Are we in the middle of a great moral decline? It's a common belief. But it turns out it's always been a common belief.
Every year for the past 70 years, anyway. A new study tests the belief in moral decline by examining survey items conducted since 1949:
Typical items included: “Do you think that over the last few decades our society has become less honest and ethical in its behavior, more honest and ethical, or has there been no change in the extent to which people behave honestly and ethically?” and “Right now, do you think the state of moral values in this country as a whole is getting better or getting worse?”
The researchers found that respondents typically agreed with an astonishing 84% of items like this. They believed in moral decline in 1949; they believed in moral decline in 2019; and they believed in moral decline every year in between. What's more, they consistently believed moral decline happened at very specific times, as shown in this somewhat odd looking chart:
People generally believe that morality was high and stable until the year they were born. Then it declines. Morality is perceived as declining a bit in the first 20 years of their life and then declining considerably up to the present day.
But is morality declining? The authors investigated this by looking at survey questions that ask about current morality:
For decades, survey researchers have also been asking people to report directly on the moral values, traits and behaviours of themselves and their contemporaries in the present: “Were you treated with respect all day yesterday?” or “Would you say that most of the time people try to be helpful, or that they are mostly just looking out for themselves?”...If, as people all over the world claim, morality has been declining steadily and precipitously for decades, then people’s reports of current morality should also have declined over the years. Have they?
Unsurprisingly, the answer is clear: reports of current morality were stable over time. The authors looked at surveys from 1965 through 2020 and found no differences. Furthermore, they found that among personal friends and acquaintances, people reported slightly higher morality over time.
In short, most people believe that morality has declined over time but this is almost certainly not true. So why do they believe it? The authors offer an involved psychological theory, but I'd guess the answer is fairly simple. The belief in moral decline is strongest among conservatives and the elderly, and both groups simply disapprove of lots of modern changes. It's perfectly consistent, for example, to believe that individuals are as decent as ever but also to believe that gay marriage represents moral decay. The same is true for choices of clothing, women working outside the home, reduced churchgoing, and other trends that conservatives and the elderly tend to disapprove of.
In any case, the overall conclusion is clear: "the perception of moral decline is pervasive, perdurable, unfounded and easily produced." If anything, kindness, honesty, and basic human decency have likely increased in recent years. People just prefer not to believe it.
I dunno. We didn't have problems with school
shootings and incels 40 years ago.
Thay said I think social media just provides a great forum for use to see people eith bad morals perform. There aren't more maybe but they are far far more visible.
Incels have always existed and have always committed a disproportionate share of antisocial behavior. The social media aspect is new, but "I can't get laid and I hate everyone" is very much not.
Uh, "I don't like Mondays" came out in 1979. What do you think that was referring to?
When they start saying again, "Ladies and Gentlemen" at online work, then I will return, but not until then! Florida is a common sense conservative state where most jd-60 people have brains!
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Open The Link———————————➤ https://hignearningdoller1.blogspot.com/
Rutger Bregman's Humankind: A Hopeful History
is a really great book with a similar theme,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humankind:_A_Hopeful_History
People may be as kind as they ever were but what's that got to do with morality?
Some of our recent moral failings:
-Lack of adequate action to address climate change (perhaps the biggest moral failure in history)
-Election of Donald Trump as president
-Nazis again (this time: here!)
-Virtually everything today's GOP touches
-Kids gunned down in classrooms like zombies in a video game
-Vast & growing inequality
-Backsliding on race, women's rights & various other issues
Most of these problems were not the crises they are today in the days when I was growing up. A few were problems but at least we were moving in the right direction.
And they absolutely are moral issues.
Closely examine the history of whatever decade it was in which you were a kid, and I'm sure you'll find plenty of moral problems, some of which are still problems today and some of which are not.
I have no doubt there were. The thing is, it's a very hard and complex problem to try to compare societal morality across generations. At best, you might come up with a fair subjective look. There's not a chart that's going to tell you.
This discussion needs some definition about what it's even measuring. Why equate "honest and ethical" with morality? Doesn't "moral values" mean different things to different people? And why look at individuals and not society? Are people "moral" if they are honest and follow the rules but live in a highly unjust society? That would be a grade-school view of what being moral means.
That said, I do think we are confronted with a number of pressing moral crises today, and none of the bigger one have much to do with levels of honesty with everyday people.
A definition of morality that doesn't include "honest and ethical" is a very strange and unconventional definition, and I'm perplexed that you think otherwise. Big-scale social problems are moral matters to be sure, but so are small-scale matters of personal and interpersonal behavior.
Honesty can be a component of morality -- usually -- but it's not the same thing. You can say truthful things for immoral ends, which would be honest but still immoral.
Morality is a more complex matter than honesty. That's why I said don't equate them.
Just to pick one from this list: Nazis were here in the 1930s. There are whole books about this. See, e.g.:
https://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-American-Friends-Reichs-Supporters/dp/1250148952
If you happened to be alive any time during the postwar years up until the past decade, Nazis (the few that existed) were rightly regarded as pariahs. Nazis were considered relics of a past era that we thankfully left in the dustbin of history when the Yanks whupped their ass good in WWII. Any Nazis after the war were so far from the mainstream and the centers of power that no one took them seriously, and their numbers so marginal that in some circles any talk of present-day Nazis was taken as hyperbole (hence, Godwin's law).
The idea that we would elect a Nazi sympathizer as president of the US during our lifetime was preposterous. Yet here we are. The dominant influence on Trump's politics comes right out of Hitler's Nazi regime. He stole their slogans. He shared their contempt for decency and norms of democracy. He gave approval to his Nazi followers. He's elevated them to power in Washington and in various states around the country. He led an insurrection against our government and is now the front-runner for the nomination of a major party for next year's election. He may or may not win but we are dangerously close to seeing Nazis take over.
