All these things””plus Wall Street and Washington and the general sense that most of our great institutions have forgotten their essential mission””add up and produce a fear that the biggest deterioration in America isn’t economic but something else, something more characterological.
I’d like to see a poll on this. Yes or no: Have we become a more vulgar country? Are we coarser than, say, 50 years ago? Do we talk more about sensitivity and treat others less sensitively? Do you think standards of public behavior are rising or falling? Is there something called the American Character, and do you think it has, the past half-century, improved or degenerated? If the latter, what are the implications of this? Do you sense, as you look around you, that each year we have less or more of the glue that holds a great nation together? Is there less courtesy in America now than when you were a child, or more? Bonus question: Is “Excuse me” a request or a command?
So much always roils us in America, and so much always will. But maybe as 2010 begins and the ’00s recede, we should think more about the noneconomic issues that leave us uneasy, and that need our attention. Not everything in America comes down to money. Not everything ever did.
As usual, Peggy Noonan puts her finger on it. Because of cable and the internet, barriers to entry for all types of content have been dramatically lowered. This is both good and bad news, right? But, the stuff that should perhaps be allowed yet marginalized is shouldering its way into our daily diet (in the media, in schools, in church, at the mall) and is presented to us as mainstream. Noonan’s example is one of the extremes, but prime time TV is loaded up with this kind of crap. I sense that people are weary with the daily struggle to deflect it from their own lives and from the impressionable children in their care. The next decade, I humbly predict, is going to the be decade of the filter. It’s going to become increasingly valuable to people to find ways to crimp the relentless firehose of uninvited vulgarities in their lives.
1. Tired of Hypocrisy makes a good point, but the internet is too convenient. I myself would look farther back to the very origins of the problem. Diogenes of Catholic World News a few years ago wrote a humbling article about how US Catholics have lost the meaning of Holy Communion because we buy our bread from store shelves pre-sliced whereas the poor of the world fight weather and pests for their crops and their daily bread. Diogenes was much more eloquent in his article. I would submit that the sheer decadence of our lives is the root cause our diminishing social capital.
It is important not to mistake better data for change.
We see more clearly now the base, vulgar and prurient nature of our culture, but that is not to say it is more-so than it ever was. To prefer concealment of vice, is to advocate for additional vice, not to promote virtue.
Perhaps if we see this world more clearly, our disgust will move us to action?