Is Everything Worse Than It Was In 1900?

“Jefferson Public School.  Fort Wayne, Indiana.  Back on that planet you say you came from?” – Planet of the Apes

I went into a bar for time travelers and they were upset I haven’t paid my tab from next week.

For large chunks of human history, things didn’t change all that much from one century to the next.  Oh, sure, there were innovations and social changes and cyclic government transformations (Roman Republic to Roman Empire, for instance) but life was such that in many cases, dropping a Frenchman from Paris in 1300 A.D. into Paris around 1400 A.D. would have been a fairly comprehensible change for the resident, except he would probably have had to get a different color beret.

Let’s go back to 1900, though.  What changes might have seemed like science fiction (dystopian or otherwise) to a time traveler from Fort Wayne (let’s call him Taylor) if he showed up in the year 2024?

I guess Joe is happy he finally made a banana republic.

Lets start with . . .

Social Changes:

  • Elevation of sexual fetish to that of a sacrament rather than that of a criminal offense.
  • Unromantic sex with large numbers of partners for unmarried teenage girls and women is the norm.
  • Sex changes for children are not punishable by prison time.
  • Universal, free availability of pornographic images and videos.
  • Women working. Sure, some worked, but it wasn’t the norm.
  • Women voting. Yes, it was allowed in some places, but certainly not all.
  • Criminals being treated with non-judgement, except when it comes to “hate crimes” – the concept of saying a “bad word” as being worse and less forgivable than murder.
  • Rap music. I still can’t believe it exists.
  • The fall in popularity of churches.
  • Staggeringly low birthrates in developed countries.
  • Credit scores as a primary measure of suitability coordinated by large, faceless financial companies.
  • Working for large corporations as the norm, rather than a rare exception, like the dude who worked for the railroad.

My grade on how Taylor would rank these?  Utterly dehumanizing for most of them.  I think he’d be shocked at the collapse of the morality required to run a just society in the absence of tyranny.

Why do I hate the metric system?  I’ll never accept a foreign ruler.

I think the sexual stuff would be the most shocking.  Sure, humans have been boinking each other in all sorts of ways since Adam’s third night with Eve, but the celebration of things that were called degenerate (or worse) in nearly every Western civilization for thousands of years would be the most shocking.

The criminal change would be a big thing for Taylor, since he was probably used to speedy justice of a trial followed by a fairly quick hanging.

World Power Changes:

  • The complete dissolution of the British Empire into a proto-Islamic Caliphate.
  • The complete collapse of the Major Power colonial system leaving many colonies adrift in a state of partially collapsed civilizations that can’t care for themselves.
  • Western government essentially declaring war on their own citizens in order to import aliens who don’t really assimilate, and importing those aliens in staggering numbers.
  • Near universal, real-time information gathering on nearly every citizen from cameras and tracking devices that they buy and carry with them.
  • A very small number of very large companies control what news people see.
  • Drones in modern warfare cutting down the ability of troops to be sneaky, at all.
  • Nuclear weapons which can devastate cities of a larger size than existed in 1900.
  • Intercontinental ballistic missiles, which can reach any area of the Earth and devastate square miles in less than an hour.
  • Jet fighters which, although nearly obsolete, can move at multiples of the speed of sound and destroy people and planes and things hundreds of miles away.
  • Centralization of the financial systems of the world into a near-monolithic system where billions in capital could move easily from one continent to another in seconds.
  • World hunger as less of a problem than world obesity.
  • The staggering number of laws and rules from the federal level covering every aspect of life.
  • Identity theft.

The set of changes was bad, but this may be thought of as more chaotic.  In Taylor’s time, colonies certainly exploited the natural resources of a region, but in many places they also gave order and governance to areas that had (until that time) were at the mud and straw hut technology level, and are rapidly regressing back to the mud and straw hut technology level.

Do national anthems qualify as country music?

Warfare went from Teddy’s charge up San Juan Hill to remote controlled impersonal warfare that has the capacity to kill billions in an afternoon.  I’m pretty sure that would be horrifying to him.

General Technology:

  • Modern cars, including partially self-driving cars are amazing pieces of technology, and combined with modern highways provide a dream transportation system – coast to coast, in a car, in a couple of days.
  • Air travel from nearly any part of the world to nearly any other part of the world is possible in hours.
  • Humanity has travelled to the Moon. The Moon!
  • Instantaneous communication with people all around the world is possible.
  • Instantaneous video from anyplace in the world is possible.
  • Most of the knowledge accumulated by the human race is available nearly instantaneously.
  • Organ transplants are a thing.
  • Modern architecture has become ugly and soulless, with no space for beauty and humanity.
  • Creation of industrial “food” which incorporates large numbers of components that were created in a chemical plant rather than a growing plant or cow or pig.

What would Taylor say about these?  He’d probably be impressed by the first part of the list, but the last two would be very troubling.  In the last two weeks I ate a “pretzel” with cheezefoodsauce®, and it was tasty.  But compare it to a freshly grown garden tomato?  I’d rather have the tomato every time.

The Mrs. didn’t want a brain transplant, but then the surgeon changed her mind.

Wow.  I don’t think he’d like to swap his steak and eggs and butter for Cheeze-Itz™ and Doritos©, but they seem popular.

So, what color beret kufi do you think the Frenchman be wearing in 2124?

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

24 thoughts on “Is Everything Worse Than It Was In 1900?”

  1. “Sex changes for children are not punishable by prison time.”

    Or the death penalty, as it should be.

