Is the world getting worse?

Every town has one. The old boy who wears sandwich boards, or else carries a double sided placard. On one side the message says, "The End is Nigh." On the other side, "Prepare to Meet Thy God." The Elizabethan language gives the message a certain gravitas, as if the world's end needed such solemnity.
Passers by give God's messenger a wide birth. If the crowd is too thick, the offered leaflet is taken and screwed up as soon as decently possible.
The lunatic fringe. A bit of color to the city's bland greyness, along with the buskers, and, at this time of the year, the Salvation Army.
Yet, religion has a morbid fascination with the end of the world. And for religion the world does not end with a whimper. Things will get worse and worse. And only at the most worse you could imagine will God step in. God will punish the wickedness of the world. Fire is usually involved. So terrible will be God's judgment that it will be like a terrible forest fire, burning all before it. Jane and I saw the evidence of a wild fire as we drove through Stanislaus National Forest in California on the way to Yosemite National Park. The road took us through a barren mountainside, where only a few weeks before the fire had raged. A huge forest had gone, with only a few tree stumps left.
Jesus talked about the end of the world too. Scan the gospels and you will find not a few references to this sort of thing. Whether Jesus really believed the world was soon going to end, or whether he just used the thought forms of his day to make a point, who knows. I leave that for Biblical scholars to argue over!
Whatever the case, taking their cue from pages in the New Testament, religious folks have often said said that the world is getting worse—so bad, in fact, that "this particular time" may well be the day that the world ends. (Do a little historical research and you will find numerous predictions that the end is nigh.)
In some respects, this is understandable. In times of terrible persecution or horrendous war it  comforts people to think that God won't let this carry on much longer. Surely, God will step in and bring a judgment? Jesus lived in such a time. His country was under martial rule by a foreign power. Many Jewish folk in his day thought things couldn't get much worse. And the truth is, for anyone who has faced the extremity of life in horrible violence and oppression, where folk are being tortured and killed, it doesn't get any worse.
Meaning no disrespect to those who face terrible things, I want to step back just a little to ask, "Is the world in fact getting worse?' The conventional wisdom says it is. The media feeds us a steady diet of such awful happenings that it is hardly possible to draw any other conclusion.
If a student in one of my classes says such, my response is usually to press in a little further. "What do you mean by getting worse?" And doubtless, the rejoinder would be about violence, or war, or terrorism, or general standards of decency.
Michael Nagler in his wonderful book, The Search for a Nonviolent Future, makes the point that although media depictions of violence have risen exponentially, included the reporting of violent crime, in fact violent crime has been diminishing. If you ask an average person, "Are the incidences of violent crime going up or down?" most answer, "Going up!" Yet, it is not so.
In 2011, Steven Pinker published his magisterial The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. It is an important and dense argument (700 pages). In brief, he provides evidence, based on number of instances per 100,000 of the population, to demonstrate that in just about every area of human common life violence has declined sharply over the last millennia. For example, homicides in New England fell from over 100 per 100,000 in 1600 to 1 per 100,000 in the mid-twentieth century. In other words, it is much safer to live in Boston now (despite the Boston marathon bombing) than it has ever been. Pinker is exhaustive in his analysis, and it runs counter to the conventional wisdom. The world is in fact not getting worse.
Pinker suggests that the reason the world is not getting worse is a complex amalgam of a civilizing process that began in the sixteenth century, and a humanitarian revolution combined with reason that began around the same time.
Though counterintuitive, having studied Pinker I am persuaded that something like his argument is true. It has caused me to rethink a number of issues.
But one area I would add to Pinker's interpretation is that the civilizing and humanizing processes did not begin merely with the birth of modernity. Seeds of the process are found in the great teachers and mystics of all the great traditions. That their collective wisdom has been ignored, and at times mocked, does not mean that their influence has not had a slow and steady effect on the collective consciousness of humanity.
For example, in a thorough anthropological analysis of violence and sacrifice, RenĂ© Girard suggest that we find  violence less and less acceptable because of the pervasive influence of the life and death of Jesus. This story speaks of the end of sacrifice, the end of violence, and the coming of love. Not surprisingly, the humanitarian revolution of the modern period (at its best) reflects the ideals and sentiments found in the narrative of the Christ.
So is the world getting worse? History is a very mixed bag. Lot's of horrible things have happened and will continue to happen, and we ought not to trivialize that. But, Pinker's analysis suggests that horrible things are getting less. Even if true, this is not a cause for complacency but for a renewed effort to see the realm of God—on earth as in heaven. We continue to work for peace and for justice.
The world is, in fact, not getting worse. We should be grateful.

And then there's global warming ...
+Ab. Andy