The youth have no respect, sex & violence are everywhere and society is going down the drain. I’ve been hearing that sort of thing since I was in high school. Maybe it’s true, but I have a vague memory of reading about people saying this in the past as well and for a long time.
Is the complaint (or its intensity) a recent phenomenon or has it pretty much always been with us?
I am, here, looking for the bemoaning of social decay, spread of violence and sex and similar denounciations. It can go anywhere from the 80s to Antiquity.
If it has been going on for very long, does every generation get that sort of alarmism? Why?
I am putting this in General Questions because I am looking for a factual answer, likely psychological or sociological. Putting this in Great Debates would make it too likely that the discussion would veer into whether or not our time is a time of decay, which is explicitely not what I am looking for, as interesting a debate as that might be.
Here’s some quotes I’ve seen bandied about, I’m not sure if they’re accurate attributions, but people throw them about commonly:
The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
Socrates (469 BC – 399 BC)
What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?
Plato (424 BC – 347 BC)
I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words… When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise [disrespectful] and impatient of restraint.
According to Wikiquote this is … a paraphrase of a quote from Aristophanes’ Clouds, a comedic play known for its caricature of Socrates. Wikiquote is a pretty good source for checking up on popular quotes.
It may or may not be going to hell in a handbasket historically speaking. On the plus side, violent crime is at or near an all time low at least in the U.S. Today’s children are the smartest ever produced in the history of the world by any way we can measure and that is the only thing that matters. That is what older people are usually referring too when they say these things so that is completely false.
On the other side, we do have some unprecedented threats like global warming which started a long time ago but we only appreciate today. That alone could mark the downfall of modern civilization in a few generations or maybe not. Really old people didn’t grow up with the nuclear war capability of many countries. That could do it too but that has been the case since at least the 1950’s. Only time will tell.
In general, most people aren’t taking such a long term and nuanced view when they make such comments. They are just reacting to today’s children with very, very faulty memories and poor sociological skills. That has always been the case.
If you read some ancient writings from ancient Egyptians or Greeks or Romans, you’ll find the same worry of parents or social commentators in general :: the youth is corrupt and there’s no respect for tradition and rules, and the world is going to their corresponding hell.
The “Why” is very complicated to answer in a forum post.
It has mostly to do with the psychological drive for ego gratification – by watching others do what you do, proving that your behavior is approved by your group, therefore accepted, therefore safe.
It’s more complicated than that, but that’s all I can do for a forum post
Yes, but the key point is they are only usually wrong.
Ancient Rome is a particularly good example of this. A consistent theme in Roman writings from the end of the Punic wars onwards is how things aren’t as good as they used to be, and the current generation has nothing on their great forefathers. Of course for a long time they were right and things WERE going to hell in a hand basket, but you can hear those complaints throughout what we’d think of as the “golden age” of Rome.
If the world has always been going to hell in a handbasket then we would prefer to live in ancient times than today. Instead, I can’t imagine a better time to be alive than today.
As for natural disasters, THOSE have been going on since the beginning of the world.
I can’t get TOO over whelmed about this global warming stuff. The Earth has undergone several ice ages, and they are cyclical. It’s been warm before, it will eventually get cold again.
Since the time it was written, the Book of Revelation in the New Testament has been predicting the end of the world. It seems like every generation reads it with horror, and some decide to set everything aside and wait for the Second Coming.
The Rapture was first predicted in the mid 1800s. It still hasn’t arrived.
I’m planning a party on December 22, 2012. The Mayans are not foolproof in their predictions. For starters, they are DEAD.
~VOW
What changes is the precise nature of the handbaskest and the variable speeds at which it approaches Hell. But we’re all in this handbasket together, no question about that! The atheist and the believer may argue, but we all face a common predicament called Life.
please, PLEASE don’t. don’t drag the poor mayans into this…
^an author tied these concepts together in a sensationalist book…starting this whole mumjo jumbo mayan nonsense.
in regard to the op:
another aspect of “the world going to hell” is (appropriate to the above) the prediction of the end times. i hear a lot about how the decline of social morays is the harbinger of the end of days. the state of the world is indication we haven’t got much longer… only this has been going on for forever, too.
These kinds of complaints have always been there, along with such gems as: “The rich are getting richer and the poor poorer”; and " poor people breed liek mad while our best and brightest only have a few children"
It is far more interesting why people have the need to remark stuff like this, then to treat it as an observation with factual merit
(excuse me, my period key is stuck)
I can see why violence is a bad thing, but why sex? The phrase “sex and violence” always utterly puzzles me. It’s like, I dunno, “marshmallows and landmines” or “kittens and cancer”. Who first thought they should be linked together?
Around 12,000 years ago a startling jump in human population and attendant increasingly rapid technological change occurred. This is an absolutely brand-new thing in the long history of the earth, an experiment whose outcome is unknown. We already recognize that the impact on the environment is profound – despite our psychological incentive to downplay and ignore that impact.
It’s unknown whether this will result in catastrophe…but to portray it as in any way part of a cycle that’s happened before is fantastically wishful thinking.
Great username/post combination!
My guess is they’re the two things that are most attention-getting to see in public.
I think the Mark Twain quote is appropriate here, from the othe side: “When I was 18 my old mand didn’t know a damn thing. By the time I was 25, I was amazed how much he had learned in seven years”.
Every generation thinks it has all the answers, and when they get old, they forget they were that way and think the new generation does not show the qualities they think they used to have.
Well, going back to Ancient Rome, they were eaten with thinly cut and deep fried vegetable fritters. Which may have been involved with the Roman orator Cicero famously bemoaning, O tempura, O morays! when a teenaged cook didn’t make it right. Though maybe I’m remembering that one wrong.
Besides, when I was a boy we weren’t going to Hell in a handbasket. We had to take the BUS! And they used tokens in those days, and if you didn’t have a token or exact change, you had to WALK to Hell… Uphill!
