Apocalypse Not Now.

"Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it." George Orwell

Just take a break from your moaning and groaning about all the things you didn't like about 2017. You can be sure that there will be more of that in 2018, but you might be wrong at betting on the extinction of the human race, your country or civilization. You might consider delaying the construction of your nuclear bunker or your tree house for another year. 

Perhaps there is something else going on, as Orwell's quote insinuates. Apocalyptic vision could come with aging, but unfortunately this kind of problem can't can be solved with optometrists or lasik surgery. 

In his book  "The Sense of Style", professor Steve Pinker describes a typical case of apocalyptic vision among old English scholars 

"As people age, they confuse changes in themselves with changes in the world, and changes in the world with moral decline—the illusion of the good old days.4 And so every generation believes that the kids today are degrading the language and taking civilization down with it"

Pinker doesn't just pass judgment. He provides historical evidence such as this about how each generation of scholars berates the previous and predicts the extinction for the next:

"The common language is disappearing. It is slowly being crushed to death under the weight of verbal conglomerate, a pseudospeech at once both pretentious and feeble, that is created daily by millions of blunders and inaccuracies in grammar, syntax, idiom, metaphor, logic, and common sense. . . . In the history of modern English there is no period in which such victory over thought-in-speech has been so widespread.—1978

Recent graduates, including those with university degrees, seem to have no mastery of the language at all. They cannot construct a simple declarative sentence, either orally or in writing. They cannot spell common, everyday words. Punctuation is apparently no longer taught. Grammar is a complete mystery to almost all recent graduates.—1961 

From every college in the country goes up the cry, “Our freshmen can’t spell, can’t punctuate.” Every high school is in disrepair because its pupils are so ignorant of the merest rudiments.—1917 

The vocabularies of the majority of high-school pupils are amazingly small. I always try to use simple English, and yet I have talked to classes when quite a minority of the pupils did not comprehend more than half of what I said.—1889 Unless the present progress of change [is] arrested . . . there can be no doubt that, in another century, the dialect of the Americans will become utterly unintelligible to an Englishman.—1833

Our language (I mean the English) is degenerating very fast. . . . I begin to fear that it will be impossible to check it.— 1785 

Complaints about the decline of language go at least as far back as the invention of the printing press. Soon after William Caxton set up the first one in England in 1478, he lamented, “And certaynly our langage now vsed veryeth ferre from what whiche was vsed and spoken when I was borne.” 

How about some new glasses?

Professor Steven Pinker in his book "The Better Angels of our Nature" shows with a detailed analysis of facts that -against those who think and speak otherwise- the world is becoming more peaceful, tolerant and less violent.

Pinker compares the modern horrors of terrorist brutality and genocidal violence with precedents since prehistorical times -from the Paleolithic to the Bible to the times of George Washington to the present day.

Here are some samples of what Pinker explains:

HUMAN PREHISTORY 

In 1991 two hikers stumbled upon a corpse poking out of a melting glacier in the Tyrolean Alps. Thinking that it was the victim of a skiing accident, rescue workers jackhammered the body out of the ice, damaging his thigh and his backpack in the process. Only when an archaeologist spotted a Neolithic copper ax did people realize that the man was five thousand years old.2 Ötzi the Iceman, as he is now called, became a celebrity. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine and has been the subject of many books, documentaries, and articles. Not since Mel Brooks’s 2000 Year Old Man (“I have more than 42,000 children and not one comes to visit me”) has a kilogenarian had so much to tell us about the past. 

