Social Changes in the Last Century
With age comes an inclination to see many changes in a negative light. Maybe it is not so much age as familiarity with the way things used to be. In addition, change affects different people in varied ways, so what is good for one, is less pleasing to another. We really can’t please everybody all the time.
Change, in reality, is a major part of the evolutionary process—so is diversity— so is genetics—so is the environment, and so is luck. Thus, to talk about change as if we have real choice in the matter, is a bit inane. Change, in the evolutionary process, is judged by advantageousness for survival, and what the consequences are in the long run. Huge size was an advantage to the dinosaurs, at least in the short run, but huge size was not an advantage in the long run. They did not survive certain environmental changes which developed as part of evolutionary change.
The social changes in our own species over thousands of years have been dramatic. Change, it must be remembered, is not always physical in nature. There are social changes too. We are less brutal with each other, at least most of the time in most social societies. Yet clearly, given certain circumstances, a harsh level of cruelty to others is not that far below the surface of human behavior. We need only think of Hitler, the Sunni vs the Shiites, the Catholics vs the Protestants in Ireland, witch burning in America, lynchings in America, Christians vs Muslims in Africa, The Tutsi vs the Hutus in Rwanda, American slaughter of Vietnamese, gang warfare everywhere, slavery, multi group massacres in Syria today, Muslim refugees vs Christian culture tensions in more and more places, and nervously—- current politics in America. We have social cauldrons of a vitriolic nature spreading across the globe. That is hardly good change. Humans are not adapting well to global changes of various sorts bearing down on our planet.
Perhaps much of the above is to be expected on a planet which suffers human overpopulation. Overpopulation always changes the nature of social interactions, and not for the better. So far the human species understands overpopulation very well regarding other species, but our own species is frozen in the headlights of this problem. Humans, even today, still cannot bring themselves to seriously talk about human overpopulation. China did for a while, and implemented strong measures, but it has been too little too late, and only impacted on China itself.
The purpose here is not to talk about the global impact of human overpopulation, but simply to note the changes in social behavior in the United States over the last century. Our country is a relatively new population growth country so the changes in American social behavior over the last century had more to do with other factors. From here on out, the same global factors are going to impact on us just as much as any other place. No nation is any longer self sufficient. It is truly a global situation requiring global regulation of human activities. The outlook is not good for this to happen.
When I was young the social milieu was essentially family, neighborhood, and church. For some children school social activities played a role. Socialization then was limited by communication abilities. If people lived close enough communication was available through the telephone, cars, and if young, then bicycles. If there was any distance involved letter writing was often the means of communication. Long distance telephoning was minimum because of the cost. A long distance call was a big deal, and everyone participated after the call to discuss the call. With the number of people available to establish a relationship limited, there was pressure to figure out a way to tolerate diverse personalities. It was also a lot more difficult to find good social interaction if a person him/her self was ‘different’ in varied ways from most other people.
Families tended to stay relatively local and this generated extended family gatherings, usually in the form of picnics in the summer and house gathering in the winter. My mother had six sisters and a brother yet all my cousins were close enough to attend family gatherings. Sunday was often likely to be taken up by church activities, albeit this varied a lot. But most people went to church at least some of the time. There were often neighborhood gatherings—picnics, sandlot/street games, Halloween parties, Christmas parties. Most news was via the newspapers, magazines, and TV. However, there were only a few channels and few major magazines so everyone was getting the same input of news. Today, there are hundreds of TV channels, and all sorts of internet sources for information, so the input to people is all over the place. For example, people who watch Fox news and those who watch NBC news will end up with vastly different perspectives about the society in which they live.
Today our social life is very likely to essentially be on our smart phones and the internet via face book, chat rooms, etc. (I can’t list them all since I am not a participant to any degree). This practice generates highly specific social cabals. One legged transvestites are no longer left trapped alone with their feelings, but they can tap into other one legged transvestites across the country, or even the globe. In the past majorities, of any nature, tended to keep minorities, of any nature, in their place. That is not so easy anymore since modern communication devices enable members of particular minorities to stay in touch with each other and form a force in society. While this forces tolerance on the surface, it can also simmer a growing resentment beneath the surface. Blacks may not have to sit in the back of the bus anymore, but that doesn’t make a lot of people delighted to be sitting next to one.
In theory most people probably would agree others should be treated equally, but emotionally many people don’t feel that way at all. They miss the days when ‘odd’ minorities had to ‘fit in’ with the majority or else. When I was young, when there were prayers in public it was only prayers of the majority religion, and just about everyone knew their ‘place’. In my town probably 20% of the population was black but friendships were almost always along racial lines. Jewish people tended to stick together, Protestants, Catholics, blacks, whites, hispanics, the poor, the affluent, and some were left very isolated—the ugly, the mentally challenged, the book worms, the nonathletic, and just about anyone considered ‘odd’ in any way. Everyone went to the same schools, but often were pursing different ‘tracks’ educationally. No student ever remotely feared being shot while in school or even out of school. People just tended to live in totally separate worlds. I don’t recall my own friends and I ever talking that much about other groups. There was no hatred, maybe the occasional ethnic or religious joke, but that was about it. Injustices were all over the place, but most people just simply functioned somehow best they could within the established boundaries. By the time I left high school things began to unravel and we passed into the revolutionary 60’s where more and more minorities began to demand equal treatment. and opportunities.
