But, what about, when he was 64?
95% of this boils down to the issue of openness. Some people prefer a world in which people invest a lot of energy in maintaining facades and disguising or hiding realities of all kinds. The SA’s of the world like things to LOOK nice, SEEM nice, APPEAR nice.
The flip side means shining the light on reality, which reveals and releases things both good and bad, but at least they are all real and true. So the bad reality can be confronted (top of my “the-good-old-days-are-a-giant-ugly-fucking-lie” list: child and spousal abuse) and the good reality can be embraced (homosexuality is a normal variation of human experience that is completely harmless in and of itself and homosexuals must have the same rights as everyone else to openly love and marry and raise families).
The price you pay is a loss of some pleasant formalities, which I do mourn. But it’s a small price to pay for the good that comes from being genuine and open.
The more humanity and individual societies become honest, the more genuinely kind, genuinely enlightened, genuinely wise we become. Hiding the truth allows ignorance, prejudice, cruelty and all kinds of suffering to flourish.
I’m not claiming any expertise here, just trying to relate what my uncle was saying. But I’m pretty sure that the point he was trying to make was not “in the 50s, things were worse than they are now, but we didn’t know, so we thought they were better”. I can try to get in touch with him and get some more details on the various different metrics he was talking about, but at least some of them (ie, income disparity) are things which are fairly objectively measurable, not just things where we used to have a facade of happiness that’s now been stripped away. It’s a lot more than just “pleasant formalities”.
(One might also argue that increased awareness of the ugliness of life can be taken way too far… is it a good thing that so many parents these days are so paranoid about child molestation that they’ll never leave their children unaccompanied with a male adult friend for even a second, and so paranoid about kidnapping that it’s considered freakish for a child to walk to school unaccompanied, etc.?)
I don’t know enough about the precise data to really answer this, but I strongly doubt that general politeness is one of the basic data points he was talking about. Social capital and social connectedness are a lot more than just how often people hold the door open for women, or what have you.
I believe that the difference is that in the middle of the 20th century, people wanted to invest in their societies. Now we all just want to cut taxes (and keep everyone off our lawns.)
I believe that for many the good old days include effective action against said plight.
Another point is that - and this will be difficult to phrase, so be kind if responding - that “ethnism” can create strong and supportive subcultures.
I’d wager we’re more likely to interact with people of different cultures/religions these days. The city I currently live in has a pretty significant Afghan population, and the city I grew up in has one of the most Vietnamese people living in it in the US. My High School was a mosaic of caucasian, hispanic, asian, pacific islander, and black kids. Similarly, my job exposes me to a very wide variety of people. The manager at my former job was Muslim and would take brief breaks at work so she could go privately pray in an empty office.
Its to our benefit to be open-minded, and learn about other cultures to understand them better. But that takes work and patience, and when you live in a homogenous society you don’t have to deal with these facts. In a lot of ways that would mean that in 50’s homogenous America things might’ve seemed more placid- the Civil Rights period started to shake that up and like Stoid said, expose us to some ugly truths that we may not really want to have to face.
I, too, am of the feeling that yes, sure, there was an unfortunate loss of a certain standard of public civility, but that it’s acceptable collateral damage. Freedom is essential, vital; social formalities are nice to have. And it didn’t even have to have happened this way –
It would have been ideal if we could have kept gentility and civility while at the same time achieving freedom, diversity and openness. ***But all too often the self-proclaimed champions of orderliness and politeness came across as simply wanting the dissidents to just STFU. *** And that would have been an unacceptable outcome.
Data point: Starving Artist is sort of right about teen pregnancy (and I’m one of those who most strongly excoriated him for that claim). While teen pregnancy is lower today in absolute terms, a lot more of those teens were married in 1951 than today.
So in spirit, he’s correct; he just omits the “out of wedlock” bit. Regardless of your personal mores it’s fairly clear that children do better when they are raised by a couple.
I leave it up to the reader to decide whether the dad who sticks around but drinks every night and beats everyone is better than the one who leaves.
