~a column by Colleen O’Brien
The news from some sources is bent on making us suspicious, judgmental and frightened of everything from ants to Zulus.
I’ve always thought the world was getting better as we went along from century to century, but the 24/7 news cycle of this modern era cautions me to beware at all times of germs, gays, sugar, foreigners, fat, bureaucrats, the Department of Education, socialism and comprehensive labeling.
If I paid attention, I’d be huddled in my house wearing white gloves and a mask, unable to invite friends in or ingest anything that hadn’t been sterilized. I’d be forced to pave my own street while the neighbor might just lay down rocks. Some of my good friends in the courthouse would fall under the fear-of-bureaucrats label. I would have to caution families against foreign exchange students. And I would never be able to eat bacon again.
Thank goodness I never became attached to TV, although I’ve long been unable to start a day without a newspaper or NPR. So, I’m not uninformed, but I am often somewhat skeptical of what I read and hear, which allows me to switch to music or gardening on a regular basis.
A recently published non-fiction book titled The Better Angels of our Behavior by Steven Pinker is a huge relief to a non-negative sort like me. This philosophical author believes that humankind is getting better. He writes that the murder rate in medieval Europe was 30 times the murder rate in the world now. He says there is less child abuse, rape, slavery and cruelty to animals. He also mentions the lower incidences of burning people alive and breaking people’s wills on the rack.
The reason we think there’s a lot of lousy and stupid behavior is because we can hear something awful and/or stupid once a minute from various news outlets.
Pinker reasons and follows up with statistics of the benefits of democratic governments, wherein people have access to police and civil suits rather than just shooting the neighbor over a difference of opinion.
He talks about the rise of commerce because of good transportation as a huge peacemaker — folks willing to buy and sell, trade and barter rather than invade a country because they want its land, gold, trees and crocodiles (purses and shoes, you know).
The idea that we are becoming better people — more humanistic humans interested in individual dignity and worth and the capacity for self-realization through reason — is completely refreshing in the face of the various faux news sources telling us science is fiction, opinion is fact and everything under the sun is scary.
Pinker cites free speech, education and the rise of general intellectual practices as reasons for the lessening of violence. He thinks that as we learn about others in the world, we also learn to allow them their own points of view; we need not be xenophobic – fearful of strangers – because we’re all brothers and sisters under the skin. He believes that widespread literacy has improved us humans immensely.
Me, too. With the caveats of: Be a careful reader. Be a skeptical watcher. Live with optimism about the human race.
As novelist writer Katherine Mansfield once wrote, “Could we change our attitude, we should not only see life differently, but life itself would come to be different. Life would undergo a change of appearance because we ourselves had undergone a change of attitude.”
The scare-tactic folks out there have altered our opinion of the world we live in. But because we are educated and live in a democracy, I believe we are capable of making up our own minds, not having them made up for us.
