You were worse than we are

A young person defends the moral fitness of young people in an intriguing post that is more explict than our usual fare.

I am sick of hearing Baby Boomers and Gen X-ers complain about a perceived cultural decline among the younger generations. For a variety of measures, things started to go bad already by the 1950s, became obscene during the 1960s and '70s, and plateaued some time during the 1980s. Since roughly 1990, however, things have gotten steadily better. This series will catalog such a trend for measures typically given in support of the declinist hypothesis: we begin with sexual behavior, and will eventually cover violent crime, divorce, narcissism, the arts, and whatever other examples I come across or that readers suggest in the comments. The hope is that the series will prevent the real-world picture from disappearing down the Memory Hole, as every generation thinks that patterns among its usurpers spell doom, regardless of what the data show.

Read it all.

Posted by Jim Naughton on June 19, 2008 7:11 AM | |
Comments (2)

the purpose of this apologia escapes me. Your point is what?

Posted by Kendall Sims [TypeKey Profile Page] | June 19, 2008 10:01 AM

i think the point is that we paved the road they run full tilt down, and repaved it over the ones that we ran full tilt down in our youth. Kind of amused, as a long-time case-pleader for gen x, to see the finger pointed at us for a change.

Posted by Helen Thompson (Gallycat) [TypeKey Profile Page] | June 20, 2008 11:53 PM

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