Civilization

When I say “civilization,” I don’t mean the concept of Western Civilization, or the video game Civilization. I’m thinking of the verb form of the word: to civilize. As in, society has undergone a process of civilization over the years. We have been civilized.

One thing that kind of disappoints me is that a lot of my Generation X cohort has turned into get off my lawn social conservatives. They’re not racist, mind you, but they share these memes on Facebook about being the last generation to play outside and the last generation to get spanked and the last generation to get somewhere with a road atlas. They are nostalgic for the old days, and they are standing athwart history yelling “stop.” One thing these people like to complain about is political correctness, how you have to be careful what you say and you can’t tell people to go fuck themselves, like you used to in the old days. We are somehow worse off.

I don’t think we are worse off. I am not a progressive, but I think progress only goes in one direction—forward—and we have undergone a process of civilization since the dawn of civilization itself. We used to feed people to the lions, you know. Now, the “R” word is so odious that we call it the “R” word. That started happening around 2013—it was fair game before that. See Anchorman (2006) and Ocean’s Twelve (2004) for recent examples of its use.

There are some interesting debates about this, for sure. Our legal system is designed to protect us from physical aggression—if I so much as lightly poke another person in the chest during an argument, I can be charged with assault. But calling someone the “N” word or the “R” word or any other word is undoubtedly more painful than a poke in the chest, but there are no legal consequences for that, even though that speech is more damaging. Interesting, right? Now, I’m not suggesting that we criminalize speech—no freaking way—but you can’t be oblivious to the fact that words do actually hurt, sometimes. You may wonder why 40 years ago we were worried about sticks and stones, and today we are worried about words, but 2000 years ago we weren’t even worried about sticks and stones. It is a process of civilization. I saw recently that the U.K. was trying to criminalize catcalling and even staring as a form of sexual assault. Remember, progress only goes in one direction.

So I am not too worried about social progressivism. It is inevitable, and there is no sense trying to fight it. Remember, the cure for anything is too much of that thing. It will go too far, and there will be a backlash, and we will reach equilibrium, eventually. A lot of social conservatives believe that it is their duty to fight progressivism, but what they don’t realize is that when you complain about something, you make it stronger. Fighting social trends actually strengthens them. The best thing to do it is to ignore it, go about your business, and people will lose interest and move on to another cause du jour.

As I said, Generation Xers like to brag about how they could ride their bicycles all over creation and stay out until midnight. We wear that as a badge of honor. It was also uncivilized. People like to complain about how overprotective parents are these days. Well, I don’t have the statistics at my command, but I would bet that there are far fewer Zoomers that got run over by cars, drowned in pools, or lost fingers to fireworks. The counterargument to this is that the Xers learned independence by exploring their world unsupervised. There is probably some truth to that. It is all a matter of risk management. A few years ago, I had drinks with a few of my Xer high school friends back in Connecticut, and we were talking about how we could ride our bicycles all over creation. I asked them, what do you do with your kids? They said they wouldn’t let them out of the driveway. You’d think if that lack of supervision was so beneficial to a child’s development, then the Xers would pass it along to their kids. See Lenore Skenazy and her book Free Range Kids.

One way in which we have become more civilized is the treatment of animals. As you are probably aware, I am a cat person, and I have owned cats since I was about eight years old. My cats growing up were indoor/outdoor cats—mostly outdoor. We lived near a busy road. Every few years we’d lose a cat, shrug, and just get a new cat. I wouldn’t think of letting my cats outside nowadays. We have seven, and they’re strictly indoors. The life expectancy of an indoor cat is fifteen years. The life expectancy of an outdoor cat is four years. You’ve probably heard about this pet investment boom that we are in the midst of. People are buying fancy food, fancy treats, fancy beds, even spa treatments—people take very good care of their animals nowadays. Leagues better than the 1980s—and the 80s were better than the 50s.

What about pop culture? If you’re my age, you remember what going to the movies was like in the 80s—boobs everywhere. Even in PG-rated movies. I don’t think you could be a big-name actress in the 80s without taking your shirt off. I would characterize that as uncivilized. That has changed, obviously. I miss the cheap thrills, but it’s also awkward being in a theater full of complete strangers when there is nudity on the screen, right? I’m no feminist, but this was extremely exploitative. Some people complain about the coarsening of music lyrics over time, but I would argue that this has actually been getting better in recent years. I was in college during the 2 Live Crew days, probably some of the most offensive music ever recorded in history. Ex-certain quarters of hip hop, music is squeaky clean these days. And it isn’t because of the efforts of Tipper Gore. It just happened…naturally.

In fact, I would argue that in some respects, we’re entering into a period of New Puritanism, and it started in 2008, with the financial crisis. My friend, newsletter writer Mark Lapolla, predicted this, and he wasn’t referring to the skirt lengths/stock market adage from yesteryear. He predicted that we would become more chaste, as we corrected the excesses and the debt and risk-taking of the mid-2000s. Newsletter writers aren’t paid to be right on social trends, but he sure nailed that one. Having worked on Wall Street during the mid-2000s, I can tell you that our definition of what constitutes sexual harassment sure has shifted over time. We were a bunch of ogres.

But most of all, people are nice to each other nowadays. And unfailingly polite. Turn on one of those 80s movies, and aside from the boobs, what do you see? People are yelling at each other all the time. And people really did yell at each other all the time. There was a lot of yelling in my house, and my friends’ houses. People were fucking awful to each other back then. And one thing about the current social and cultural environment is that people are so sensitive to perceived slights, that they forget how much progress we have made on these issues. We really have come a long way. I mean…Andrew Dice Clay? In the early 90s, everyone thought Dice was hilarious. My guess is that if you went back and watched those routines today, they would fall flat. He was part of the say anything zeitgeist. It was fun for a while, but we are never going back to those days.

As you can probably tell, I’m partial to the new normal. Because part of the new normal is an attitude of live and let live. If someone is fat, you don’t need to point out that they are fat. If someone has purple hair, you don’t need to point out that they have purple hair. People leave each other alone. And that’s a good thing. Yes, you still see articles online about some rogue hothead that shoots his neighbor for playing his music too loud. That still happens. But the media doesn’t report on all the times that doesn’t happen. Things are good. In fact, things are awesome, and we don’t realize how awesome things are. If you spent any time on the Twittertubes, you would be led to believe that we are going down the tubes.

Nothing could be further from the truth.