Why do positive things happen today?

In good part because previous generations have acted ruthlessly to suppress the forces of destruction – to establish the principle that for good behaviour to spread, really bad behaviour must have really bad consequences.

Hence for a long period piracy on the high seas was almost non-existent.

But now the idea seems to be that really bad behaviour has all sorts of consequences, some of which might be fairly bad but not all. Hence a strong re-emergence of bad behaviour, in this case piracy.

Two good articles about this.

The first at NRO by Andrew McCarthy achieves greatness by deploying the word straitjacket correctly and through this passage:

Civilization is not an evolution of mankind but the imposition of human good on human evil. It is not a historical inevitability. It is a battle that has to be fought every day, because evil doesn’t recede willingly before the wheels of progress.

There is nothing less civilized than rewarding evil and thus guaranteeing more of it. High-minded as it is commonly made to sound, it is not civilized to appease evil, to treat it with “dignity and respect,” to rationalize its root causes, to equivocate about whether evil really is evil, and, when all else fails, to ignore it — to purge the very mention of its name — in the vain hope that it will just go away.

Evil doesn’t do nuance. It finds you, it tests you, and you either fight it or you’re part of the problem.

He links to Bret Stephens who reviews the history of piracy and concludes:

Piracy, of course, is hardly the only form of barbarism at work today: There are the suicide bombers on Israeli buses, the stonings of Iranian women, and so on. But piracy is certainly the most primordial of them, and our collective inability to deal with it says much about how far we’ve regressed in the pursuit of what is mistakenly thought of as a more humane policy.

A society that erases the memory of how it overcame barbarism in the past inevitably loses sight of the meaning of civilization, and the means of sustaining it.

The exam question for Western politicians:

"Either we fight the enemies of civilisation on their territory – and win – or they fight it on ours – and they win."  Discuss – but not for too long.