeleteA lot of our experience, and therefore our behavior, is formed by the environment that we have from our late teens through our late twenties, perhaps because most people choose jobs and marriage partners at that time. The environment both before and after has less of an effect on life-long values and habits.
The depression generation, the generation of WWII, and the baby boomer generations all had different environments, different experiences which created different frameworks and strategies for the rest of their lives.
It seems that once we get strategies for dealing with life, we keep them even if things continue to change. We tend to be less influenced by past generations or the future generations that are coming along.
Something like the law of inertia, once things are set into motion they continue with the same motion, even if other generations are moving differently.
We see this in both church and society where the older generations in power are working from a completely different framework than the young people.