There's nothing comparable to today's Nazi problem during the 70 years after the war, or during the 1930s when the country had some Nazi supporters.
If you don't understand it's never been like this, I don't know what to say.
Shows that people either don't read history or don't think about it after reading. From a US centric point of view, things aren't perfect today, but it's not that long ago that beating your wife and kids was common, lynchings were acceptable, children could be forced to work, open discrimination was acceptable in the workplace, etc. Go back longer than a century and the stuff people did to each other, and the willingness to treat most poor people as completely expendable and unimportant, was just repulsive. To argue that morality as a whole is declining is nuts. I think it's possible to argue that certain behaviors have loosened a bit very recently, such as expressions of anger and abuse of service persons, but this is paired with a great increase in recognizing that other people should be treated decently who could previously be discriminated against freely. I think arguing we have become less moral is really hard, we have just shifted to be less prescriptive about it in favor of focusing on how actions actually impact others.
Kid's today.
Yah, back in my grandparents time the kids always got off your lawn when you yelled at them.
Or --they cut the grass harder to prove they could do it and were worthy members of society.
Kids get money from their parents, and some absorb all the claims their parents make, i.e. it's so hard now a days, things must be worse off.
Of course past generations sacrificed, e.g. WWII, and paid taxes to build stuff so their children can have nice things.
The kids resent paying taxes, they never had too when mommy and daddy took care of things!
and here we are....
I think it's due to visibility effects as people grow up. Most people are careful not to expose children to overt immorality, and are more scrupulous while parenting in order to set a good example; they are far less careful when interacting with fellow adults. This can very easily make people think "people were much more moral when I was a kid" when actually, no, they were just hiding all the immorality from you *because* you were a kid. It was all totally happening, you just didn't get to see it!
Of course there's been a massive decline in morals. Look at how permissive the far-right has become! Extramarital affair? Acceptable! Rape? Acceptable! Cheating, lying, conning people? Acceptable!
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IOKIYAR
"What is happening to our young people? They disrespet their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the laws. They riot in the strrets inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?"
- Plato, circa 300 BC
Exactly.
Nostalgia -- what such surveys are ultimately polling -- is as old as time memorial. Fascists know this and feed upon a hyper-romanticized view of a golden but lost past to gain power. It's why accurate depictions of history are so important to a society, and why some fight so intensely to prevent them.
A lot of Roman writers had similar complaints. They were whining about "decadence" and loss of military vigor even as Rome was stomping Carthage, Macedonia, and the Seleucid Empire into the ground, and they continued to whine about it for centuries, and their writings tricked Victorian-era historians into thinking that the Fall of Rome was all about "decadence" when actually, "decadence" was a figment of the writers' imagination and always had been. Just because you, Mr. Elite Roman, have aged out of military service and are now enjoying a life of luxury as your body deteriorates does not mean the same thing is happening to your entire society!
I forget which Len Deighton character observes that when people miss the days of their youth they are really missing their own youth, not the times themselves.
There must be a natural progression in development. Kids are taught to be moral, and while there may not be an effort to teach that everyone else is moral, they are not always told how often other people are not moral. They are in contact with people who have their best interests at heart, mainly relatives. Parents and other close relatives are altruistic toward those in the next generation who carry their genes. Teachers are also dedicated to helping students, not competing with them. In adolescence some may read about or be taught about movements that could potentially improve things for everyone. Then when they enter the workforce and get wider direct knowledge they find out how immoral things really are.
In other words it would be surprising if adults didn't think that the world is less benevolent and moral than it was when they were young. That is their own direct experience.
"The belief in moral decline is strongest among conservatives and the elderly, and both groups simply disapprove of lots of modern changes."
But the claim that racism, homophobia, patriarchy etc are as bad as they ever were and getting worse is just as prevalent on the left.
Same phenomenon, only the details differ.
I expect at ROOT it's because when you're a kid you're mostly protected from the world; as you grow older friction with other people becomes more intense, there are disappointments in love, responsibly weighs on you in a way it didn't previously, hell past 30 even your body starts to let you down, slowly at first but then faster. It all does feel like there was a golden age around when you were born.
And of course where does "golden age" come from?...
Hesiod: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_and_Days
Thus has it always been.
"But the claim that racism, homophobia, patriarchy etc are as bad as they ever were and getting worse is just as prevalent on the left."
No one with half a brain claims those evils are as bad as ever. But the context for most of the discussion here is today compared to how people remember it before.
"Make Racism Wrong Again." I saw that on a bumper sticker today and I think it's plain what it means. Racism used to be wrong, immoral, and it wasn't up for debate. When was that? Most of our post-'60s history until the Obama backlash leading to Trump.
That doesn't mean racism didn't exist. It did. It simmered. There were dog whistles and momentary eruptions. But it was something people understood was best to be quiet about in public, and for good reason. Racism was wrong.
Now racism is open and public and any condemnation tends to build more support for the racists. People in public office and in big media espouse racism with impunity.
When what once was unarguably wrong becomes prevalent in society, a good way to describe that is moral decline.
I'm flabbergasted that a fair number of people here are in denial about that.
Nobody knows what society was like 40 years before or 20 years before or even the year of their birth. We have the nostalgia of our elders and we have things like movies and books.
So it seems likely to me that we have a rose colored view of how moral society used to be. Likewise we have personal experience of the actual grittiness of life which gives us a deflated sense of how moral we are now.
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."
Written in 1859, about the year 1775, and could apply to today. It is likely a human condition to believe things were better when I was a kid...