Real and Imagined Social Decline

There are, in my view, two mistaken attitudes to social decline:

1) There is nothing new under the sun. People have been lamenting social and cultural decline since the dawn of man, but nothing ever really changes.

2) Everything is declining all the time. Almost every example of change can be held up as a sign of broader social and cultural decline.

My suggestion is this: there are real examples of social and cultural decline, but dragging everything into this narrative makes it impossible to talk about it seriously. If we fall into a pattern of reflexive curmudgeonliness, nobody need take anything we say about actual social and cultural decline seriously.

A few of my recent blog posts have been along this theme. For instance, in this blog post on language change, and in this blog post on criticisms of social media (including the common claim that attention spans are shortening). I'm playing the sceptic in those posts.

However, I definitely believe there are real examples of social and cultural decline. For instance (and this will surprise nobody who's ever read this blog), the decline of poetry.

When I talk about the decline of poetry, I'm often presented with the argument that music lyrics are the poetry of today. So the successors of Yeats and Tennyson are actually Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Eminem.

I don't think this argument works. I'm not denying that the lyrics of popular music can often attain the level of poetry. I think they can. But only in flashes, here and there.

On the whole, there's no comparison. There's nothing like the same level of depth, nuance, and seriousness involved. Nor is there the same level of coherence. A poem by any great classical poet flows from beginning to end. Even the best popular music lyrics tend to be simply a series of phrases strung together. 

(I've noticed that many of the more well-read rock musicians were influenced by Dylan Thomas, a classical poet who did write in this montage style. Bob Dylan took his stage name from him. William Blake also tends to popular with rockers, partly for the same reason.) 

Besides, there were always popular songs and people always quoted them, but they once lived alongside classical poetry.

But I don't want to go any further down that bunny trail.

Here's something I've noticed about laments of social decline. Liberals and progressives seem to indulge in them at least as much as conservatives. Very often it points to a contradiction in their own thought which they seem reluctant to face. 

For instance, they'll (quite rightly) lament the sexualization of advertising or pop culture, but they won't relate this to the 1960's sexual revolution, or to the decline of Christian ethics. (Again, their panacea seems to be socialism; don't blame the sexual revolution, blame capitalism!)

But really, everybody seems to indulge in laments of social decline, all the time. Very often they have to do with everyday irritants like manners, customer service, etc.

Sometimes there are familiar laments that are entirely justified. For instance, inflation. The old codger nostalgically remembering everything he could do with a fiver, and still have change, has been a comic figure for decades. But he's been right all along. Inflation has continually skyrocketed for generations now.

Then there are other laments where I'm not so sure. For instance, the decline of small business in the face of big business. Chesterton was writing about this in the early twentieth century and it's seemed to be a constant refrain for decades. It's a perpetual theme in movies and TV. But small businesses haven't disappeared. Small shops haven't disappeared. It doesn't even seem to me like they've especially declined since my childhood.

And then there's the fact that people rarely seem to dwell on social and cultural improvements.

Here's an example. Many years ago, knowing my interest in movie posters, somebody bought me two books about them (and full of examples of them). One was about movie posters from the 1940s, the other was about movie posters from the 1980s. It took only a cursory flick through both of them to see that the movie posters from the eighties were clearly superior to the movie posters from the forties. The 1940s posters were all very boring, unimaginative compositions involving a few star faces and the title of the film. There was nothing like the famous image of ET passing over the moon on a bicycle. Or the little girl sitting beside a glowing screen, her arms outstretched, on the poster for Poltergeist.

Even when it comes to my biggest anxiety about social and cultural change-- the dread of cultural homogenization-- I'm not entirely sure it's really happening, considered as a whole. Is it simply the case that there have been recurrent waves of homogenization followed by fragmentation? Why do we have so many languages descended from Latin? How did La Téne culture become so widespread in an era long before modern communicatons? And what about counter-currents such as the recent revival of the Cornish language?

Now all has been heard, here is the conclusion of the matter: I think we should be slower and more tentative to make claims of social and cultural decline, without falling into the "nothing new under the sun" fallacy.