The Illusion of Moral Decline

So we’ve always sucked ?

 

So the evil, underachievement, corruption, and shit we're drowning in is nothing new, meaning we are incapable of evolving beyond it. What a cheery thing.

 

You act as if it is all around you every day. You have 24 media blasting you with jaded and distorted perspectives and it gives you the perception that is the world we live in.

I highly doubt people of yesteryear were dramatically more virtuous. Human nature is human nature. People did some pretty cruel shit decades ago. Corruption at high levels is nothing new.

If anything with the intense attention and visibility it is probably not as rampant as it was in the past.

 

I know we're not declining morally. 90 years ago, antisemitism was rampant, and we were far too willing to look the other way as Jews were persecuted and slaughtered in Europe. 60 years ago, Jim Crow still existed. 40ish years ago, gay people were treated as second-class citizens, and our government was happy to let them die of AIDS.

Now, segregation is a distant memory, we have little tolerance for antisemitism, and the laws that denied gay people equal citizenship are mostly gone. There are still many wrongs to right, injustices happening today, and improvements needed, but we as a society are certainly progressing. Progress isn't always linear, but it is happening.

 

Or corruption and evil, while still rampant is a bit better thanks to checks and balances. Time to highlight the good.



This message brought to you by the Christmas Season.

 

We can assess changes in moral behavior objectively, if arbitrarily, but there simply is no way to objectively judge a single moral state. It’s like asking if a mile is long.

As Epictetus noted a couple thousand years ago, it’s not events that disturb people, but their judgements concerning them. If our morals haven’t changed over generations, then it would seem that the most objective way to describe them would be “average.”

 

Or the Bible says “The heart of man is deceitful and beyond cure. Who can understand it ?”

 

I don't think we are necessarily a more "moral," maybe a better word would be less cruel. Empathetic is probably more accurate, which is probably more down to advancements in media making the world "smaller" than advances in morality, our ideas of which are largely unchanged. The circle of people we see as worthy of empathy as has widened.

 

It’s hard to forget the 100 million who died under atheist regimes in the 20th Century.

 

I think our attitudes are largely shaped by material and political conditions, and I think there is a certain amount of conformity in how that works, social censure being among those ways conformity is shaped, but usually there is some sort of material or political condition preceding that which allows for that. Capitalism certainly allowed for the triumph of bourgeois morality, "the protestant ethic" and all that.

 

Illusion? Baloney. I've been in moral decline for years. There's no question about it. I was raised as a Southern Baptist fundamentalist. I was glory-bound, "once saved, always saved." Then I left home and went to UF. It's been a downward slope to depravity ever since.

 

Anytime I start thinking we are in decline I just think back to how degenerate we were in middle and high school.

 

Yeah, we were overrun with trannies and mass-shootings back in the day.