Devolution

The opposite of evolution is devolution. Merely moving forward in time chronologically doesn’t guarantee higher standards, better performance, or improvement. Our speech has declined. People support this, claiming that speech must “evolve.” But does evolution include mindless, ubiquitous profanity, unintelligible statements, and confusing grammar? The arts haven’t made great strides, and on television and in the theater we see a procession of diluted revivals and low quality spinoffs. Athletes showboat over a tackle when their team is down three touchdowns. Service levels in most hotels are down, as they are on most airlines, and the latter fly smaller and smaller jets on longer and longer flights to make money despite passenger discomfort. Traffic is terrible in most large cities—incomprehensibly bad in LA— and if you replace every single internal combustion car with an electric car tomorrow, you’d still have the same number of cars on the roads with the same traffic jams! Civility is lower than ever, with polarization creating terrible name-calling and an overall casualness, where clerks call customers by their first names and people wear ripped jeans and hoodies to upscale restaurants. There is an entrenched belief that a privileged few in government and in the media somehow have the right to dictate to the rest of us how to live our lives. And we’re trapped in identity trumping talent, where merit and ability take a back seat to making sure gender, race, and ethnicity are “fairly” represented. (Yet this doesn’t occur in sports, where owners, players, and fans simply want the best talent available to win, no matter who that talent may be.)