The Good Ol' Times

Was life better before our time? Will the future make life better? Are we at the pinnacle of the humane society's potential right now? In all eras of our history, there was someone to promote the yes or the no answers to each of these fundamental questions. As for this very year of 2008, the echoes I hear seem to be three big 'NO' for each question. Let us have a view at the past, the present and the future so we can understand better how meaningful these 'NOES' are.

Evaluating how good was life in the good ol' days is practically impossible on a happiness scale, simply because happiness is a state relative to individuals in situations that will make them feel their needs fulfilled. I also automatically push aside any statement that has to do with happiness fluctuations within the same lifetime, A.K.A "In my youth...", because this kind of evaluation can never be objective enough. What we can do is compare how we are living nowadays with how we believe our ancestors did, if we trust our historians. I do not believe politics alone should be considered, as we know today democratic countries which offer less possibilities of well-being to their citizens than some kingdom or empires of the ancient past. The only sure way, I believe, to compare our contemporary well-being to the one of an ancestor is through an economic and health evaluation. So far, through my disscusions else places over the internet, the best comparison I was offered is the one between our North American lifestyle and the one people experienced in the Roman Empire. Using the United States of America for this comparison, it seems to me that only technicalities changed since then, like the average lifespan or the currencies in usage. So to the first question, my answer would be: Life today is about the same as before, only that we now live somehow longer and with more tools and techniques available to reach our individual goals.

Futurists in the middle of the twentieth century predicted that by Y2K, we would be driving flying cars, cancer would be cured for good and computers would have eliminated our need for paper (maybe one day we might print ourselves out of trees, as it is). That, and other wishful claims which today seem hilarious or simply dumb. Yes, each year, each generation, each century we reach further, faster, with growing ease in scientific knowledge. Sanitation, food preservation, mechanical information processing (computers) and means of transportations are our greatest achievements. It makes, for our North American civilization, life easier at first sight. If I take a step back and look at the greater picture, it is no great deal: to keep living in that bubble of comfort, through war and econmics we exploit countries we consider less civilized or do not care about, while at the same time we dillute the purity of Earth's primary resources in industrial trash. Ecologists, humanists, economists and scientists are siding to alert us about these facts. All this complex problem will either be solved or (most probably) will provide the cure by itself, leaving our childrens a world with new challenges to overcome. We may be inventive, cooperative and adaptative but also dumber in number, egotist and lazy. Some may say, what about improvements in the social aspect of the human life? It's a flavor. People keep fighting to get the largest greenest piece of land with the greatest house and so on, at the same time talking to babies and youngsters on the same tone they use for pets. That is when they are not using them for punching bags or sex toys. Let's not ignore that some criminal rings abduct people to sell them whole as slaves or in parts for surgical replacements. On top of that, we wouldn't start to agree on religious, sportive or political topics here, where there is little possibility for us to start an idealistic bloodsheding brawl. To the second question, I say: No, not as long as the human beings remain that limited in the empathic department.

To assess if we are near or even past the best of the human potential as a society appears even harder than comparing our society with past ones. Happiness scale remains as subjective. Also, how do we know without a possible comparison? I am about to make really simple: genetics and demographics. Not that I have all the answers, especially in the genetics area. Please, those who know, tell us if the human species is getting better or worse! Is it possible that our general repulsion for eugenics (a taboo we do not extend to cattle) has already prevented us to go beyond our genetical deffects? Right now, I do not believe enough of us know how to breed healthy humans so we can be sure the human species will prevail on the very long run. Every minute, more and more humans are born on a planet that does not grow. That means less human ready habitat, less primary resources for each individual and more trash and shit to deal with. The the philosophers that keep saying that an increasing number of humans grow poorer and a decreasing number of humans get richer, I say you are right. If Earth was a big supper on a table, there would be less and less space around the table for the fat ones who had the biggest shares to start with and at the same time, more and more people to fight for the crumbs that fall, with the same remaining number of bathrooms and trashcans. Can a society be great, if the well fed are too fed, the others starve and everyone is swimming in a pollution soup? To the final question, my own answer has to be: Yes and I have had no proof so far that we, as a species, are smart enough to trim our numbers for the better.