  2. I think he would be surprised at just how dumb people are in 2024. As I like to say we have the accumulated knowledge of mankind available to us instantly while sitting on the toilet and yet most people are intellectually incurious and foolish. That and how many morbidly obese people are around.

    1. There was an article a few years ago that compared letters written by soldiers from WWI (and Civil War) vs. those written during the Gulf War. The letters written in WWI were very well crafted and would put any grad student in English literature to shame. In contrast, the more recent letters read like an elementary school essay by comparison. Granted, the guys 100 yrs ago didn’t have a lot of other distractions so writing was more natural for them, but it clearly illustrated a massive failure on the part of our education system.

      There is also another somewhat related phenomenon taking place that I don’t see mentioned but know is real. That is the fact that poor grammar on the internet and social media is contagious. I used to be a very good speller but seeing so many words misspelled so often has caused me to be a much worse speller (not to mention making me second guess many of the words I used to take for granted). For people who spend all of their time on sites like Facebook, the dumbing down effect is becoming even more noticeable.

      1. Speaking of which…

        https://realclearwire.com/articles/2024/08/15/is_recalibrating_advanced_placement_exams_defining_deviancy_down_1051963.html

        I agree grammar degradation is real. I am reading a book now on the recommendation of my wife and her knitting/book group, All The Colors of The Dark by Chris Whittaker. So far I’m I’m picking up on nothing but pure nihilism instead of any promised uplifting insights – and my wife is stunned that I have already picked up on the (to me, heavily telegraphed) surprise ending twist after reading only 30 or so pages. I’ll take Karin Slaughter’s take written over 20 years ago on gritty, struggling Damaged Characters any day over Whittaker’s helpless puppets all of whom so far have zero agency over their actions, outcomes or lives. Helpless seems to be both a societal and book trend these days…

        But anyway, over and over Whittaker writes paragraph after paragraph of truly inspired, legitimately literary language – only to drop totally unnecessary and incongruous f-bombs or worse again and again that totally destroys my suspension of disbelief while reading. He has no reason to do this – he is obviously doing it just because he can. And this unfettered use of vulgarity is equally spreading throughout our language, robbing it of its impact and leaving only piles of mundane detritus behind in our grammar.

        I’m hogging the comment space today, sorry. No more. 🙂

        1. My wife and I tried to recommend books to each other and that did not go over well. She is a big fan of romance and drama which just isn’t my thing.

          Here’s the kicker….go into any used book store and look around. Roughly 2/3 of the bookstore will be dedicated to romance novels. Thousands and thousands of boring, poorly written romance novels (Harlequin romances will take up a huge section by themselves). How are there so many different books about one subject? If it were science fiction…yeah, I could see all of the different books as at least there are so many unique plot lines. But there are only so many ways to describe a hot steamy sex scene and it would seem like they are beating that subject to death.

          1. People who read romance novels are not looking for novelty; they’re looking for escape.

            Lathechuck

    3. this has been a “mystery” to me; how we as a society that years ago seemed to seek knowledge and have the desire to better understand things; to a society with the ability to access the totality of human knowledge – but instead sends pictures of themselves eating spaghetti to each other.

  3. It all comes down to energy and minable materials. In 2124, petroleum and nat gas products are all gone and cost way too much to ration away to the average cybersexual Jayne at the corner Delta L, where the lamb-flavored kebob sells for 2000 NUSD (New USD) and where people come for tire patches on their bicycles which are always getting punctured by the injection needles that nobody bothers to pick up off the street anymore. With gaz gone and juz crazy expensive, cars are last century tech – both gaz and juz versions. Nuclear juz never caught on after all of Ukraine and half of Russia became radioactive wastelands when the Zaporizhzhia and Kursk nuke plants were deliberately cracked to end conflict in the World Special Military Operation III, making the Chernobyl accident fifty years earlier look like a sponsored outdoor food consumption event. Solar and wind make just enough juz to keep the old iEyes functional (the next-to-last 2050s version, manufactured before The Collapse – everybody knows the last-Gen iEyes from the 2060s suk) so people can stay in Alternate Reality mode and not have to actually see the hot squalor they live in, since no way can trickle charge mode run aircon, which needs real power levels no longer available. Rumor has it that in the MidAmerikaZone there is still some actual raw coal being illegally dug up in ground holes called “mines” and actually BURNED to make juz in local minipowernets, but at least CopDronez can suss out and stop open pit mining. Not that there is anything left to mine anyway, with the ore grades of everything dropping to unrecoverable levels from being greedily scooped out before The Collapse. Even the helium is practically all gone, accumulated over billions of years of radioactive uranium decay, wasted on party balloons for decades, and now hoarded by The Gov to chill down into liquid helium for cooling the Quantum AIs, who it is whispered are even smarter than the Dems running the whole show from the Pentagon.

    Here in 2124, we understand the “nothing” part, but what is own and what is happy?

    1. If we think too much about the future, we waste today. If we don’t think about the future, we neglect ourselves. It’s a balance.

      1. Little, or no political propaganda. It was just a goof, so we enjoyed it as such. My favorite, granny.

  7. I’d say the general speed of life and noise level would astonish him. Here, I’m thinking about “The Twilight Zone” episode where a scientist’s time-travel machine transports a criminal about to be hanged (circa 1875) to a large city.

    It still ends badly for the criminal. Before he bites the dust, he’s overwhelmed.

  8. So I have a YouTube channel of my own. I do my own commentary, performances of classic poems, and host discussions of those poems with friends & sometimes special guests. Would you be interested in joining some time for one of those discussions?

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