Ötzi lived during the crucial transition in human prehistory when agriculture was replacing hunting and gathering, and tools were first made of metal rather than stone. Together with his ax and backpack, he carried a quiver of fletched arrows, a wood-handled dagger, and an ember wrapped in bark, part of an elaborate fire-starting kit. He wore a bearskin cap with a leather chinstrap, leggings sewn from animal hide, and waterproof snowshoes made from leather and twine and insulated with grass. He had tattoos on his arthritic joints, possibly a sign of acupuncture, and carried mushrooms with medicinal properties. Ten years after the Iceman was discovered, a team of radiologists made a startling discovery: Ötzi had an arrowhead embedded in his shoulder. He had not fallen in a crevasse and frozen to death, as scientists had originally surmised; he had been murdered. As his body was examined by the CSI Neolithic team, the outlines of the crime came into view. Ötzi had unhealed cuts on his hands and wounds on his head and chest. DNA analyses found traces of blood from two other people on one of his arrowheads, blood from a third on his dagger, and blood from a fourth on his cape. According to one reconstruction, Ötzi belonged to a raiding party that clashed with a neighboring tribe. He killed a man with an arrow, retrieved it, killed another man, retrieved the arrow again, and carried a wounded comrade on his back before fending off an attack and being felled by an arrow himself. Ötzi is not the only millennia-old man who became a scientific celebrity at the end of the 20th century. Many other bog men and women from northern Europe show signs of having been strangled, bludgeoned, stabbed, or tortured. "

And how about looking at the state of affairs of Man and God back in Biblical times?

THE HEBREW BIBLE

The Bible depicts a world that, seen through modern eyes, is staggering in its savagery. People enslave, rape, and murder members of their immediate families. Warlords slaughter civilians indiscriminately, including the children. Women are bought, sold, and plundered like sex toys. And Yahweh tortures and massacres people by the hundreds of thousands for trivial disobedience or for no reason at all. These atrocities are neither isolated nor obscure. They implicate all the major characters of the Old Testament, the ones that Sunday- school children draw with crayons. And they fall into a continuous plotline that stretches for millennia, from Adam and Eve through Noah, the patriarchs, Moses, Joshua, the judges, Saul, David, Solomon, and beyond. According to the biblical scholar Raymund Schwager, the Hebrew Bible “contains over six hundred passages that explicitly talk about nations, kings, or individuals attacking, destroying, and killing others. . . . Aside from the approximately one thousand verses in which Yahweh himself appears as the direct executioner of violent punishments, and the many texts in which the Lord delivers the criminal to the punisher’s sword, in over one hundred other passages Yahweh expressly gives the command to kill people.” 22 Matthew White, a self- described atrocitologist who keeps a database with the estimated death tolls of history’s major wars, massacres, and genocides, counts about 1.2 million deaths from mass killing that are specifically enumerated in the Bible. (He excludes the half million casualties in the war between Judah and Israel described in 2 Chronicles 13 because he considers the body count historically implausible.) The victims of the Noachian flood would add another 20 million or so to the total. 23 The good news, of course, is that most of it never happened. [...]

Modern biblical scholars have established that the Bible is a wiki. It was compiled over half a millennium from writers with different styles, dialects, character names, and conceptions of God, and it was subjected to haphazard editing that left it with many contradictions, duplications, and non sequiturs. The oldest parts of the Hebrew Bible probably originated in the 10th century BCE. [...] 

Though the historical accounts in the Old Testament are fictitious (or at best artistic reconstructions, like Shakespeare’s historical dramas), they offer a window into the lives and values of Near Eastern civilizations in the mid-1st millennium BCE.

Pinker's book continues to show how, along the last millennia and particularly the past decades, the world at large has become more peaceful and tolerant. The atrocities of Syria and Iraq look pretty mild compared to those of the Iliad or the Odyssey and the sexual scandals of the Windsors pale in comparison with those of Henry VIII or Elizabeth I. 

Pinker's provides a comprehensive statistic study of violence since the Stone to our days that shows constant progress in spite of horrific events. Pinker's work helps understand that studying historical facts and data is not a choice, but an indispensable way to understand the present and avoid being manipulated by conspiracy theorists, demagogues and ignoramuses which -like in Biblical times- fill the Internet with "alternative facts".

Here's more from Pinker himself

And an interesting debate with him about the origins of violence:

Serious studies and research are now as available as sneak oil

I suggest to follow a simple rule: go to scholar sources and papers.

I'll keep trying to help by showing sources and authors that meet those standards.