I was searching online for the answer to this question today, after watching a particularly dumb Netflix production. Instead despairing, as I often do, about the lack of halfway decent content to watch, I decided to Google my question and that led me to Quora where someone had asked it to the internet public. I wrote a reply and thought I’d share it with you. To make a long comment short, yes I do think we’re devolving, but with a caveat which I will add to the end of my comment.
Is humanity devolving?
I think we are. Everything is dumber, less moral, less rational than ever before and any attempts to evolve society is met with fierce and dumb resistance. And in terms of culture, look at today’s media, ads, Netflix. The style these days is everything super dumb and obvious from comedy to drama. The obvious soundtrack, formulas, charactors are perfect for the dumbed down mind and low charactor that’s today’s cultural ideal, to grasp and identify with. In the past only the anti social stoners watched gross out horror or humor, identified with evil. Now it’s the norm.
Advocating for greater values, things of beauty, like nature, animals, great institutions is met with hate and resistance online and in person. This is because not only won’t dumb people understand, they also resent that which is above them. It’s a formula for devolution and our society has fed this loop into being and into power.
Politics is now all about your culture and opinion, who you hate, not facts, reality or righteous values, true need or truth. Can you imagine if our safety depended on today’s generations (1960- present)? We can’t even put on a mask without complaining, violently assaulting people, and coming up with super stupid conspiracy theories. Of course not all of us are the super dumb, super crass but enough are and our status quo, arts, media, entertainment feed them and rarely these days rise above them.
Enlightment is going sideways, not forward. Real evolution like animal rights, conservation and preservation, green policy and infastructure, smarter world systems, ending poverty, human equality infrastructure is rejected, denied or delayed. Meanwhile far left and far right policy, attitude and agenda take all the news, all the attention and debate. It’s seen as progress but it’s just an endless cycle of war, insanity and stupidity that wastes everyone’s time fighting for or against everything.
Morality and virtue are deeply connected to human evolution. Deny them, denigrate and disrespect them, make sin the virtue and societies and humanity with decline and devolve.
So yes, I do believe society as a whole has devolved but I’m still happy and hopeful living in it. How and why is because as much as a society can devolve, and ours has, it can also at any time, figure it all out and start to evolve, get back on the forward track. I think many people can, have and advocate for it, our evolution. Activists, progressive, smart media, arts policy and culture are out there and abound these days. We can evolve if these ideals and ideas win. If we learn that our humanity matters as much as our tech and capital, and that great civilizations are made of human effort, growth and values, not just advances in development, and radicalism in art, culture and thought.
