Posted by Rachel on: 10.04.2007 /
On the Criminal Insanity thread, Joe posted this comment:
I guess I have a mental burp every time someone claims that in some way our current society is ‘worse than it used to be’. I’m sick of hearing this kind of BS in church.
Society is just different than it used to be. We used to burn witches at the stake, hold public executions and employ people to live and work in the sewers. In some ways it is less connected, but I’m not sure I want to live in a society where people lynch people in mobs or whatever. That might have been a connected society in a sense, but clearly not one I’d want to live in.
Yes, we’re messed up and our societies are broken. But there is no point in comparing ourselves with past communities, because that was then and this is now.
Do you agree with Joe? Or do you think society today IS “worse than it used to be”?
Leave a Reply
Comment by: Rachel
1 10/4/07 3:56 PM | Comment Link |That is one of my pet peeves too, Joe. I have had this conversation with my mother SO many times after she grimly declares that “the world today is more evil that is has EVER been!” I bring up all kinds of horrific and appalling things in both the recent and distant past and point out the great progress that has been made in human rights, quality of life, etc. I point out that there is a tinge of racial insensitivity in her assertion that things were so much better in “the good old days.” (I doubt that a black man in Mississippi is longing for the 1950s!)
But these arguments never seem to convince my Mom who has been throughly indoctrinated with dispensationalist end times theology - what Brian McLaren calls “the eschatology of despair.”
Comment by: Helen
2 10/4/07 8:33 PM | Comment Link |I so totally agree with Joe…that’s why I found what Mike O posted today irritating; although I respect that he gets something helpful out of it.
Comment by: Mike O
3 10/5/07 3:59 AM | Comment Link |That’s what I love about this group of blogs - they bring such vast perspective! I still stand by what I posted over there, but I can also completely see this side of it. You’re right, while I may like to see certain things change (were they ever really that way before?), there are also LOTS of wrongs that have been righted!
Comment by: Rachel
4 10/5/07 8:16 AM | Comment Link |I totally agree, Mike! That’s what I love about our blog network too!
Comment by: Janice
5 10/5/07 8:41 AM | Comment Link |I missed the original comment (will read it later) but just wanted to interject that - for me - there are two considerations in addition to what has been posted. We used to be less globally aware. We lived a more isolated life and didn’t know of many of the ‘evils’ out there sometimes. (thinking of my parents for instance who grew up without a tv etc). So while evil was present (probably in the same proportions as today) many people weren’t aware of it or affected by it.
Today, for instance, there are cell phones with cameras, etc and even in the VERY controlled country of Burma in the past weeks we’ve been wittness to the death of Japenese journalist Kenji Nagai and the photos of monks being beated were readily available for the world to see.
Second, many times when I hear the phrase ‘good old days’ or whatever, people are referring to times they view as being ’simpler’
though in reality there was nothing simple about beheading your chicken and pluching all its feathers prior to dinner as opposed to running out to the grocery store for a packaged bird, there is still a sense (for some) that those days were simpler. Technology has perhaps made many things ‘easier’, but it seems our reaction to that is too fill the space with more and to move faster and maybe there is more stress in that.
I don’t know. :)
Comment by: benjamin ady
6 10/5/07 9:19 AM | Comment Link |Rachel,
So what’s your mum say about the quote in Genesis about how evil things were right before (the crazy genocidal Old Testament Hebrew) God decided to wipe out humanity with a catastrophic flood?
Comment by: Karen
7 10/5/07 9:38 AM | Comment Link |I just saw a fascinating documentary called The Rape of Europa. It’s all about how the art treasures of Europe were looted by the Nazis during WWII and then what was recovered and restored by the Allied forces after the war. Totally well-done and very informative. Definitely recommend it.
However, as I was watching and the reality of this utter madman expanding his evil empire all over the world hit me yet again, I just had to shake my head over that mentality that your mom expresses, Rachel. I heard it all the time - this is the worst period in human history, Jesus has to come back soon to save us from the depravity, yadda yadda yadda.
