NFP is a comedian, and BTB, all of those things are still available. Unlike then there is much higher divorce rate and much more social acceptance of divorce, availability and acceptance of contraception, greater acceptance of relationships outside of marriage, far more open media, greater participation of women and disadvantaged in public life. So, yes I repeat.
Back to the OP. Remember many of today’s barred drugs were freely available OTC in Victorian era. In Sherlock Holmes, the protagonist is noted to use cocaine and that is treated like a quirk rather an addiction.
Iran may be an even better example. Here are some photos of Tehran, Iran from the 1960’s and 70’s. Scroll down to see the photos of women as professionals and university students (Iran was arguably ahead of the U.S. in terms of professional opportunities for women back then). Also notice the Iranian rock groups and everybody having a grand old time. Those photos aren’t cherry-picked. I just grabbed the first links I could. There are thousands of them out there.
Could one not make the opposite argument? The current wave of fanatic reactionary religious fervor in the US, in the Middle East? In Russia?
Seems to me that fascistic and authoritarian regimes manipulate reactionary religious movements as a means to power routinely, and I don’t see any signs of this diminishing. Quite the contrary.
“All” societies are a mix of people who are one side of the other on the liberal-conservative spectrum, and are governed by an institution that fixes a midpoint somewhere. The prevailing posture of the influential majority of the society may exert pressure on the central administration to lean further toward the right or the left.
Governments, in the obvious interest of self-protection, tend to be more conservative, because that is exactly what conservative means – dance with the guy who brung ya. But watching the mood swings of a government does not necessarily reflect the mood swings of the governed.
Mores and social conventions seem to swing like pendulums. When things are excessively strict, the general mood of the public is “that’s too much, loosen up.” When things are excessively liberal, or loose, or unstructured, or wild, the general attitude of the public swings back to “that’s too much, let’s get things under control.”
Perhaps sometimes the cycle of sexual mores, politics, or other trends may not be n sync, but generally they are.
Another factor is independence. When money is good, people can afford to “do their own thing”. If my employer does not care about my hairstyle or mode of dress or my lack of piercings, I can do what I want. It swings both ways; an employer who does not control their employees’ private lives can attract the better and the brightest, to out-compete with those who only hire straight-laced Caucasian protestant males in white collars and neckties (or give preference to the boss’s nephews). However, the converse is true - when times are tougher and jobs are scarcer, people do what is required of them to keep their jobs. there’s the old joke that skirt hemlines used to follow the stock market up and down.
the same might be true of social conditions. Prosperity also means security. When crime is low and times are good, self-indulgent displays are more common; when times are difficult, due to war, terrorism, financial difficulties, (perceived) threats to public safety, whatever - people tend to be more circumspect and public displays of ostentation are frowned up as immoral. (“How can you party it up while our boys are dying overseas?”)