I truly wonder if that’s even theoretically possible. So much of “gentility and civility” in yon days gone by was inherently about suppressing freedom, diversity and openness. I mean, look at the threads on etiquette, such as it exists today. It’s full of “I don’t wanna!” on one side and “STFU and stop acting like you’re the center of the universe and just do it for the rest of us, okay?” on the other. Only by stifling one’s freedom and openness, and limiting “diversity” to one generally accepted set of rules for what, exactly, is civility in the first place can one act in a genteel manner.
How can one act with “gentility and civility” when you don’t know whether it’s good manners to shake hands upon meeting or if that will cause offense? Because we’re a diverse nation, we just can’t meet everyone’s standards for gentility and civility. It’s not that we have none - we do, or we wouldn’t be appalled when people break it - it’s that we have too many. For one group, breastfeeding in public is a horrible broach of gentility and civility, while for another it’s perfectly appropriate. For one group, loud cheering and airhorns at a graduation ceremony are a way to show respect and love for the graduate in their family, for another, sitting quietly until the end of the announcements is how you show respect and love. These are not easy freedoms to remain civil about, because everyone finds the other guy rude.
Not unless we work hard to keep groups separate, or until we’re so thoroughly homogenized that we have one set of cultural rules - in other words, only by losing our freedom and diversity - is it possible to even agree what gentility and civility even look like, much less act like it.
On the other hand…
[QUOTE=Jackson Browne]
I have done all that I could
To see the evil and the good without hiding
You must help me if you can
Doctor, my eyes
Tell me what is wrong
Was I unwise to leave them open for so long?
[/QUOTE]
This reminded me of Pleasant Valley Sunday.
An argument I’ve heard is that the boomers were the first generation who had enough wealth that they could pursue lives of self actualization rather than working solely for material needs like food, shelter, transportation, health care, etc and that this trickled down into how society is organized and run. I don’t remember who wrote the book on that subject though.
Plus for many of us in the millennial generation, the opposite is the case. We aren’t largely guaranteed a decent level of housing, health care, food and transportation with the costs of most of those things going up while our wages stagnate. I’ve also read the millennials are more pro-social, but I have no idea if the concept that you have to be part of a community to survive economically (which many of us are facing, whether it be roommates, friends or family) has anything to do with pro-social levels of interactions.
Very interesting post! The income disparity leapt out at me, relating to something I read awhile ago: people don’t perceive their own wealth in absolute terms, but rather in terms relative to the wealth of their neighbors. A minor medieval king might have had less absolute wealth than today’s average accountant, but felt much wealthier, and derived more satisfaction from his wealth, because he was one of the richest folks he knew. As wealth disparity increases, folks on the bottom of the ladder become increasingly dissatisfied with their lot, and social unrest rises.
Public policy since Reagan (and to a lesser extent before Reagan) has, IMO, increased the wealth gap in our society, to our society’s detriment.
Wealth isn’t the only thing that’s relative. Some people probably remember society being nicer when they were young because they’re Anglo-Saxon heterosexual Christian men. If so, they’re right - things really were nicer for them back in the fifties. Society put them at the pinacle and everyone else acknowledged their superiority - or else.
What they experience now isn’t rudeness as such. It’s just the lack of automatic deference they grew up with. They’re like kings who’ve been exiled to a republic - they’re insulted when other people treat them like equals.
You know, in hindsight, the most strange and glaring thing about The Sixties is that the backlash just doesn’t stop. It began when Nixon trounced his hand-picked (that was that Watergate was all about really) Dem opponent McGovern, who was successfully identified with the counterculture (and probably got the votes of all the hippies and radicals who were not by that time completely disaffected from the mainstream electoral process, including newly enfranchised 18-to-21-year-olds, but it wasn’t nearly enough). It continued through the Reagan Revolution and the triumph of movement conservatism, with all its ancillary support organizations such as the Moral Majority, and the War on Drugs, and so on and so on. When’s the last time something actually happened in America that would have thrilled the hippies back in the day? Gay marriage, that’s about it; and not a matter high on the agenda of most 1960s radicals, I should think. And maybe the election of Obama . . . or not, all things considered.
