People have always been saying that morality is declining. People aren’t as good as they once were, kindness has gone out the window, the world is going to shit.
This isn’t true. The only thing that’s true is that people have always said it.
In an essay called “The illusion of moral decline,” Adam Mastroianni offers a strictly psychological look into this issue, describing moral decline as a psychological illusion. Mastroianni details the research he did with a partner to study the history of people’s insistence on moral decline.
They collected and studied hundreds of other studies from various times and places, and found a startling fact: people’s insistence on moral decline is remarkably consistent across time and place. It’s one of the most consistent social phenomena I’ve ever seen.
If you write down a statement that goes “people these days are” or “things these days are,” you can safely remove the words “these” and “days.” Almost nothing you can say about the world, now, would be untrue if you went back in time 2,000 years. Because the common denominator is people, and that’s a hell of a common denominator.
And people don’t change. Not that much, anyway. Certainly not enough for every successive generation to think we have.
There are statements like these in very old texts. For example the book I’m currently reading, The Count of Monte Cristo, published in 1845. Or in Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai, which contains Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s commentaries from the 1600s. I even found a Reddit post showing a few examples from history (as early as Aristotle himself). “The world is going to shit” and “kids these days” exist across time and place. They’re cross-cultural.
I have wondered for years whether there’s any truth to these laments. Whether morality really is declining, and if so, why. There are infinite reasons why it could be true, and there are also a number of reasons that it might not be true. Reasons like:
Morality has no universal definition, so people can claim immorality on anything they want
Population density kills our sense of community
The illusion of connectedness from social media (and other technology)
Psychological biases keep us from seeing both the past and the present clearly
Morality is undefinable
To begin with, morality is a very soft word. Like many extremely meaningful words that we use all the time, it has no satisfying definition. Does being moral mean being nice? Does it mean restraining oneself and one’s base impulses? Does it mean progressing towards more mercy, or does it mean progressing towards more justice (since those are often polar opposites)? Does it mean a willingness to take responsibility for one’s community, and to stand up when something threatens that community?
Does morality involve psychology, and the nuances of people’s psyches? Does it involve neurology and the wiring in the brain that we, so far, can do very little about? Is it something that science can solve, or is it one of those messy things that human beings just have to give their best shot on a case-by-case basis?
There have always, to give one example, been creepy and abusive men — which is immoral as in lacking restraint or principles. The only thing that has changed is that we no longer murder them for it — which you could argue is moral as in progressing towards mercy. So they just keep on being creepy and abusing people. Which is immoral.
In the ancestral environment, murder as a punishment wasn't a moral issue. At least not in the modern sense of “moral,” which means cosmic correctness or transcendental justifiability.
Murder was only a moral question in the sense of being better or worse than not murder. It wasn't a question of transcendental significance — it was a question of social cohesion and utility. It was a question of what was most useful.
If there was a person in your tribe who kept trying to rape people's wives, the only possible conclusion is that the tribe would be better off with him dead. There is no other conclusion that makes any sense. Ergo... murder. In the stone age, people got killed for anti-social transgressions all the time.
In season 4 of ShowTime's Dexter, there's a serial murderer called the Trinity Killer who keeps replaying the traumas of his childhood in theatrical, ritualistic ways. He's re-creating and re-living his traumas, as a way to take emotional control of them, by involving other people and then killing them.
The psychology community's question here would be: is this is an illness?
The neurologists would ask: what is wrong with the circuitry in his brain that's making him do this?
And whether the psychology community calls this an illness or the neurology department calls this faulty wiring, there's only one pressing moral question: would the entire world be better off without this person alive?
And the answer is simply “yes.” Right?
Well, that’s my opinion. But everybody has a different definition of what is moral, or good, or socially useful. It’s complicated. The reason the myth of moral decline will never go away is because people get to define “moral” however they want. And their definition will be informed by their own experiences, science, religion, and anything else they find meaningful.
As long as people are not living up to someone’s individual definition of morality, that person will get to look around and claim the world is immoral. And that it’s getting worse, which we’ll get to later in the biases section.
Density
Another problem is that the more connected everyone is to everything else, the denser the world gets, the fewer opportunities people have to be moral — to do the right thing in a way that is meaningful. That sounds stupid and counterintuitive, but I have noticed this problem over and over in my life. I think that morality is less an issue of the degradation of the fabric of human love, and more an issue of opportunity.
Part of the perception of moral decline is that we're just constantly in each other's business, all of the god damn time, but not in a meaningful way. Not in a way that builds community.
If you live in New York City, of course people are going to be less kind and approachable than when you grew up in the suburbs. Or when you lived in California. Because everything about life in New York is a pain in the ass. It hardens you. Every time I go to New York, I feel like everyone is trying to avoid eye contact with me. It’s weird.
Avoiding eye contact is not how the human spirit was meant to interact with other human spirits.
I've heard stories (and seen videos) of people getting harassed, bullied, or beaten up on subways. And the tragic joke of our time is that nobody steps in to help. Both because they're afraid of vengeance from the abuser, and because it has become impolite to meddle in other people's affairs. Because you don’t even know them. It’s easy to see this and think “people just don’t care about other people anymore.”
But if people lived in small communities, and didn’t have to commute to work every day within inches of a bunch of strangers (tense, frustrated strangers), these kinds of things wouldn’t happen. Not as much, anyway.
If everyone around you knew your name, you wouldn't be able to abuse someone in public. Because you'd be in jail 1 hour later, because literally everyone would tell on you. And/or kick your ass.
Call me old-fashioned, but ass kickings are part of what makes small towns (and the 1900s) great. There were immediate consequences for dumb actions. The community was held together by citizens’ law: if you screw with my neighbors, I’m going to make you sorry. Immediately.
People who still live rural (which is a miracle of human commitment in the 21st century) still have the experience of life that we had 300 years ago. When most of us had neighbors we cared about, helped raise each other's children, and were deeply involved in each other's lives.
In a small town, you have neighbors. In a city, you merely have co-inhabitants.
If you go up into the hollers of West Virginia, you're more likely to find 4 women who would love to be your adoptive grandma than you are to find a single person who won't make eye contact with you. Your experience of people is the opposite of what it is in the city. If you asked for someone’s house, they would give it to you. “Go ahead and move in honey, I didn’t really need it anyway.” And then they’d go starve to death. Because it was the neighborly thing to do.
Let me put it mathematically. Imagine you live in a small town. In one year, you help 2 people with flat tires, watch 2 people's kids, and keep 2 people from getting bullied. In that case, you've helped 6 people out of a couple thousand, and probably made a real difference in your community. And you probably helped with more situations, proportionally, than you declined to help with. You saw opportunities to be moral, and you took them. Because it’s your community.
If you did the same amount of kind things in New York, you only managed to do something nice for 6 people out of 13 million. And you probably ignored a lot more situations than you helped with. Cities place an incredible demand on people to "do the right thing," and it's probably just more than we can keep up with. People just want to get to work.
You're not any more likely to get murdered helping someone on the side of the road than you ever were. In fact you're probably less likely now. But we don't do that as much anymore.
Partially because we don't trust each other, because we all think that morality has declined (a self-fulfilling prophecy).
Partially because a sense of community is something most of us no longer have in our lives, so we no longer feel accountable to stop and help.
And partially because we just don't have time. We're always in such a stupid rush to get somewhere. Anywhere. Anywhere other than where we are right now.
As Seinfeld said, nobody likes being anywhere.
Being part of a small, tight-knit community brings morality out of people. It presents people with opportunities to care for each other's children, and do favors that actually mean something, and show kindness and goodness. Good morality still exists in big cities, because people are still good. You just have to try harder to get it out of them, because they’re not used to being part of a real community.
The illusion of connectedness
The internet and social media bring out an extremely selfish and short-sighted side of us. It’s not because we're all totally selfish... it's that the internet and social media put us with people without putting us in front of people.
It's easy to get in arguments and call each other ignorant pieces of shit when you suffer no social consequences for doing so. 90% of what is said on the internet would never be said in real life.
It's easy to see a video of some tragedy and think "haha, that sucks" because it's just a video. It's not happening in your real life, to someone you actually know.
Plus, as I hope is obvious, you can’t help someone with a flat tire over the internet. You can’t babysit someone’s kids with Wi-fi.
The decline of morality isn't a goodness problem, it's a systems problem. It's not a software problem, it's a hardware problem. Our society is designed to make us think we’re being social, while pulling us further out of each other’s actual lives. Each other’s kitchens, each other’s living rooms, each other’s back yards. We’re closer than ever physically and electronically, but we’ve never been further apart socially.
If we threw away smartphones, moved out of cities, and left our 60-hour-a-week corporate ladder-climbing jobs, it would only take us about one year to become wholesome people in wholesome communities again. Because we wouldn't have anything else to do.
Similarly, I’ll bet the reason we stopped going to church isn’t for any reason other than it’s inconvenient. We value our Sunday mornings and we feel we don’t have enough free time (which isn’t true either).
Two-income households are also contributing to the decline of moral opportunity. If both parents weren't busy, and if mothers (or fathers) were still raising kids together, with each other, as teams, we'd be more connected. To each other, to our neighbors, to the families around us.
The modern world itself is contributing to the myth of moral decline, through the illusion of connectedness and the side-effects of population density.
But what about older societies? What about when people said “kids these days” and “things these days” in Rome, or Greece, or Egypt?
Well, first of all, those were cities and city-states too. For the entirety of documented history, we’ve been growing physically closer together. So my point stands even then.
Bias
But there are also psychological factors at play. Biases. Ordinary, everyday silly human thinking.
Chronocentrism is a human bias by which people ascribe particular importance to their own time in history. Human beings are just absolutely in love with the idea that they live in some defining period of history and that “well, after this, things will never be the same.” People like the idea that they were here to witness the absolute murder of all that is good in the world.
This is just a more artistic, elaborate form of negativity bias. And this is a big strike against the idea that morality is declining. After all, it seems pretty unlikely that morality started declining only once you arrived on earth. Especially since everyone says that.
And then of course there’s negativity bias itself. People don’t go around seeing other people do good deeds and saying “that was very moral.” They usually only make judgments when something isn’t, by saying “that was immoral.” Therefore, there are more specific examples, more easily-recalled examples, of immorality available inside people’s minds. This wouldn’t be the case if people walked around all day pointing out good things.
But we don’t. But we could.
Mastroianni, in the essay we mentioned earlier, offers a pair of biases that humans seem to exhibit habitually:
We offer an additional explanation in the paper, which is that two well-known psychological phenomena can combine to produce an illusion of moral decline. One is biased exposure: people pay disproportionate attention to negative information, and media companies make money by giving it to us. The other is biased memory: the negativity of negative information fades faster than the positivity of positive information. (This is called the Fading Affect Bias; for more, see Underrated ideas in psychology).
What he’s saying is:
People have a negativity bias, and it’s almost universal, and it’s also profitable so it gets even worse. “If it bleeds, it leads.” We are literally told, every day, that the world is a worse place than it actually is. And,
Positive memories retain their power in our heads better than negative ones.
When most people think about their childhood, it feels like a time of innocence and playfulness. A time of freedom and curiosity. We don’t think about times we were grounded or disappointed for not getting ice cream — we think about mother’s love and playing catch with Dad and what it felt like for the world to be a big playground. Even though it wasn’t.
We’ve always had both good neighbors and bad neighbors, and the world has always had both sinners and saints. That hasn’t changed — the way we think of the world has changed. As people get older, they hold onto positive memories from the past while constantly creating new negative memories about the present. What this adds up to, is that as people get older they think the world has gotten worse even though it has, in all likelihood, gotten better.
There’s another, similar bias that’s surely contributing, although I don’t know if it has a name. I’m sure it’s been written about before, because I’m not clever enough to come up with something brand new.
As many (though not all) people get older, they tend to adopt more conservative and community-oriented values without realizing that they are. Maybe you’ve heard the quote “if you’re young and not liberal, you’re heartless; if you’re old and not conservative, you’re brainless.” The essence of this quote is, as people get older they tend to loosen their grip on individualistic ideals and favor community and duty and family.
So as people age, the lens through which they see the world subtly changes year by year. They start to wonder why kids aren’t more respectful, even though they themselves weren’t respectful as kids. They start to wonder why there are fewer good neighbors in their neighborhood, not realizing that they themselves were not good neighbors at 26 years old.
Maybe you can call this the rose-colored self bias. We remember ourselves as better people than we were, so that we can impose higher standards on others. And it’s not a totally selfish bias — ultimately, I think there’s an evolutionary reason for this. This bias is ultimately in service of community and family, because old people’s main purpose in life is to keep younger people loyal and organized. To teach us. To keep us in line. To give the community a backbone of wisdom and tradition.
From that angle, this bias makes perfect sense.
In fact once you learn the evolutionary reasons behind biases, most of them make perfect sense.
It’s a myth
There is no real moral decline. It's a myth, it’s an opportunity problem, and it's a combination of psychological biases. Here is the summary:
Everybody has a different definition of moral, which means we are forever biased against whatever we personally don’t like.
Similarly, if people say there’s a “lack” of morality, that depends entirely on what they personally want to see more of. People have different (and even opposing) values.
The smaller the number of people you're accountable to, the more moral you’ll be. Because you know those people, and your behavior is much more visible and has much more impact.
We're so “busy” that we simply don't make time to do moral things.
We're terrified of putting ourselves on the line to be moral, because the world will find a way to punish us for it instead of rewarding us for it (social media, vengeance from bad actors who themselves don't care about community, etc.).
We think that both the world and our selves were better before than they actually were.
We think that the world now is worse than it actually is.
It's not that people aren't interested in being good. Because they are. They just need more time, and fewer people to care about.
Drink some water and relax.
JDR
“In times like these it's helpful to remember that there have always been times like these.” - Paul Harvey
I made this almost exact statement you made "It's easy to get in arguments and call each other ignorant pieces of shit when you suffer no social consequences for doing so. 90% of what is said on the internet would never be said in real life."
on me substack where i talked about virtuality being one of the reasons for the Ill exchange of words. I said:
"It's very easy for someone to call you a fool online than in real life because of the obvious adversities the latter may bring. Most of the things people say online are really difficult to say in real life."
https://open.substack.com/pub/yomi0/p/the-depth-of-sentences?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1p29c7