What a myopic, idiotic, self-centered, short-sighted viewpoint! Just 50 years ago the world was EASILY worse off and if Armageddon didn’t happen then, why would they think it’s going to happen now? And the weirdest thing is that some of the people who buy into it lived through WWII. I bet they weren’t in Europe suffering through the bombings, though. It just makes me shake my head at the ignorance.
Comment by: Nathan Ketsdever
8 10/5/07 2:09 PM | Comment Link |Perhaps general discussions of “it was better then” vs. “now” aren’t all that productive. However, I think if you have a specific topic (ie race, women, community involvement) in mind they are. First, they help us understand our past and our cultural roots. Second, they tell us there is an alternative and that alternative is possible. We seem to have so many problems and short on viable, tangible solutions that the second part is particularly helpful (even if how to get from here to there still becomes an issue) Even if the relationship tends in the opposite direction (better now, worse then) something can be gained.
Comment by: benjamin ady
9 10/5/07 5:27 PM | Comment Link |nathan
great idea to narrow it a bit. that makes it way more approachable.
So for intance–when better/worse in terms of danger of more or less total catastrophe due to nuclear war? The doomsday clock may or may not be an accurate reflection with regards to this variable.
Comment by: benjamin ady
10 10/5/07 5:30 PM | Comment Link |also,
here is the executive summary of a fairly broad spectrum report which is produced once every year by the millenium project attempting to get a handle on this same sort of question: are we better or worse off *in general*?
Comment by: Aubrie
11 10/8/07 12:28 AM | Comment Link |I have so much to agree with with everyone above. I was raised by my grandparents who are now both 75. So there is a big generation gap. I was also raised very shelterd & stricktly in an evangelical church that was very conserative. I have heard about my grandparents raising their own food, killing their own meat, washing their own clothes by hand & so on.
I mean I didn’t own or wear a pair of jeans until the 6th grade! And my black sheep aunt had to sneak them in! Sunday was about church, pot roast or chicken, & Sunday night church. Their eairly lives they feel were so much easier. The only bad things they thought they had were boys sneaking alchol into the high school dances, (so we NEVER dance!) & smoking & movies. We never went to those either. But just ask Staci & Rachel, we snuck in!
But get them to talk about the depression. Or the Japenese internment camps, the friends they visted there & the farms they watched over. Or uncles who died in the war. Or what alcohol did to family members, or I could go on. I agree that they just didn’t really know some things becuase it wasn’t on their radio, in the newspaper or eventually their TV.
Today we can look back & see what people were really doing. But we also don’t see some of what happened because press wasn’t alowed in, no camera’s, no reporters. Or people knew, but there was no way the american people were going to be told. Today we hear about things, but we don’t always do something about it.
I think the days you have are as good as your going to make them. And even if you remember them as wonderful, your children may remember them as horrible. Case in point, my memories of growing up being awfull & somewhat abusive & my grandparents having no idea! Eveyone has their own perception of what is good and what is worse. Sure horrilbe things happened yesterday, today, & tomorrow.
I hear from my grandma all the time that these just have to be the end times, like Rachel & her mom. But ya know what? My grandma has been saying that since I was 10 years old & now I’m 32! Hello, that’s 22 years!
Comment by: benjamin ady
12 10/8/07 1:36 AM | Comment Link |Aubrie
You really hit the nail on the head. Furthermore, you sort of summarized “postmodernism” awesome.
indeed. and this goes back much further. seems at least a couple times in the new testament the authors indicate that they think *they* are living in the end times, and jesus is likely to return any day, etc.
Comment by: joe
13 10/8/07 3:15 AM | Comment Link |I think what we’re talking about here is nostalgia. Almost everyone has rosy memories of their childhood and associate ‘good’ with ‘old’.
I remember learning in my Ecology classes at university about uproar which was being provoked in some communities when certain old trees were cut down. The weird thing was that these trees had been planted only about 100 years ago, particularly for making wooden furniture. Since then the industry has died and the trees have reached the end of their natural lives. As they were all planted together, they are obviously all reaching maturity together.
