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> A tale as old as time. Or as old as generational gaps. Are you claiming that moral standards of the "younger generation" in this gap haven't really declined

> A tale as old as time. Or as old as generational gaps. Are you claiming that moral standards of the "younger generation" in this gap haven't really declined as people in the "older generation" thought they would? Or are you saying that the moral standards have declined, but it's no big deal, just the changing of the times?

JoshTriplett 12y ago
Most people inclined to mass concern about "moral standards" are hypocritical: anything introduced in their generation that the previous generation didn't understand was just fine, but anything introduced in a subsequent generation that they don't understand isn't. Or, more bluntly: their moral standards are fine, it's everyone else that's wrong, both older and younger.
- brazzy 12y ago
  “I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.” ― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
- notdonspaulding 12y ago
  It's disingenuous, or maybe just naive, to think that a generation who has been on the earth 20 years longer than you doesn't understand what's going on in your generation. Sometimes I think Hacker News doesn't take a long enough view of history. My grandparents went to war in Europe. They saw and did things that shamed and haunted them when they came home. They were emotionally disconnected and stunted as they raised their children, my parents. My parent's generation, consequently, decided in the 60's that sexuality should be liberated, in the 70's that everyone should experiment with drugs, in the 80's that money and wealth were the most important priority, in the 90's that integrity was an outdated notion. In my generation, meanwhile, we've concluded that morality itself has run its course and that we should be tolerant of everything except intolerance, that faith and morality are all fine and well as long they're held privately, and that taboos are the only taboo. I asked my wife's grandparents what the biggest change is between now and the time of war that they lived through. Their answer? Community. There is no I've got your back, you get mine mentality really left in our nation. I think the point they were making is that if our generation were faced with the same question as theirs (Another sovereign nation is exterminating a race and seeks world domination, what should we do?), we'd be paralyzed by a lack of community. There would be no banding together, considering the price of losing hundreds of thousands of lives, and deciding to pay that price because it's the right thing to do. Call that hypocritical if you like. I'll just take it as well-placed criticism, because I've outlived my "everyone older than me is stoopid" mentality. EDIT: My point about taking a longer view of history is that all of these changes have taken place over a span of maybe 80 years. That's short enough that people have lived long enough to see it all happen. When older people complain about changing morals, they aren't necessarily going senile.
  - rfrey 12y ago
    It's disingenuous, or maybe just naive, to think that a generation who has been on the earth 20 years longer than you doesn't understand what's going on in your generation. That's funny, most of the people I know who talk a lot about this, and think today's youth are just fine, are over 40. The point is that there has always been rhetoric from elders about how terrible the youth are. Aristotle complained about the atrocious manners of the modern youth. Your grandparents' grandparents probably talked about the lack of community in the modern world. The game panics in the OP are just one category of a general theme. My wife is doing a paper on the "Girl Problem"... turns out you can go back 500 years and find a continuous written record, in both popular writing and policy, of the "current" crisis of morality among young women. With age comes wisdom, sure. But age also brings a sort of amnesia. The evidence is overwhelming.
  - fixermark 12y ago
    > I think the point they were making is that if our generation were faced with the same question as theirs (Another sovereign nation is exterminating a race and seeks world domination, what should we do?), we'd be paralyzed by a lack of community. World War II was running for two years prior to the involvement of the United States. The US passed a series of Neutrality Acts to keep out of the war. In the years prior to 1941, the president actually deployed US naval assets in the European theater as resource carriers in arguable contradiction of the desire of Congress to stay out of the situation entirely. U.S. domestic opinion on involvement in the European-Asian war was very divided until Pearl Harbor. A United States that got up and fought against world domination under its own initiative without the prompting of Pearl Harbor is very revisionist history. And if I may editorialize... I don't think that the sense of community that your wife's grandparents remember was a "natural" state that we've "lost." I think it was a side-effect of national galvanization under a war effort, and it is not without its negatives (keep an eye out for an "us vs. them" mentality that can make it hard to accept perceived past enemies as equal people). There are a lot of advantages to that sense of community; I'd like to hope we can build it anew without the need for bloody global conflict as a trigger.
  - pjc50 12y ago
    Morality is certainly changing; you'd need to deploy a lot more ethical reasoning to argue that it's getting worse. Remember that "community" in the 50s really did not extend across racial barriers. As for integrity, the famous exchange about "Have you no sense of decency?" ( http://americanrhetoric.com/speeches/welch-mccarthy.html http://americanrhetoric.com/speeches/welch-mccarthy.html ) was in the 50s, where the community did not so much have one another's back as was looking for a back to knife. When talking about community and solidarity, one must always ask "among whom exactly?" and "how reciprocal is this?". I believe we've gone from tight but narrowly defined, exclusionary communities to looser, more inclusive and egalitarian ones. The "should we intervene militarily in perceived overseas atrocities" question is also a lot more complex than it first appears, and too long to fit in this comment.

