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Will only hitting the bottom stop the slide downwards? : Comments
By Brian Holden, published 24/2/2011For over 48 years it has been obvious that 'progress' has been 'regress' - when will we notice?
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Sure, the technophobe will grump that it's not 'real' communication, but I'm sure there were those who grumbled that telephones were no replacement for letters written with a feather quill. The human instinct to interact, gossip and chat hasn't changed, just the means of doing so. Arthur C. Clarke was never more perspicacious than when he wrote, in '1984: Spring', 'the world will become one vast, chattering village'.
As for suicide rates and child abuse statistics, I'm not sure what the official rates are, but there is good reason to argue that for many years, due to cultural and religious pressures, the problems were largely hidden. They were certainly there, though. Try reading some old newspapers, as I did when researching family history: the accounts of death by violence and suicide are quite shocking. Jack Marx has written an excellent article on this: http://tinyurl.com/46fteww .
As for marriage breakdown, again, cultural pressures may have acted against divorce in the past, but all that meant was that millions of people - mostly women - lived trapped in miserable and often brutal relationships, unable to leave because of the social stigma and economic impossibility of being a single mother.
As my mother always says, 'no-one had sex outside marriage in our day - funny how the orphanages were full to bursting, though.'
Lifestyle related diseases? To put it frankly, we're lucky enough that we're living long enough to get sick with heart disease, instead of dying from tuberculosis, cholera, influenza, smallpox, polio, diptheria, malaria, dysentery ... I think you get the picture. In many ways, though, we're actually healthier than ever: cancer rates, for instance, have fallen steadily.