It is tempting to say that the more things changed, the more they stayed the same. But that is not true either. I still find myself often returning from a play or activity of some sort late at night, wending my way to an EL stop or the suburban train station. There are groups of young people all over the place and what stands out is the diversity of these groups. In my day, late night groups of young people were pretty much either white, black, hispanic, oriental, straight, gay, good-looking, unattractive, female, male, or a dating-each-other group. Now it is not unusual to see a group at a table really diverse. The ugliest guy might be having an animated chat with the prettiest gal, a black with a white, oh, just any kind of combination imaginable. That strikes me as real progress. Then again, we all know, there are other cabals which stay to themselves and have a deep hatred or resentment to all kinds of people. They see the same picture I just described and are livid. Why we vary so much in our genuine appreciation of diversity is a difficult topic.
One way to describe society today is that some people live socially in the best of all possible worlds, and others live disgruntled in their own worst of all possible worlds, and for different reasons. Certain things are clear. The neighborhood, the Church, and newspapers are no longer the center of social life. Neither are relatives in many cases. The community, for most people today, are the contacts on their cell phone, smart phone, or internet emails, chat rooms, face book, etc. While most people, affluent or poor, are not bored so much anymore, neither are they much of a contented lot either. Amusement and addiction to inane chatter rule the day, while any sense of immediate community or group relationships are more the exception today.
For the elderly, at least those like me, it is great thing that we can be amused all day by gadgets instead of having to bother others to amuse us. But for the young and those in their productive years, it is a very different story. For sure everyone seems busy enough, but more like compulsive activities associated with addictive tensions. The endless video games, the text messages, the emails, the cell phone chats, the endlessly scheduled daily events all programmed into gadgets to keep one on time to a schedule, the often job insecurity, romance insecurities, marriage insecurities, economic insecurities, health matters, all centered around a zillion wants of this or that nature——all of this tends to foster feelings of frustration. We are not so much bored anymore as in the past as we are insecure, pressured, discontented, filled with vague yearnings over things we don’t have while often overworked with precious few in depth relationships—replaced with 150 people on our Facebook page who at best are vague acquaintances, no more genuine to us than people in all the films or books we see or read. When someone tells me they have 436 ‘friends’ on Facebook I let it slide. What good are those kind of friends? Well, maybe for some, numbers like that really do serve some sort of need. The word friend means different things to different people. The quantity of friends needed by different people varies too. It’s a crap shoot perhaps.
Earlier it was mentioned that size was an early advantage in the evolutionary process for dinosaurs. But huge size was a disadvantage in the long run when certain environmental changes drove them into extinction. Do humans, as a species, have any short term advantages that might doom us in the long run?. Clearly we are smarter and more clever than other species. About as far advanced with intelligence over other species as dinosaurs were in size over other species. Perhaps the intelligence which gave us such advantage to date is going to be foiled by a human ethical weakness which is leaving all species, not just the human species, vulnerable for insurvivability.
While most every human culture understands that the Golden Rule is an ethical principle, there is no human culture yet which really uses this ethical principle as the basis for ethics in it’s culture. Instead of using the Golden Rule as the safety net for those less fortunate in the evolutionary process, we use ‘family values’ and personal greed to gate ourselves off from the less fortunate. Combining this with our inability to enforce responsible reproduction on ourselves, and we have an impending disaster in the making. When enough is never enough in terms of money, titles, power, things, and offspring—we then overrun the planet with our own species, and by not letting the Golden Rule be the basis for providing a more level playing field for the less fortunate in society, we allow the distribution of wealth to become egregiously out of balance. What we are witnessing now is a loss of appreciation for diversity which is growing at an exponential rate, plus an increasing rate of violence growing at an exponential race, plus a widespread inability to understand when enough of something is enough. This greed for things, sharing restricted to our own genetic family, all in the midst of an overpopulated earth——might well be spelling disaster for much of life on this planet. While there is no reason to believe life on this planet will end, there is every reason to believe another major evolutionary correction is just around the corner. We are not intelligent enough to envision what kind of correction, and for how long, or what the nature of life on this planet will be when the correction ends—so what will be will be.
