STEADY DRIFT TOWARD SOCIAL RECESSION

KENNETT, Mo. -- If the casual reader takes a moment to inspect the graphs and indexes that regularly measure the state of our happiness, he will be ecstatic at what he reads: Americans have never been wealthier, healthier and safer than at this moment in our history.

It's true.

The stock market reassures us that, despite temporary setbacks, business is good, and each day brings us closer to medicines promising cures for the most elusive of diseases.

As for America's once dreaded nuclear foe, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the remains of that authoritarian system confirm that our shores are safe from its weapons.

It was German philosopher Immanuel Kant who once defined enlightenment as "humankind's emergence from its self-imposed childhood." The problem is that his metaphor suggests our next stage is adolescence, which unfortunately is also the most turbulent, violent and unhappy stage of life.

Ridiculous, you say?

After all, more people are rich than ever before and science, democracy and capitalism have kept their promises.

All true, and all the more puzzling since it seems that more people are unhappy as well, even unhappy in new ways and venues.

In centuries past, the principal sources of unhappiness were scarcity and constraint. Now we are experiencing a period of overstimulation and a frightening erosion of restraint.

This is hardly a new thesis. Notable observers and diaries have been saying the same thing recently. Their common theme is that the way we live now has its costs. The proof is all around us:

Legitimization of divorce, sexual excesses, single parenthood, the universal availability of contraceptions, the economic independence of women, our accepted methods of child care, the proliferation of consumer choice, the diversification of the media, the superabundance of information, the increase of residential and occupational mobility, the displacement of loyalty by competition in the workplace, the decline of party identification and patronage, the undermining of tradition, and in general the increasing prevalence of individualism and loss of personal identification.

Compelling evidence

It's true that there may be good and logical reasons for some of these miasmic transformations, and like the Y2K crisis we were thought to be facing on Jan. 1, 2000, some may be only temporary and some may not exist at all in the next second.

On the other hand, there is compelling evidence that despite seeming prosperity at this moment, there are compelling arguments for what others call our social recession.

Please make certain you are sitting down as I list some of these recessionary signs that are frequently all too apparent in our hometowns, capitals and world today. It is not a pleasant litany, but it is a factual one.

Since 1960 the divorce rate has doubled. Cohabitation is seven times more frequent. Four out of 10 ninth-graders and seven out of 10 high school seniors report having had sexual intercourse. The average age of first marriage for men has increased from 23 to 27 and for women from 20 to 25. Births to unmarried teens have quadrupled. Births to all unmarried parents have increased sevenfold. The proportion of children not living with two parents has tripled. The number of children living with a never-married mother has increased by a factor of 13. Forty percent of all children do not live with their biological parents.

But there's more.

Hours per week parents spend with children have decreased from 30 to 17. The teen-age suicide rate has tripled. The rate of violent crime has more than doubled. The rate of juvenile crime has increased sevenfold. Twelve million people, including 3 million teenagers, contract sexually transmitted diseases each year. The average television-watching hours per household have increased 40 percent. Average SAT scores have declined 50 points. The number of survey respondents agreeing that "most people can be trusted" has dropped 40 percent, while those asserting that "you can't be too careful in dealing with people" have risen 50 percent.

And there's still more.

Although personal income has more than doubled, the proportion of Americans calling themselves "pretty well off financially" has dropped 40 percent, and the number who say they are "very happy" has dropped 15 percent, while the incidence of depression is, depending on which estimate you read, three to 10 times greater.

I'm not sure that this is what we thought our new world would look like when we talked about it a decade or two ago. I believe what I envisioned back then was a world without the threat of nuclear annihilation and a world free of young children dying from starvation.

Civilization's adolesence

Indeed, what I believe many Americans envisioned in earlier times was a world relatively free of physical threats, such as nuclear attacks and starvation, and one in which our normal environment would allow us to live out our lives in relative peace and tranquility.

Instead, we seem to have inherited an environment that, according to the above statistics, is anything but peaceful and tranquil. Just the opposite in fact.

Call it our civilization's adolescent stage or name it whatever you choose, but at least study its results and consider the calamitous error of continued indifference to important details about life in America in 2001.

Perhaps if we knew reasons for all this, solutions for our social recession would be more apparent. All I know is that it isn't the result of whoever is occupying the Oval Office at any moment or the political party that put him there. The responsibility is much larger than we are willing to admit, given our fervent avoidance of self-incrimination.

~Jack Stapleton is the editor of Missouri News and Editorial Service.