Decline of Handwriting, Decline of War?

I had an interesting conversation the other day with a mix of people from different countries.  We were talking about the decline of various skills like handwriting and face to face conversations.  Instead, the newer generations type and think in short little bursts.  One man said he fears our century's cultural decline is indicative of humanity's decline. 

Someone else mentioned that the 20th century was no standard by which to judge humanity if you take into consideration the atrocities of those past 100 years.  Surely good handwriting couldn't save us from wars, epidemics, genecide or inhuman ideologies.  This got me to thinking about something I had read recently by Neal Stephenson. 

In In the Beginning ...Was the Command Line, Stephenson writes:

...Anyone who grows up watching TV, never sees any religion or philosophy, is raised in an atmosphere of moral relativism, learns about civics from watching bimbo eruptions on network TV news, and attends a university where postmodernists vie to outdo each other in demolishing traditional notions of truth and quality, is going to come out into the world as one pretty feckless human being.  And--again--perhaps the goal of all this is to make us feckless so we won't nuke each other.

Perhaps the ambivalence of modern thinking and modern behaviour is paralyzing our ability to act on cultural or moral grounds, thus keeping us from engaging in either very good actions or very bad ones.  Or not.  Who knows. 

Neal Stephenson is an incredible writer, and a very interesting thinker.  I definitely recommend reading In the Beginning...Was the Command Line.  While it is about how the various personal computer operating systems (Mac, Windows, Linux, etc.) developed and why, he spends quite a bit of time considering the whys of what makes us make the choices we do.  A favorite topic of mine.

And read his Cryptonomicon.  It's The Name of the Rose for our feckless century.

 

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