elfs | Contra Kirk, again, the world is a lovely place.

Again in the Foreward to The Conservative Mind, Kirk tells us that we must cultivate "a moral imagination and a tragic sense of life" in order to appreciate "an account for what ails mankind today."

Contra Kirk, let's review the last ten years. Or let Charlie Stross do it, but basically it comes down to this: In the past twenty years:

AIDS went from being a death sentence to a chronic but manageable disease
The proportion of the total world population unable to acquire food, water and shelter dropped by half
Africa managed 5% growth, resulting in a billion people seeing an improvement in their quality of life
In the US, violent crime is at its lowest levels in 56 years
In the world, the odds of dying in warfare is at its lowest levels since the beginning of human history
"You have cancer" is no longer an authomatic death sentence either.
"You had a heart attack" means "You might well live another 30 years."
In the US, 10 million acres of new forest land were recovered in the past ten years,
In the US, air pollution is at its lowest levels since the 1950s.
The US economy grew at 30% between 1980 and 2010, but energy usage went up only 26%
We're making progress on wiping out polio and malaria
Despite economic and population growth, the US's water usage has been stable since 1985
Malthusian prophecies of famine, war, pestilence and death continue to fail as reliably as the Christian Eschaton

The world has problems. But my generally optimistic world view is not informed by a constant dwelling on a tragic sense of life.