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"Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority, they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no

by spodek 9y ago

"Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority, they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers." This quote is hundreds of years old, often misattributed to Socrates, but applies perennially. It describes not values degrading, but changing. To people who value one thing, a younger generation valuing other things feels like degradation since other values seem worse, but there aren't that many human values. Eventually generations cycle through them all and repeat.

coldtea 9y ago
When things are often repeated across generations, they can: a) always be true (we generally go to lower standards from the viewpoint of the previous generation, or even from an absolute viewpoint). b) always be false c) Sometimes be true and sometimes be false. I'm not sure why people immediately jump to (b). Perhaps it's comforting to dismiss any worry of decline, and to always attribute it to change. Or it's not fashionable these days to even think about decline (it marks one as old and not "going with the times"). I find (c) much more plausible. After all, whether Socrates said this or not, some such decline happened after Socrates (the dissolution of the Athenian state and its eventual collapse) -- and several other times (in later Rome, etc). And conversely, for huge periods of time people have not had much to complain regarding their children having some different lifetimes, because unlike ancient Athens or Rome or the US 50s and 60s or so, nothing much changed between generations -- a rural family in most of the world would have the exact same day in day out things to do, the same customs, etc, for centuries, with the very subtle and slow occasional imported innovation. It's also funny those that while many would say that steady cultural decline couldn't possibly be happening, as many as all convinced for steady cultural progress -- like history is like some kind of march towards more and more enlightenment. Of course those people have never read history, or experienced how a steady and advanced country (or world, in 1939) can turn backwards in a moment's notice.
- TulliusCicero 9y ago
  The problem is that "values changing" looks an awful lot like "values degrading" to those who held the older values, so it's impossible to tell which is which, until perhaps much later on when you have the benefit of hindsight. E.g. gradually increased acceptance of homosexual behavior is considered an obvious sign of moral values degrading among many (perhaps most) of the elderly (and percentage-wise this is even more obviously the case if you go back to the 90's).

by spodek 9y ago

coldtea 9y ago

When things are often repeated across generations, they can: a) always be true (we generally go to lower standards from the viewpoint of the previous generation, or even from an absolute viewpoint). b) always be false c) Sometimes be true and sometimes be false. I'm not sure why people immediately jump to (b). Perhaps it's comforting to dismiss any worry of decline, and to always attribute it to change. Or it's not fashionable these days to even think about decline (it marks one as old and not "going with the times"). I find (c) much more plausible. After all, whether Socrates said this or not, some such decline happened after Socrates (the dissolution of the Athenian state and its eventual collapse) -- and several other times (in later Rome, etc). And conversely, for huge periods of time people have not had much to complain regarding their children having some different lifetimes, because unlike ancient Athens or Rome or the US 50s and 60s or so, nothing much changed between generations -- a rural family in most of the world would have the exact same day in day out things to do, the same customs, etc, for centuries, with the very subtle and slow occasional imported innovation. It's also funny those that while many would say that steady cultural decline couldn't possibly be happening, as many as all convinced for steady cultural progress -- like history is like some kind of march towards more and more enlightenment. Of course those people have never read history, or experienced how a steady and advanced country (or world, in 1939) can turn backwards in a moment's notice.

TulliusCicero 9y ago
The problem is that "values changing" looks an awful lot like "values degrading" to those who held the older values, so it's impossible to tell which is which, until perhaps much later on when you have the benefit of hindsight. E.g. gradually increased acceptance of homosexual behavior is considered an obvious sign of moral values degrading among many (perhaps most) of the elderly (and percentage-wise this is even more obviously the case if you go back to the 90's).