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This chapter explores the weakening of moral constraints that accompanied the rise of self-interest, and the growth in business power described in Chapters 3 and 4. It is argued that moral standards have not themselves declined, but that traditional moral authority — the authority of religion and the church, the state, the family — has all but collapsed. This development is rooted in the Enlightenment but has accelerated sharply, due in part to the erosion of cultural boundaries associated with globalization and its technologies of transport and communication, and to the suburbanization of society.

Beliefs in social and moral decline are widespread, and people sometimes perceive decline when conditions are actually improving. The original research presented here seeks to explain such illusory perceptions of decline by linking them to a general judgmental bias that causes people to mistake change in the self for change in the external world. Many changes that people experience during the life-course alter their perspectives in ways that sensitize them to social threats. When people fail to realize that these personal changes have heightened their perceptions of threat, they may mistakenly conclude that threats are becoming more prevalent in society. This chapter tests this thesis by combining surveys of people actually undergoing relevant transitions with experimental analogues of these transition processes. Also reviewed is evidence linking the belief that conditions are declining to politically conservative attitudes. After examining the judgmental biases that produce illusory perceptions of decline, the chapter draws on broader models of ideology and system justification to explain how the rhetoric of decline may function to achieve wider public support for conservative social movements.

This chapter examines how perceptions of moral decline intersect with the reality of living in towns experiencing population declines and diminishing job opportunities. The specific moral issues of concern that residents of small towns most frequently mention are abortion, homosexuality, and education issues, such as teaching the Ten Commandments and creationism alongside evolution. Whole communities were sometimes divided between factions that supported or opposed a revision to the school curriculum, or because a local pastor declared themselves to be in favor of gay marriage. There are other moral issues that townspeople said were important enough that they should receive more attention than they do—problems such as drug use and alcoholism, job training, school improvement and consolidation, the gap between rich and poor, and protection of the environment.

This chapter discusses the idea of decline of dharma. Social and moral decline underlined in Purāṇic cosmological time was consistently endorsed as characteristic of change over the four ages. Sometimes the description of the yugas were merely a prelude to the lengthy statements on the reversal of norms and mores, which reversal characterizes the Kali age. The gradual decline of dharma is stated both directly and in symbols. The Utopian conditions of the first age, also sometimes referred to as Satya, the age of Truth, diminish slowly until nothing of the Utopia is left in the Kaliyuga. Slotted into the theory of the decline of dharma was also the notion of transmigration or metempsychosis — karma and saṃsāra. The cyclic notion is reinforced by the idea of transmigration, where the ātman or soul being constantly reborn.

How did interwar commentators in France reconceive the meaning of pornography such that it thematized new fears about sexual deviance and, more generally, moral decline? What is the relationship between fantasies about pornography and the remaking of the integral body after World War I? This chapter addresses these questions by demonstrating how the perception that pornography was an identifiable body of material slowly dissipated as critics became increasingly alarmed at pornography's proliferation. Historians have recently conceived of this proliferation as a symptom of democratization. In so doing, they challenge an older vision, best represented by the historians Montgomery Hyde and Giuseppe Lo Duca, who both argued that pornography was the product of repressive social attitudes and policies. The relationship between pornography and perversion constituted a new rhetorical strategy to preserve the boundaries between a purportedly pure social body and pornography, which came most dramatically under siege after the Great War.

Between 1924 and 1929, a campaign was launched to try crack down on London's nightclubs and nightlife. