Dating Societal Decline

Most people have the sense that we are a civilization in decline.

But something intriguing happens when you ask them, “When did things begin to go south?”

The period they mention is roughly the year they were born. They date societal decline to around the moment when they arrived on the scene.

Adam Mastroianni published an article in Nature compiling this data. He shows that this concern about the unraveling of the social fabric transcends nations and cultures. It’s a universal belief that civility and honesty are relics of a bygone era.

We all feel like things are worse than they used to be. Why is this?

We might assume that older generations are biased toward this negative outlook. “You used to be able to leave your door unlocked at night, but now you can’t.” “You could once take people at their word, but now hooligans are running wild…”

But this isn’t just The Simpsons’ “Old Man Yells at Cloud” stuff.

It isn’t only Baby Boomers who feel we’re on the brink of collapse. Have a conversation with a Millennial about the state of the economy and the housing market. Or talk with Gen Z about their anxiety over the looming climate catastrophe.

The common narrative is that there were once simpler times, but now we face impossible odds.

Now, that’s not to say there aren’t real issues and concerning trends in these categories. But the reality is that the negative stories we tell fly in the face of actual evidence. Pick your topic: education or the environment, medicine or morality, and we can chart progress and problem-solving. There’s plenty of work to do. But these aren’t areas of dramatic neglect.

There isn’t evidence to support the idea that people are less charitable today or more likely to plow their vehicle through a crowd of kittens. The recent decades have witnessed a steady decrease in violent crime.

But our cities do not feel safer.

A primary influence on our impression of the world around us is the endless news cycle. Thanks to the Internet, we are exposed to a constant barrage of distressing events.

The news media is a business fueled by negative press. “If it bleeds, it leads.”

And the more distant we are from the people involved—the more “other” they are, such as migrants—the more susceptible we are to disproportionate reactions or panic. Our friends and family might be nice, but it’s a jungle out there.

Is it our present moment that primes us for this? Technology is a factor. And certain ideas form a lens on our life outlook.

We live in what Charles Taylor called the “malaise of modernity.” There is an increased expectation that we discover individualistic purpose, having been alienated from traditional structures that brought a sense of meaning. Communities have been exchanged for platforms. Transcendent rewards for a follower count.

We face higher pressures to become somebody significant. And we experience crashing disappointment when the structures around us do not support this. We’re set up for disillusionment. We weren’t given the life we were promised—the one the people before us seemed to enjoy.

What philosophers on the right attribute to a loss of traditionalism, economists on the left describe as “living in late-stage capitalism.” The system is rigged. Early adopters had all the advantages and buried the rest of us underneath their oversized houses.

Both of these analyses have merit. But the thing is, our sense of societal decline is not just a feature of modernity or technology.

Mastroianni demonstrates that this goes back for millennia. He quotes a Roman historian from 2,000 years ago bemoaning the collapse of civilization.

Every new generation thinks the one before was better. Or had it easier.

The grass is always greener in the rearview mirror.

The obvious feature of the year we were born is that it’s the moment we begin to have firsthand experiences. Anything that precedes us is delivered packaged in a third-person perspective. The stories we tell feel weightier than the stories told to us.

Perhaps we date the decline starting with our existence because we’ve inappropriately centered ourselves in the narrative. But it might point to something else.

From the beginning of the historical record, people have longed for former days. It’s almost like we enter life aware of a backstory. Imprinted with a memory.

We are nostalgic for a time we haven’t experienced. We ache for a prior world that’s right-side-up. Certainly, things were better before. It couldn’t have always been this way. Once justice flowed like a river.

We grieve paradise lost as we wander east of Eden.

Maybe, as C.S. Lewis put it, in the same way that our appetite signals that such a thing as food exists, our desire for an unbroken reality tells us that a restored cosmos awaits us?