Every generation has said that since, at least (judging from the earliest documented case I'm personally familiar with, which is no doubt many generations from when the trend started), the time of Plato.
> Western civilization reached it's peak right around 1776, the height of the Enlightenment
[Considers status of the Atlantic slave trade, position of women in society, etc., in 1776]
Um, no. Just no.
> Every generation is worse than the last
Its really not.
> and Western civilization will not last much longer unless the trend reverses.
Western civilization isn't on any trend to disintegration, even if you may not like its current organization.
> You can't turn the United States into a Hugo Chavez-style system and expect a different outcome than the one in Venezuela.
In what meaningful sense is the United States a "Hugo Chavez-style system"?
There existed societies without slaves, and multi-cultural cities were everybody got along, milenia before the "Atlantic slave trade".
So it's not a great example of something that "got better as things progressed".
>Western civilization isn't on any trend to disintegration
That's like, em, your opinion man. Lots of people think otherwise -- so it's not that clear cut.
The first part is true, but irrelevant. 1776 is the point that was proposed in the post I was responding to as the peak of Western civilization.
(Whether "multicultural cities where everyone got along" can be anything but hyperbole for anything that has ever existed is another question, but also irrelevant.)
> So it's not a great example of something that "got better as things progressed".
It wasn't offered for that purpose. It was offered -- as the direct quoting of the claim about the 1776 peak that preceded it should have suggested -- to counter the idea that 1776 was the high point of Western civilization.
> Um, no. Just no.
It was the Englightenment that made the end of slavery inevitable. For instance, it is written into the US Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal and have rights. That made it inevitable that the US would eventually outlaw slavery in its territory (i.e., as soon as it would be possible for the majority of the country to force the minority---and they did, at massive expensive of lives and material).
And it's not like the idea that all men are created equal was originated by the US Founding Fathers---it wasn't. It was part of the cultural mileiu at the time. It was a recent discovery. The United States was not responsible for the Enlightenment; it was a product of the Enlightenment.
So, your comment is incredibly ignorant and couldn't be more wrong. You are trashing the very time period that ended slavery.
Ignore history and you will be doomed to repeat it. (The Germans and the Russians did just that---creating new forms of slavery.)
I'm not interested in arguing the rest of your points. The evidence is out there if you care to look and think.
edit: So, I think I was too harsh on you, dragonwriter. I don't want you to think I'm a giant dickbag. Going to Hitler AND Stalin that quick is kind of crazy. I still think what I said, I just think I was being too aggressive.
Also, if people in Plato's time thought every subsequent generation was worse, they were probably right---at some point, the populace was so degraded that they actually would listen and seriously consider that old bastard (Plato). I'm half-joking here, of course. He did delimit all the important philosophical questions---he just got them all wrong.
[1] Many Americans were against slavery in 1776, but it would have meant losing the Southern colonies and thus losing the Revolutionary War.
edit: I picked 1788 because that's the year the US Constitution was adopted.
No, they didn't. Even white male Americans didn't have more rights in 1788. The federal government, true, had smaller scope, but there were, for example, fewer rights protected against infringement by State government than now.
Or women. The omission does say a lot about you.
Once married, they became basically legally merged with their husband, but I'm not sure what it would mean to share a household in 1788 and not have joint ownership of things.
update: In fact, they would have been covered by all of the bill of rights, including 9 and 10, which we are not covered by today and which are really the most important ones. So I think I was probably right in my original statement, even including women. I mean, I'm not an expert on femininity in the 18th century, though.
update2: And you want to know what my omission says about me? It says that I think of people as people, rather than dividing them up by gender. I am not a feminist---I believe in equal rights for all people, not priviliges and special treatment for women.
I think that most people today -- and most of the founders that you seem to deify as paragons of philosophic virtue -- would recognize both the right to participate in the government to which one is subject (the basis for the slogan, "no taxation without representation") and the right to equal treatment under the law -- both of which women did not have in 1788 -- to be moral rights. Certainly, both are actually legal rights which are extended to women in the US now that were not, in the same way, extended to them in 1788.
> They could own property, for example.
Unmarried women could own property, but under the common law doctrine of coverture, married women could neither own property, nor enter into contracts, nor earn a salary. Her husband could do all those things -- acting on his sole discretion -- including entering into contracts which called for performance by the wife, or exercising all rights relating to property which she had owned prior to the marriage.
> Once married, they became basically legally merged with their husband, but I'm not sure what it would mean to share a household in 1788 and not have joint ownership of things.
