In a word, yes. All of the people who argued that the various trends you mentioned were moving society gradually into decline were correct. It’s just a matter of incremental change, so it’s easy to say “oh don’t be a curmudgeon, it’s no big deal.” Perhaps these things were a symptom rather than a cause, but the correlation is there.
I’m sure critics of flappers in the Jazz age thought “if the kids keep this up, soon women will be running around half naked, and all the young people will be having children out of wedlock!” The counterpoint might be “oh it’s just short hair and a bit of dancing, the kids are just having fun! It’s not going to harm anything.” Yet, which prediction turned out to be most accurate?
Pliny the Elder was right. At some point, Rome stopped being Rome, although nobody who was there at the time would have been able to acknowledge it. All they could do is observe the gradual decline.
Regarding pajamas in public, if you look at photos from the Great Depression, the men in the bread lines were wearing jackets and ties. Granted, their clothing was worn and patched, but they made some effort at maintaining a sense of dignity. On the issue of dignity, and my penchant for corncob pipes
ROFLMAO
, the distinction is that unlike crappy banana art, nobody holds cobs out as the premier essence of pipe smoking. Corncobs are like pajamas - cheap and undignified yet very comfortable, and best suited to the privacy of your (really, my) own home
Ultimately, at some point, all civilizations lose steam and then decline. Maybe the things I’m complaining of are more the symptom than cause, and perhaps are simply unavoidable, but I dislike them all the same because I dislike what they represent. Oswald Spengler wrote far more eloquently about it than I ever could, and there was another once-prominent historian, Toynbee as I recall, who further developed those ideas. However, this Spenglerian cyclical theory of civilizations that ebb and flow in a consistent and predictable manner has over the past decades given way to a “directional” view of history which is ultimately rooted in the Marxist theory of historical materialism, which is the frame of reference when someone talks about being “on the right side of history.” Again I digress into the margins of the political, but suffice it to say that the postmodern stuff is no random development, and it has everything to do with how the thought leaders of our society shape our collective perspective of ourselves and the world and our place in it.