And yet, after all that, still we encounter characters like Starving who seem to think the country still needs to be taken back from the hippies who have been running it all this time. Or something like that. 
I think you’re all missing the big elephant in the room - the rise of activist government since the 1960’s.
Before the explosion of new government agencies, regulations, and protections, people formed voluntary groups in mutual aid. People were forced to negotiate with each other to get what they wanted. Retirement planning involved maintaining close ties with your extended family. Marriage was more important, as it was a key protection against unemployment, illness, etc. Marrying two families together doubled the size of the ‘protective pool’. Divorce was a personal and financial disaster - personal because your extended family would look down on it, and financial because you cut yourself off from half of your relations as well as doubling your household costs.
There used to be more of a stigma on divorce because divorced people tended to put more pressure on their communities. Neighbors would be called on to babysit the kids until you got home, family members would be pressed into service or asked for financial aid, kids of divorced parents might be more unruly and cause more difficulty in the community, etc. This all mattered more then because communities were tighter and everyone knew everyone else - out of necessity.
There was plenty of aid for the poor, but it was personalized and voluntary. Thus obligations were put on the poor to attempt to raise themselves up, and there was a sense of shared contribution and gratitude. “Pay it forward” was a common phrase. With lower protection levels by the government, reputation became an important commodity, and people lived and died by their reputation for honesty and fair dealing. In short, there was a lot more social pressure on everyone to behave themselves, and people were forced tighter into their communities for mutual benefit.
Enter the big bureaucracy and the faceless government agent who came to ‘help’. Suddenly these issues all became political. Politics is a zero-sum game - if budgets are limited, anything you get represents something I don’t get or that I have to pay for. It turns people against each other. Government retirement insurance and unemployment insurance reduces the need to maintain family connections. Government guarantees and standards reduce the value of reputation. Partisanship grows as people choose sides to maximize their political clout. You eventually stabilize on a situation where half the country ‘wins’ every four years and the other half loses, and the ‘winners’ immediately try to impose their ideas on the ‘losers’. This further fractures society and causes resentment.
In the meantime, people stop accepting blame for their own fate. They are convinced by the polarized, partisan culture that any problems they are suffering in life are the fault of the ‘others’. Introspection vanishes in favor of outward displays of hostility against those deemed responsible for your misfortune.
Manners, personal responsibility and civic virtue declines as more of our lives move from the private to the political sphere.
This is not to minimize the problems with this approach. Pressure to stay married meant pressure to stay in abusive relationships. People without family or social connections had a more difficult time. There were definitely more cracks you could fall through. But the attempt to fill these cracks with big government has had a lot of unintended negative consequences.
I love the freedoms and choices that were won.
But I still like to hold the door for ladies and I still like to wear a hat.
I am so confused!
I think you need to dial back on the Kool-aid, Sam, you’re starting to hallucinate.
Also WW2 was a massively unifying force. Pretty much the entire country was mobilized for the war effort and it was constantly on everyone’s mind. Along with that probably came a sense of community that lasted for those who experienced it.
Another factor that I think plays a role is the MPAA code that was in place then. According to the media of the time, no one cursed, no one was sexually active although occasional babies were produced through some unknown means to married couples. Bad guys were easily identifiable with no redeeming qualities and always punished by a strong and just authority figures who were never in the wrong (except for the occasional bad apple quickly rooted out). It is easy to see that the world presented in this media is much more attractive than the world represented by the current media in which the goal is to sensationalize the negative, to the point that people think that there is a child abducting pervert around every corner, and the government and all authority figures are corrupt criminals.
And as a bonus advantage if someone did slip through the cracks and was unable to survive, it must be someone no one cared about so it didn’t really matter, at least not to anyone who counts.