JoshTriplett 12y ago

Most people inclined to mass concern about "moral standards" are hypocritical: anything introduced in their generation that the previous generation didn't understand was just fine, but anything introduced in a subsequent generation that they don't understand isn't. Or, more bluntly: their moral standards are fine, it's everyone else that's wrong, both older and younger.

brazzy 12y ago
“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.” ― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
notdonspaulding 12y ago
It's disingenuous, or maybe just naive, to think that a generation who has been on the earth 20 years longer than you doesn't understand what's going on in your generation. Sometimes I think Hacker News doesn't take a long enough view of history. My grandparents went to war in Europe. They saw and did things that shamed and haunted them when they came home. They were emotionally disconnected and stunted as they raised their children, my parents. My parent's generation, consequently, decided in the 60's that sexuality should be liberated, in the 70's that everyone should experiment with drugs, in the 80's that money and wealth were the most important priority, in the 90's that integrity was an outdated notion. In my generation, meanwhile, we've concluded that morality itself has run its course and that we should be tolerant of everything except intolerance, that faith and morality are all fine and well as long they're held privately, and that taboos are the only taboo. I asked my wife's grandparents what the biggest change is between now and the time of war that they lived through. Their answer? Community. There is no I've got your back, you get mine mentality really left in our nation. I think the point they were making is that if our generation were faced with the same question as theirs (Another sovereign nation is exterminating a race and seeks world domination, what should we do?), we'd be paralyzed by a lack of community. There would be no banding together, considering the price of losing hundreds of thousands of lives, and deciding to pay that price because it's the right thing to do. Call that hypocritical if you like. I'll just take it as well-placed criticism, because I've outlived my "everyone older than me is stoopid" mentality. EDIT: My point about taking a longer view of history is that all of these changes have taken place over a span of maybe 80 years. That's short enough that people have lived long enough to see it all happen. When older people complain about changing morals, they aren't necessarily going senile.
- rfrey 12y ago
  It's disingenuous, or maybe just naive, to think that a generation who has been on the earth 20 years longer than you doesn't understand what's going on in your generation. That's funny, most of the people I know who talk a lot about this, and think today's youth are just fine, are over 40. The point is that there has always been rhetoric from elders about how terrible the youth are. Aristotle complained about the atrocious manners of the modern youth. Your grandparents' grandparents probably talked about the lack of community in the modern world. The game panics in the OP are just one category of a general theme. My wife is doing a paper on the "Girl Problem"... turns out you can go back 500 years and find a continuous written record, in both popular writing and policy, of the "current" crisis of morality among young women. With age comes wisdom, sure. But age also brings a sort of amnesia. The evidence is overwhelming.
- fixermark 12y ago
  > I think the point they were making is that if our generation were faced with the same question as theirs (Another sovereign nation is exterminating a race and seeks world domination, what should we do?), we'd be paralyzed by a lack of community. World War II was running for two years prior to the involvement of the United States. The US passed a series of Neutrality Acts to keep out of the war. In the years prior to 1941, the president actually deployed US naval assets in the European theater as resource carriers in arguable contradiction of the desire of Congress to stay out of the situation entirely. U.S. domestic opinion on involvement in the European-Asian war was very divided until Pearl Harbor. A United States that got up and fought against world domination under its own initiative without the prompting of Pearl Harbor is very revisionist history. And if I may editorialize... I don't think that the sense of community that your wife's grandparents remember was a "natural" state that we've "lost." I think it was a side-effect of national galvanization under a war effort, and it is not without its negatives (keep an eye out for an "us vs. them" mentality that can make it hard to accept perceived past enemies as equal people). There are a lot of advantages to that sense of community; I'd like to hope we can build it anew without the need for bloody global conflict as a trigger.
- pjc50 12y ago
  Morality is certainly changing; you'd need to deploy a lot more ethical reasoning to argue that it's getting worse. Remember that "community" in the 50s really did not extend across racial barriers. As for integrity, the famous exchange about "Have you no sense of decency?" ( http://americanrhetoric.com/speeches/welch-mccarthy.html http://americanrhetoric.com/speeches/welch-mccarthy.html ) was in the 50s, where the community did not so much have one another's back as was looking for a back to knife. When talking about community and solidarity, one must always ask "among whom exactly?" and "how reciprocal is this?". I believe we've gone from tight but narrowly defined, exclusionary communities to looser, more inclusive and egalitarian ones. The "should we intervene militarily in perceived overseas atrocities" question is also a lot more complex than it first appears, and too long to fit in this comment.