Are we entering a new "dark age"?

Seeing what the world is coming to and knowing a little about history, I began to wonder if maybe after the height humanity had for the last hundred years, we jumped the shark and now begin to go back again.

781 million people worldwide are illiterate. Two thirds are women (UNESCO). 

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These are shocking numbers, for literacy is one mayor key for education. And education is the key for social and political participation. Kids, who don't go to school or leave early, have bad chances to get a well paid job and support themselves or a family. It's a vicious circle of poverty, inherited from generation to generation. We know this after a lot of studies about poverty and education (e.g. PISA). If your parents aren't well educated, the chances you don't get a good education are significantly higher.

Another point is the decrease of political participation. Going to vote in an election - free, secret, general, equal, and directly - the democratic election priciples - is crutial for social developments. But more and more people don't use their right to vote, for which the generations before us fought so hard.

As you can see, in the elections for the European Parliament in 2009 only 43% of Europeans voted! How can you expect to be represented by our political 'leaders' if you don't vote? But I meet a lot of people, who don't understand how it works, why it's so important, why they should do it. That shocks me every time. On the other hand it's the same people, who complain most about 'those up there doing what they want'. It's paradox, and they don't even see it.

So, being badly educated, having bad chances of social and economical rise, being angry at society, living in a complex world, they don't understand and think they can't change, people tend to turn to simple answers. 

One source is political populism. Not only Trump uses simple or even no answers, just distraction from the question, to mobilize people. Le Pen - Front National in France, Salvini - Nothern League in Italy, Wilders - Party For Freedom in the Netherlands,  Petry - Alternative für Deutschland in Germany,  Kaczynski - PiS in Poland, Orban - Fidsz in Hungary, and so on. Political populists are on the rise, blaming minorities for the world's problems, mostly muslims, of course. 

Another source of very simple and seemingly everlasting answers is... religion. Fundamentalism is not only a problem in Islam, but also in Christianity and Judaism. Every religion has a fundamental group. A very shocking example is this forum, I stumbled upon some time ago. Obviously, impregnating your own daughter is not rape, God wants you to get your daughter raped, an abused wife should stay with her man for he only wants her to go to heaven (and fast...), children should be beaten severly by their father for he wants them to go to heaven and even pregnant women should be beaten on the belly to teach the fetus to fear Him! Honestly, I'd prefer a woman in a hijab and niqab...

And mostly all fundamentalists turn to violence when threatend. Today, we mostly threaten muslims, 'democracys' invading their countries, killing innocent people in the name of democracy or God or oil or whatever. Restricting their right to live out their religion, suspecting them every time something happens.

For example: On the 22nd of July this year a young man shot and killed 9 people, 4 more were wounded, 32 were harmed fleeing in panic. First thought: Islamic terror. Well, it turned out the guy was a Nazi, worshipping Anders Behring Breivik. Just for comparision: In Germany at least 149 people (it's expected to be a much higher number, but police isn't investigating properly, they only list 63 deaths) were killed by Nazi terrorists since 1990, between 1993 and 2016 'only' 38 Germans  were killed by islamic terrorists. Of course, every victim is one too much, but we are afraid of muslims, whereas nazis are much more dangerous (at least if you belong to a minority, but the scared people mostly don't). 

Actually, my point is that more and more people turn to fundamentalist religious beliefs to make their life easier. Don't believe me? Look at these statistics: A lot of people don't believe in evolutionary theory anymore.

I mean, what the fuck!? We struggeld for years to ban churches from science, to make sure, scientists can work without being threatend by the pope or whatever religious leader that happens to come along. And now religion more and more takes over wider parts of our lives. When President Kennedy was elected in the USA, he said to not vote for him because he's a catholic, but to vote for him because he's a democrat. In the last elections, it was all about religious beliefs of candidates. That's just sad, because the secularization was so important to ensure equal rights for everyone. Now people think dinosaurs and humans lived happily side by side in paradise only 6,000 years ago...

Inequality is growing. 1% of the world's population owns 50% of the wealth. More and more people are obese, while anually 3.1 million children die of hunger (Black et al. 2013). 

But are we fighting this? No. Instead we play Pokémon Go and flee into a digital world. We don't care for each other anymore. We have thousands of facebook friends, but who can you talk to when you're in need? People meet up just to look at their smartphones side by side, texting with people who are not there. Accidents happen because people don't look up anymore. Lacking real wars, people fight each other in computer and online games, as if there wasn't enough violence already.

What I'm trying to say is that there are developements in humanity that scare me. Developements, that remind me of the Middle Ages, when people thought the earth was flat and thunder means God is angry. We know so much more now, but we chose to ignore it, because we can't always understand it all. I know that Steven Pinker showed, that we live in peaceful times nowadays. He also showed that literacy, humanism, democracy and Enlightenment help(ed) to secure that peace. But for the last years, I can't help but think that we started to lose these acquisitions and we turn back to a kind of Digital Dark Age.

We don't need an A.I. to stick a needle in the back of our head and push us into the Matrix. We are doing this all by ourselves right now. We sink into a simple, digital world and stop to care about the real issues, because they need time and strengh to be solved. We need to educate our children, we need to help the poor help themselves, we need to tell religion to stay in church and keep out of science. We need to vote for a competent candidate, not a loud one (with a stupid hairstyle).