We have pretty much, it seems, assumed the human species, as represented by ourselves today, is the creme de la creme of human evolution, that we are the end point of species evolution, that we were ‘created’ in the image of God Himself, that God is judging us, making demands on us personally, and if we worship God properly according to the scriptures of our inherited religion, we personally will be protected and aided throughout life until we finally die and enter the Kingdom of Heaven. That seems a stretch and is obviously self-serving. We now have even created computers that are ‘smarter’ than us in varied respects. But this ‘smartness’ can be used against us too—like the weapons of mass destruction and smart missiles which can be programmed to pretty much go up a particular person’s ass. We pretty much now can all be mass terrorists. In fact more and more people, at an exponentially growing rate, are becoming just that. It is really weird, while more and more people are gaining rights others just had, there are as many or more people determined to get whatever they want, OR believe terroristic acts will create fear and bedlam; and in the midst of the chaos and the guns which are more and more everywhere, their side—whatever that might be—will rule the streets. Of course violence begets violence, so in places like Iraq, Afganistan, Sudan, Syria, Somalia, Ethiopia, Haiti, the Congo, Nigeria, our own urban, suburban, and rural ghettoes——well, the violence is never ending in these places and the only constant is that whoever controls a geographical area at the moment will simply be the thugs of the moment. They will be toppled by the same kind of violence which put them in control for a period of time. ‘Thugocracy’ rules vast areas of our globe. Military intervention fails to solve much of anything.
Marriage and sex habits have changed a lot too, but as always, the changes here are all over the place and not subject all that much to reasonable or logical analysis. So, accepting the mysteriousness of all this, I will just ignore it.
If the evolutionary process is to continue on, as it has for millions of years, I sometimes wonder what will new advanced species look or act like? Maybe the gadgets we create will end up running the world. So much of what I had to do myself in the past, is now done by computers of some sort.The future for the human species, it seems logical enough to conclude, will depend on how we learn to treat each other. “Man is a religious animal. He is the only religious animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion—several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbors as himself and cuts his neighbor’s throat if his theology isn’t straight” (Mark Twain). Actually, there has been tremendous progress here, especially in developed countries. Just in the U.S. alone many more people have rights which before only some people had. Still, there is one huge caveat here: those strongly against this spreading out of rights and opportunities for certain others, have the ability to disrupt society and potentially even cause social implosion. Human overpopulation just increases the tendency for this kind of anger. As the number of people increase who are trying to get bigger pieces of a pie that is shrinking—not enlarging, there will always be the tendency for many people to blame ‘minorities’ of some sort for their own failures. If only their despised ‘minorities’ were kept down, they themselves would do better in life.
In essence, human rights have never been so spread around in so many places, and yet our social situation, most everywhere, is a simmering cauldron of emotions ready to explode. Does anyone really think American society is in good shape when 43% of Americans don’t pay any income tax because they don’t earn enough money, or earn so much money that they have an array of tax loop holes to escape paying taxes? This is not only obviously a time bomb waiting to explode, but the rate at which it is happening has been rather fast, and is now growing at an exponential rate. So many THINGS and the GREED for them, with no ENOUGH IS ENOUGH is driving society into the best of all possible worlds and the worst of all possible worlds. The wealthy are not yet satisfied, and want even more wealth. It can’t come from the poor, they have nothing more to give; this leaves the middle class, and to take more from the middle class just creates an increased size of the poor class. We have now become, in the ‘interest of self defense’, a very well armed nation. If an implosion happens, there is no way the “haves” can protect themselves from the ‘have-nots’. All of history has shown that it will be the have-nots who win and a whole new societal structure will have to be constructed.
In the past the poor could be poor and independent. Many could simply live off the land. And they were not reminded a hundred times a day, via electronic gadgets, of just how much better other people are living. The poorest people, in the poorest countries, are now well aware of just how many more THINGS so many people in so many places HAVE compared to themselves. It was easier in the past to be poor and yet contented. Urbanization of families brings with it massive numbers of poor who are anything but independent and have anything but a level playing field for schools, health care, job opportunities, personal safety, and so on. They may be gated off in many countries right now, including the United States, but it is only when, not if, this situation will implode and create total chaos. Everyone is armed now, so chaos will not be a pretty picture for anyone. Churches are fading and the Golden Rule not a major ethical pathway for enough people to generate any solution. Whatever the future, it seems clear enough that peace, security, and personal prosperity will not be achieved until the dominant species is governed by widespread adherence to the Golden Rule.
Change is to be expected, but the rate of change is starting to take our breath away. Lincoln would barely recognize this country 150 years after his death. The information overload which we all face and attempt to access all this information, cannot be reduced anymore to simple solutions for more and more serious problems facing the planet. It is not at all like the past, history does not repeat itself, and what can we do but hang on to our hat; it will be a bumpy ride—like a roller coaster, only we have no idea where this ride will end up. Actually, this being the evolutionary process, it will not end. We will, the process will not. Even our memories, for which we are mostly thankful, will be gone when the last conscious person who is part of these memories is gone. That’s all she wrote folks.
