The burden of proof is on Pangloss, and sometimes it’s a heck of a challenge. Pangloss was the fellow who argued, in Voltaire’s “Candide,” that this was the best of all possible worlds. That was in 1759, when things were pretty good, unless, of course, you were a serf in Russia, a slave in America, a British or French general in Quebec (both were killed at the Plains of Abraham), or Georg Friedrich Handel (he died, too).

The Pangloss debate has been raging for nearly two and a half centuries: Are things better now than they used to be?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, wondering whether our world of terrorism, nuclear proliferation, AIDS, and the designated hitter rule is much of an improvement over the bygone times we sometimes call the good old days. Indeed, there’s actually a magazine called “Good Old Days,” and it is full of features and pictures on life between 1900 and 1949, a period which, if I am not wrong, included rampant racial segregation, two world wars, a worldwide depression, the polio epidemic, at least two efforts at genocide, the Bolshevik revolution, and paregoric. Let the good times roll.

The answer to the big question, in this time and for all time, has to be: Yes, but. Yes, the first half of the last century – those good old days your father remembered – produced the songs of Cole Porter, but it also produced the crimes of Josef Stalin. Our own time is no less ambiguous. We have Harry Potter and we have Saddam Hussein. You can play this game with any age. The 19th century had Abraham Lincoln, but it also had Jack the Ripper. The 18th century had Jonathan Swift, but it also had George III. On the surface, this game tells us almost nothing.

Nothing, that is, except that it provides us with some tiny glimpses of the nature of our society, and of the nature of progress itself. The Whig historians argued that the human story (or at least the English story, for that was their main preoccupation) was the story of progress. Now we know better. That is no small insight.

Take my own business, journalism. Newspaper reporters by and large are better educated than they were a generation ago. Newspapers by and large are worse. Or take the world itself. America, the lone superpower, has never been more dominant. Its security isn’t necessarily greater. Now look at civic life.

The ethical rules governing politicians have established higher standards for politicians. Our politics have seldom been drearier. Look at your local hospital. Medical technology is better, and yet health care is worse, simply because often there’s less human care in health care. And, of course, there are more channels on your television than there used to be, and far less to watch. You could write a song about that.

Years back, William Bennett, the erudite former education secretary and virtuemeister, used to produce an index of leading cultural indicators, finding, for example in 1999, that Scholastic Aptitude Test scores had risen while the proportion of 12th-graders using illegal drugs was also on the upswing. No connection, probably. But interesting nonetheless.

But try these three, and try to tell me there’s no connection beyond the semicolon I inserted craftily in each sentence: We have air conditioning now; the politicians stay in steamy Washington through most of the summer rather than go home. We have powerful search engines now; we seem to know less than ever. We provide children with mass-media images produced by adults for the profit of adults; we wonder where children’s sense of childish wonder, and their imaginations, went.

Don’t bother calling or writing to tell me that these are random elements, more notions than facts, artfully and perhaps disingenuously assembled. I know that, and I did it on purpose. I wanted to test my own bias, which is Whiggish to the extreme. I wanted to see whether there was any reason to indulge another, seemingly contradictory, impulse of mine, toward nostalgia.

I’m not beyond misty water-colored memories of the way we were. My guess is that you’re not, either. There is, it turns out, a lot about the past to be valued, and if you’re lucky you have a lot of memories, warm and vivid, that you do value. But as individuals and as a society, we need to use the past less as a harbor and more as a launch pad. The past tells us where we’re coming from, to be sure, but far more interesting – as people and as a people – is where we’re going.

And one of the things we take on this trip to wherever we’re going is the idea, simple and yet sometimes so hard to understand, that progress has its price, and that progress is not linear. We get automatic transmission, but we lose the feel of actually controlling a car that comes from using a manual transmission. We defeat the worst tyrannies of our time, but we find that the Earth is a fertile place for new tyrants. We throw ourselves into wars to end all wars, only to face new ones. We acquire wisdom, but we grow old, and maybe grow weary, too, doing so. We communicate faster, more efficiently, than ever, but we lose our sense of privacy and isolation.

Tough world out there. Tough lessons, too.

Always has been. And that’s the biggest, most sobering, lesson of all.