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Hello, dear readers. First of all, I must apologize for a long absence from this blog. The Doctor and I have been on a marathon of relative-visiting, complete with a brief trip to the philosopher’s job market in Baltimore. Believe it or not, I have not been at home since the evening when I wrote the “wolf children” post. I thought I would be able to post from my laptop computer while traveling, but it has more or less died, leaving me sad and computer-less. Isn’t it strange how visiting people starts to feel exhausting even when you’re not doing much of anything? Anyway, I look forward to returning to my home, my routine, and this blog, as of next Monday. But I managed to borrow a computer for long enough to put up a quick post tonight.
This is just a little teaser that I pulled from the most recent issue of The Economist. I used to read this magazine regularly, and now I pick up a copy only occasionally, but the Christmas issue is always fun, and this one included a feature asking the question: why are Americans so gloomy about the state of their country when everything seems so good?
“Both violent crime and property crime have declined dramatically since 1973. New York City will probably notch up less than 500 murders this year, the lowest since the early 1960’s (the figure for 1990 was 2,262.) Teenagers are cleaning up their act. Teenage drug use has fallen by 23% overall since the 1990’s, and by 50% for LSD and ecstasy. Teens are drinking less, smoking less, having sex less and dropping out of school less. The birth rate for 15-19-year-olds has fallen by 35% since 1991. At 10%, the high-school drop-out rate is at a 30-year low.
Welfare reform is working. The welfare caseload has dropped by 60% since 1994. A series of social evils — overall poverty, child poverty, child hunger — have all decreased. Employment figures for single mothers have surged. The number of abortions fell from over 1.6m in 1990 to fewer than 1.3m this year. The divorce rate is at its lowest level since 1970. Education scores are up.”
Huh. It’s an interesting question to consider from the standpoint of traditional Catholics, who certainly have a strong gloom-and-doom air about them, and who tend to assume that the world is getting steadily worse. Now, obviously, The Economist won’t necessarily care about all the things that would matter to traditional Catholics. For example, the increased legitimization of homosexuality is a big concern for us, and The Economist would if anything mark that as a positive trend. They would also be unlikely to consult stats concerning, say, Mass attendance. Even so, these trends do surely mean something to us. Less violent crime! Less broken families! Less drugs and sex among teenagers! This is surely good news. The annual decline in abortions may not seem like anything to celebrate given the 1.3 million that are still happening, but 300,000 less deaths per year is still an awfully good thing. Oh, and guess what? Birth rates are up too, and America currently has the highest fertility rate of any Western country.
Is America getting better? The improvement would no doubt be marginal when placed on a scale with a perfectly virtuous society. Certainly, the United States today is suffused with modernism — but then, it always has been. Clearly, Vatican II did tremendous damage to American Catholic culture — but that was decades ago, and it’s hard to dispute that, on that score, things have been gradually improving of late. When I make reference to memories from my teenage years (particularly, my experience of public high schools) I am regularly reminded, “Oh, but things are so much more terrible now.” Are they? I went to high school in the mid-1990’s. If The Economist is right in their statistics, the schools of my day probably had more drugs, sex, and violence than the schools of today.
There’s plenty wrong with today’s world, but I sometimes wonder whether the perception of continual worsening has more to do with an increase in cultural conflict. America is more polarized today than it was a generation ago, particularly on “values questions.” Liberals continually wring their hands about the evil Evangelicals, and social conservatives get equally upset about liberalizing trends on the other side (gay marriage, stem cell research, euthanasia). Both sides are responding to real phenomena, and each may correctly identify particular figures or ideologies that would not have been tolerated in an earlier era. But if we could really get perspective on the state of the country as a whole, would it be so clear that things are tipping in the wrong direction? I wonder.
And on that note… Happy New Year!
St. Louis-Marie de Montfort,
Pope St. Pius X,
St. Joseph,
St. Ambrose of Milan,
St. Thomas Aquinas,
St. Francis (and St. Clare),
St. Catherine of Siena,
St. Alphonsus Ligouri,
St. John Chrysostom,
You’re not speaking about pessimism in the traditional Catholic communities in Kansas City! We have it so good that our enthusiasm and optimism for the future can’t help but follow along. At least 250 people (half children) came to our Saturday morning Mass today. At least six Latin Masses each Sunday, too. In addition, two or three sets of traditional Catholic nuns. Don’t forget the good number of traditional Kansas City Catholic bloggers, as well. God is very, very good to us.
How very wonderful! I did not know that things were so good in Kansas City, but it certainly cheers me to hear it.