Yet there are certain people who associate this particular place with this stand of trees. This to them is the epitome of ‘natural’ - even though it is a totally artificial industrial environment. They don’t - or don’t want - to understand that trees a) need to be managed and b) have a limited lifespan, and therefore resist felling.
And the really sad thing is this kind of illogical thinking is rife in church.
Comment by: Helen
14 10/8/07 7:52 AM | Comment Link |Joe wrote:
In the dispensational conservative evangelical Christian world I spent 20 years in, it’s a theological doctrine that the world is spiralling downwards. To think otherwise would be to disbelieve God; to find evidence that it’s getting worse upholds the truth of the Bible.
To not agree the world is getting worse would be to disagree with God’s Word - not an option in that world.
Comment by: Rachel
15 10/8/07 2:35 PM | Comment Link |As Brian McLaren says in summing up the dispensational worldview, “to have hope is to be unfaithful.”
Comment by: benjamin ady
16 10/8/07 6:36 PM | Comment Link |and yet *not* having hope is so much *easier*, in many respects. Isn’t that a bit of an oxymoron? Isn’t christianity supposed to be the more difficult way?
Comment by: Rachel
17 10/8/07 7:06 PM | Comment Link |Benjamin, I think that true Christianity IS the more difficult way. And I don’t believe that dispensational eschatology represents true Christianity. The message of Jesus was a message of radical, crazy, impossible hope. To an oppressed people living under the brutal domination of Rome, Jesus had the audacity to say, “There is a greater power than Caesar, there is a greater Kingdom, and that Kingdom has already arrived among you.” Jesus challenged them to believe in what they could not yet see. As Jim Wallis says it, “Hope is believing in spite of the evidence and then watching the evidence change.”
And yes, that is difficult. Especially when the message is that WE are supposed to participate with God in bringing about that change. That’s why I think that the dispensationalist eschatology of despair is so popular. Because it is easy to sit on one’s rump, self-righteously decrying the evils of society, while doing nothing to advance the cause of justice and peace. Hope takes energy and courage and imagination. That is the Way of Jesus.
Comment by: David H
18 10/8/07 9:19 PM | Comment Link |The author of Ecclesiastes said with despair: There is nothing new under the sun. Everything wrong or selfish or sinful that can be done today was done before.
From my parents I hear the same arguments about how things are much worse, very ironic considering that my father is often the one to put on this particular broken record. Every time I remind him about Nazi death camps, Jim Crow, slavery, etc. But I also point out that almost none of the evils perpetrated in the past occurred in a vacuum. They all happened as a result of some other evil. Most go back and back, some only generations, others centuries, a few trace back millenia each building to he thing we look at now as evidence that the world just can’t get any worse. Hitler came from the rape of Germany after WWI, which was a product of long-standing European feuds over empires in collapse, etc., etc., ad naseum. I doubt the evil grew except in proportion to the population. The Inquisition, the Children’s Crusade, the trenches at Verdun, the ovens at Treblinka, the pogroms and purges and mass murders of the 20th century all have the same stench. The also offer ample evidence that the world isn’t winding down, it is just grinding on.
It isn’t evidence of anything, perhaps, other than that people are still the same.
What I always tell my parents is that even if this isn’t true, the role of a Christian should never be as cheerleader for the infernal machine or passive observer of God’s inevitable judgment. Jesus made it pretty clear that his followers should focus on the people being chewed up.
Comment by: Doreen Mannion
19 10/11/07 1:28 PM | Comment Link |A great book on how it was so wonderful when we all had “Leave it to beaver” families vs. “how it is now” is
The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap by Stephanie Coontz
I read it when it when it was first published in 1992 and it really affected me. For example, it reminded me that there were many pregnant teenagers and unwed mothers back in the day, but the girls were shipped off. I remember a sister of a friend being sent to Missouri suddenly to “live with an aunt.”