Geeze, Peter!! I just told you I didn't want to give up my illusions, and you go and tug at them anyway!! LOL!! But you'll have to tug harder than that.

For one thing, horrible as our current rate of self-slaughter seems, it is a lot less rampant than it was 200 years ago. Especially when you factor out the advances in leverage from technology. I suppose Rwanda was an exception. For another, at least in my lifetime in the West, I think there have been significant advances in intrahuman tolerance. For a third, I think there are significant adsvances in ecological consciousness raising -- global conferences of the sort that never would have occurred in the first quarter of the 20th century, for example; well-established environmental defense groups where once there were just scattered granolae. Enhanced global communications, admittedly not being put to their best and greatest use. A wider range of insights into various mental and spiritual models (some of which are off the end of the bell chart, admittedly). The Mudcat itself!

Given these trends, although the dramatic exceptions continue to be as troubling as ever, I would submit that "all the evidence" does not in fact point to juvenilization. I do think we see fewer really stellar thinkers than we did in the more isolate, analog world prior to 1970. But I am reluctant to interpret the randomness of a transition as a catastrophic trend. That would be throwing out the baby with the whirlwind.

A