Hell in a Handbasket

I have been preaching the gloom and doom of the new generation. As everyone is quick to point out, since the beginning of written records, each successive generation despairs over the next generation and its obvious deterioration. The youth of our country have lost something that the older generation has venerated. Every generation has believed that it is presiding over the loss of something treasured. Courtesy, elegance of expression, work ethic, and moral or ethical values are among the most frequently lamented losses. More recently, deterioration of education has been the most often cited problem. The remarkable thing about this observation is that, in a significant sense, each generation has been right. Many of the observations of the decline in aspects of the culture from one generation to the next are indisputably true. Reading the classical writers from as far back as the advent of the printing press, suggests that his decline has been going on for quite some time. Does this mean that the culture, as a whole is in a steady state of deterioration, that we are worse off, on balance, than fifty or one hundred years ago? No, of course not, but, if each generation loses some of the virtues of its forebearers, why not? Why are we continuing to make obvious social and technological progress?

The answer, of course, lies in the fact that we have always had progress in other areas that more than compensated for what we were losing. Cultures and societies change. The most frequent engine of that change is progress of knowledge, scientific advances that create technological growth. These advances, of course, provide opportunities and time to engage in behaviors that accelerate the increase in knowledge and still leave time for more pleasurable pursuits. So we are constantly increasing efficiency, which allows for more time to discover even more ways to improve our lives further.* Now, instead of the previous question of why we have not regressed to mouth breathing chaos: if we are in a state of positive acceleration of progress, are we much better off than fifty years ago. Are we physically and emotionally vastly superior to our grandfathers? Again, no. With the increased ease of production, comes the concomitant decline in the effort and discipline that each generation laments. It is, indeed, a real decline. The ease of meeting basic needs decreases the need for disciplined work. People can drive places, buy food conveniently, communicate instantaneously, control the temperatures of their environments. For the most part, we can live in comfort with relatively little effort. Discipline is not necessary for survival, or even comfort. The hard and long work that our ancestors needed just to live meant that people in those days needed to have a work ethic and discipline. Some loss of these traits is easy to understand; we don't need them. Win something. Lose something.

What, then is the overall direction of society? To answer that, of course, it is necessary to have some standard against which society can be measured. What's improvement? More free time? More toys? Faster and easier acquisition of what we want? Better interpersonal relationships? All people must decide that question for themselves. For me, on the whole, I think, the changes are positive. Life, as I measure it, has improved in quality over all of known history. There really has been progress for many years. Of late, however, I believe that long upward trend is threatened; further progress is precarious. the long upward spiral of technology has not only slowed in rate but continuing the improvement, itself, is in jeopardy. Even if the acceleration of improvements in technology is slowing, advances should still build on the shoulders of yesterday's progress. In fact, this does not appear to be happening. Advances in many fields appear to have slowed and, sometimes, nearly stopped.

What have the last twenty to fifty years brought to us by way of better technology? What progress has affected our lives the most? Clearly, the miniaturization of electronics has been, by far, the element that has changed our lives the most. When I began my post high school education, there were no home computers, no 'cell' phones , nor any of the small devices that add to our entertainment and can be kept in our pockets. I carried a slide rule. Years down the line, for my dissertation research, I used a computer the size of my basement. I sat by it, idly observing scorpions scuttle across the floor for six hours at a sitting waiting for this monstrosity to disgorge its 'punch cards' and print out a page of statistics. Now, I can easily carry a computer that will make those calculations in less than a half second. The advent of miniature circuitry has allowed immense computing power in pocket sized packages. Much of our current world feeds off that portability of computing power. In addition to the incredible advantage in scientific work, transportation, communication, entertainment , and comfort have all increased and improved markedly from just this advance.

The limiting factor in rocketry is weight. Now, the weight and bulk of the computer and instrumentation is a small fraction of what it was in 1969. In 1969, we put men on the moon. Even with the advantage of the size, weight, and sophistication of the instruments, we would be hard pressed to do it again anytime soon. We have actually regressed in some scientific areas. But how? I think there are two related reasons. One reason is most likely related to the first phenomenon mentioned, deterioration of the discipline and work ethic. When these traits degrade, so do others, most notably, education. It is frighteningly easy to document the deterioration of education in basic subjects in the United States over the last fifty or so years. The quality our highest professionals and scientists has lamentably deteriorated. The conclusion from that is obvious but there is another factor, a more specific one.

Despite the advantages that the storage and accessibility of information has conferred, a destructive and seductive element accompanies this ease. For many years, I have watched 'new discoveries' in various scientific fields. Often, however, they are discoveries that others have found before. Across different disciplines, with actually little communication among them, phenomena are repeatedly 'discovered.' I attributed my noticing this to the fact that I was trained in more than one professional discipline and was sensitive to the lack of good communication among the different sciences. But I soon discovered that this was not the complete answer because it was not just rediscovery of 'facts' in different fields, it was much worse than that. We were constantly rediscovering things across time, just as though we had 'forgotten' that we used to know that. The wheel is periodically reinvented. I have seen many 'discoveries' celebrated twice, twenty to forty years apart. In this age of enhanced information, how could this happen?

Consistent with the observation that ease reduces discipline, the internet has impaired scholarship to a frightening degree. The apparent absurdity of that observation is striking. Nevertheless, it is true. The internet has introduced several processes that have resulted in decline in numerous fields. Instead of utilizing the exciting possibilities, this ease of information has invited a very bad habit. It is now so easy to retrieve studies previously published in your field, that it leads to reliance on the computer data to research the history of work on your problem. This can be deadly. These computer databases are created and organized by someone, and that 'someone' is unlikely to be the expert scientist that is required to do a competent job. There are sophisticated decisions that need to be made by people highly knowledgeable in that area. Otherwise, no search engine will be able to find and access all of the relevant works. A few years ago, problems were researched by the investigators who went first to recent work in the area, possibly even contacting the investigator whose work is most relevant. The articles that contain lists of work referred to are then used as cues for further research. That scholarly process is becoming rapidly rare as more and more people simply rely on their computer's access to data. These data bases are typically collected and organized by graduate students and, if you are lucky, librarians. Then, the program that searches the data base is another step in the process on which the researcher depends to tell learn everything relevant that has been done before on this problem. The accuracy and completeness of the result is dependent on the accuracy and completeness of the available data bases and the programs to search them. They are far from complete and far from properly organized. Non experts neither know what search terms and key words will be necessary for accurate retrieval, nor where to look for all of the relevant information. Fewer and fewer researchers go through the laborious procedures required to do a thorough job of searching the history of a problem when the seductive lure of the internet data is as handy as it is. Remember the issue of discipline and work ethic? The vastly improved technology that promised the library of congress at the push of a button has created an ocean of misclassification and a group of 'scientists' who are skimming the top of an uncharted sea in rowboats, believing that they are scooping up everything relevant. After all, the computer told them so and it wouldn't lie.

Hell in a hand basket.

*For those who think in these terms, I am saying that the second, and even third derivatives of the curve of technology are positive, or have been.