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| I ain't stoopud. It's them other guys! |
Reading on-line stuff -- which I used to not do and now really need to stop: it depresses me -- I got to wondering if a lot of those posting their laments would have, in the past, died in infancy or childhood. All the improvements in sanitation and nutrition, as well as medical care, especially antibiotics and vaccinations, have allowed people to survive to reproductive age who would have perished early in past generations.
We forget how common it was for babies to die even as recently as a century ago. In the 19th century, a common practice was to photograph your deceased infant in its coffin, as, I guess, a last memory. You can find the photos on-line.
One of my great aunts was one of 10 brothers and sisters. Four died in the influenza epidemic of 1918-19. Two died of scarlet fever. One got what was called brain fever and lived but was "slow" after that, as she said, and had to leave school. He never learned to read or write and lived his whole life on their ranch, a sort of gentle giant who was most at home with animals. He had no children.
Of the three remaining who reached adulthood sound in mind and body, one, who worked on the railroad, was killed in a railroading accident, had three children.The other died of cancer, had one child. Only my great aunt survived into old age, dying in her nineties. She had three children. All seven children of these three survivors grew into adulthood and had children themselves.
From what I've read, that sort of family history -- many children, few reaching adulthood -- was more the norm than not. You could get a minor cut and die from the infection. Women commonly died shortly after giving birth of what was called childbed fever. Giving birth itself often proved fatal. Babies died of whooping cough, measles, mumps, flu.... Tuberculosis was a common killer. In earlier times there were such scourges as smallpox and cholera.
Then there were accidents. Children worked on the farm or ranch from an early age, then once the industrial age began in factories. Jack be nimble, Jack be quick -- or die.
Those with weak immune systems, genetic defects, a propensity for cancer, heart disease or other maladies, the clumsy and inept, the uncoordinated, the dull-witted, fell victim to disease and accidents more often than the coordinated and clever, the sensible and strong. Those with disagreeable personalities, an inability to get along and cooperate with others or other social defects were ostracized, killed or driven off. Only the fittest survived it all. Darwinism in action.
What I'm getting at is that we are in an era now in which several generations have lived to reproduce who never would have in bygone days. So not only has the gross rising IQ measure of the Flynn Effect reversed, but we have legions of the inept, incapable, mentally weak and neurotic. When such people reproduce, even though they are terrible parents, cruel, neglectful, incompetent, indifferent, their children survive, carrying on their...deficient...characteristics.
And.... Sigh.
I was going to write a lot more about this, what I'm thinking, but what's the use? I know I sound like an arrogant snob, writing this stuff, but, honest to God, I think it's true. Devolution in action. It's real. I know you will mention that movie Idiocracy. I haven't seen it but I have seen clips from it, and the scene with the smart couple deciding to delay having children for rational reasons seems spot on. The only objection I would have to the movie, from what I have seen of it, is that it scrupulously avoids race. I need not say more.
But the solution, if it really is one, is too terrible to contemplate. Mass abortions, euthanasia, or, at least, neutering and spaying on a colossal scale. It will never happen. If you say war is the solution, I say absolutely not. War takes away lives indiscriminately.