Obamacare and the End of Days

Canvassing in Allentown, PA today, I met a young white woman coming out of her apartment, lighting up a cigarette. She was listed on the contact sheet as a supporter, and she said she was going to vote, and when I asked for who she said somewhat doubtfully, probably Obama, or I guess Obama, or something like that. I asked whether she had any doubts, and she said several positive things about Obama -- that he came in facing a mess, and had started to turn things around (I wish I could remember the good metaphor she used), that Romney was just for the rich. She seemed neither educated nor politically unaware.  Then she pointed to her forearm and said, "what about that chip?"

I had heard this once before. A Hispanic girl of about 13, translating for her mother who remained far from the door, asked us whether Obama was going to put a chip in everyone's arm through which we could be controlled. I asked one of the district coordinators about this, and she said they had heard the tale occasionally, and thought one of the churches was spreading the rumor (she may have said a Seventh Day Adventist church, or that may be my memory embellishing). 

Better Angels in the news

I have long been receptive to evidence that human life is improving -- growing less violent and more fulfilling for more people. I have rejected C.S. Lewis' warning against chronological chauvinism  -- against the assumption that we have more moral, political, social wisdom than our predecessors -- asserting that in fact contemporary international treaties and codas do embody ethics superior to those articulated in ancient scriptures. I have inveighed against boomer-bashing and idolization of the so-called greatest generation.  I have set my face against all forms of originalism.

Thanks to this confirmation bias, I knew the starting premise of Steven Pinker's  The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined -- that "violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species' existence" -- before I cracked the book, having read various interviews, Pinker articles and responses.  And yet, within pages of the beginning, I could feel the book changing my world view - sweeping away the vestiges of ancestor worship, golden age nostalgia, boomer guilt, and who knows whatever other mental gestures of obeisance to outmoded authority.   This effect began to register in Pinker's preface:

How, in particular, are we to make sense of modernity of the erosion of family, tribe, tradition, and religion by the fores of individualism, cosmopolitanism, reason, and science?  So much depends on how we understand the legacy of this transition: whether we see our world as a nightmare of crime, terrorism, genocide, and war, or as a period that, by the standards of history, is blessed by unprecedented levels of peaceful coexistence (location 138)...The belief that violence has increased suggests that the world we made has contaminated us, perhaps irretrievably. The belief that it has decreased suggests that we started off nasty and that the artifices of civilization have moved us in a noble direction, one in which we can hope to continue (location 142).