But now I have a song from the musical “Oklahoma” running through my head. “Everything’s up to date in Kansas City. They’ve gone about as far as they can go. …”
I’m not a pessimist but I didn’t realize how rosy things are until I read those statistics from The economist. Still, I guess it’s hard for traditionalists to be upbeat, with so many negative forces working against us, like depletion of the ozone and Global warming and all.
On the positive side, not to mention that the George Washington Bridge is still standing, I feel a lot more safe these days, now that the Homeland Security Act is in place. And you really feel protected while traveling, especially at the airports with all of the security and surveillance. Schools, too, are doing a better job in educating—at least schools with x-ray scanners and police at the doors. Industrialization, once responsible for devastating the countryside and concentrating the population into the cities, is on the wane and people are now fleeing cities like Detroit looking for jobs elsewhere. Fortunately, they can find them in the tourist industry, especially as the dollar weakens, making the visiting of the U.S. an attractive deal—kind of like a Third World Country. And as crime decreases, we may see the day when prisons are closed and sold at a faster rate than Catholic Churches.
No, seriously, I agree there are a lot of signs for hope but we can’t become complaisant. The battle still wages. The youth now attending the Traditional Mass in increasing numbers need to be injected with the spirit of a Church Militant. Too often they fall in line with our decadent society. But yes, Happy New Year!
Well as a Catholic I would be concerned about the growing inability to hear Auricular Confessions.
Check my math -http://quickbeamoffangorn.wordpress.com/2007/12/19/confession-and-priest-shortage-do-the-math-mission-impossible/
I think the Economist must have gotten some bad or outdated figures on teen age birth rates.
Centers for Disease Control
Childbearing by unmarried women rose substantially in 2006, reaching record high levels. The birth rate rose 7 percent in 2006 to 50.6 per 1,000 unmarried women aged 15–44 years; the number of births to unmarried women increased by nearly 8 percent in 2006 to 1,641,700.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr56/nvsr56_07.pdf
Lastly, as a Cradle Catholic Irish American it’s taken 5 generations of doom, gloom, and poor cooking to develop such a highly skilled level of guilt.
Nothing is more depressing that not having anything to be depressed about, one can only be happy when your feeling guilty.
It looks to me, Tom, as though the stats you cite relate to illegitimacy generally, not specifically to teens. So it would be possible for teen pregnancies to go down while the number of births to unmarried women generally went up. Actually, The Economist did mention a few bad trends later in the article, including increased illegitimacy, but in the interests of brevity I didn’t get into all of it. The bottom line was that, in their estimation, there seemed to be a lot more good news than bad news.
Ah! Tomorrow night I will sit at my own computer again… and watch the college football national championship on my own television. I can hardly wait!
I’m surprised that The Economist regards illegitimacy as a bad thing. Isn’t that just a lifestyle choice? I assume that ‘teenage pregnancies’ (even of happily married 19-year-olds, presumably) are a ‘bad thing’ because of their detrimental effect on the proportion of women in the workforce.
Maybe I’ve been reading The Economist too long…
Happy New Year!
If you’re suggesting that The Economist is basically depraved with regards to questions of morals or religion, I quite agree. But I still find it to be amusing and informative, as apparently do you.
Things are getting better in the wider world, too. There’s less communist tyranny, less war, and lately, less poverty. But birthrates are falling worldwide, except in the US and a couple of European countries. That helps countries alleviate poverty because a larger share of the population is working, but it might be a bad thing from the Catholic point of view.
Also, long-run trends in church membership are positive in America: it’s increased from 20% or so in the colonial period to 60% or so in the 1980s. I’m not sure of the most recent numbers or specifically for Catholics. Europe has definitely moved in the other direction, with a collapse of religion, and of birthrates, although birthrates are recovering in a few countries such as Denmark and the Netherlands.
STD’s are clearly rising among young people, especially HPV. the birth rates are only up because of illegal and legal immigration. in general, white and native born americans are not having lots of kids. hispanic and asians are the fastest growing population groups.
it all depends where you look and how you look at the data. some good signs, some very bad signs–the threat of a nuclear terrorist attack, the pollution problem in china, our country’s wasteful unsustainable lifestyle, the rise of islam in europe, the attacks on christians by islam, resistant staph infections in hospitals, globalization, the power of the industrial military complex, secularization, poor catholic catechesis…. etc.
i wouldn’t say things are getting worse, but they are not getting better.
I don’t think it can be obviously shown that things are getting better, or that things are getting worse. Nathan, in my opinion (and this is based on a long history, not just on that comment), has entirely too optimistic a view of the modern world. :)
But Trads may tend towards the other extreme, which is why I thought it might be fun to poke at them with that little post.