They didn't have joint ownership of things -- the concept of joint ownership in marriage in the US is a result of laws beginning in the 19th century which allowed a married women to own property at all. Prior to that, the husband owned any property and could dispose of it at will without the consent of the wife, but the reverse was not true. It was sole ownership by the husband, not joint ownership by the couple. The same was true of the power of contract, and basically all other beneficial aspects of legal personhood.
> In fact, they would have been covered by all of the bill of rights, including 9 and 10, which we are not covered by today
Both halves of this are wrong: while the Ninth and Tenth Amendments remain in effect today, they were formally proposed by the first Congress operating under the new Constitution in 1789 and were ratified in 1791, so they didn't apply to women or anyone else in 1788.
In any case, the Bill of Rights is not the only part of the Constitution that provides rights; among the amendments ratified after 1791 that provide rights are amendments 13, 14, 15, 19, 23, 24, and 26.
> Unmarried women could own property, but under the common law doctrine of coverture, married women could neither own property
That's what I said. (And not entering into contracts or earning salary are corollaries of that.)
By "joint ownership," I didn't mean some specific conception of joint ownership that you seem to be referring to. I meant that they owned things together, which means that whoever was more dominant in the marriage would have say---and legally, the husband would be free to completely dominate if he wanted.
> while the Ninth and Tenth Amendments remain in effect today
Go read them---they are not in effect in practice.
I don't care to continue this discussion, so I won't continue discussing it. It's pointless anyway, we are too philosophically different. If we want to argue we should argue about philosophy. Arguing on this level accomplishes nothing.
But one of the big challenges of success is that it's easy to take it for granted, especially each successive generation who grows up used to the benefits that their parents worked hard to win for them (or the results of major global conflicts in some cases. But even those result in post war booms.)
To take this out of the broad country level perspective, where technological and other advancements and history could be argued to be the cause-- we could look at the second and third generation immigrants to the USA. I suspect, and I hear this anecdotally, but I don't have data-- that the first generation kids are more industrious than the third or fourth-- and that this is probably true in the 1800s, 1900s and now.
In fact, I would argue that it was the presumption that prosperity (Which we've had) would result in ever higher levels of literacy (Which we've experienced) and thus higher levels of enlightenment and philosophical perspective due to ever better education and schools -- which we have not had.
Schools have slowly declined to the point where I suspect most schools don't even teach classical literature, let alone philosophy.
So, I think the lesson to learn from the USA is to never let the government take over the schools.
Among an extremely narrow, elite class perhaps. Jeffersons & Adams & Paine * Adam Smith are disproportionately represented among the people of that time that we remember now, but weren't exactly the norm.
> Probably literacy reached a local maximum, or a higher level than in generations prior.
Well, the latter but not the former -- just as has been the case since. [0]
> To take this out of the broad country level perspective, where technological and other advancements and history could be argued to be the cause-- we could look at the second and third generation immigrants to the USA. I suspect, and I hear this anecdotally, but I don't have data-- that the first generation kids are more industrious than the third or fourth
The common thing I've heard from people in fairly-recent-immigrant-descended-communities is that first-generation Americans (children of immigrants) are less industrious than immigrants or later generations. This is not to endorse the idea that any of these generational generalizations are accurate, just that, well, there's lots of different generalized anecdotes out there.
> In fact, I would argue that it was the presumption that prosperity (Which we've had) would result in ever higher levels of literacy (Which we've experienced) and thus higher levels of enlightenment and philosophical perspective due to ever better education and schools -- which we have not had.
I don't think that's true. I just think that due to selective preservation of history, we tend to only see the top end of the bell curve from 1776, and a lot more of the current distribution.
> Schools have slowly declined to the point where I suspect most schools don't even teach classical literature, let alone philosophy.
Certainly, the fetishization of the ancients Greece and Rome has waned and there is a lot more literature written since the fall of Rome that is taught in schools. I'mnot sure that this is a problem. And the definition of "philosophy" has narrowed since the 18th Century -- much of what is currently taught in school would have been within the scope of "philosophy" were that term as broad as it was in the 18th Century.
And perhaps a smaller percentage of schools teach philosophy than did in the 18th Century, but I suspect at least as great a share of people attend schools in which philosophy is taught; that would have been mainly the elites in the 18th Century, after all, not everyone. [0] http://ourworldindata.org/data/education-knowledge/literacy/
Western civilization reached it's peak right around 1776, the height of the Enlightenment, and it's been going downhill since then.
Every generation is worse than the last, and Western civilization will not last much longer unless the trend reverses.
You can't turn the United States into a Hugo Chavez-style system and expect a different outcome than the one in Venezuela.
Western Europe is more robust to socialism because the culture within each country is so homogenous, but even they won't be able to last forever. Especially with crackdowns on free speech.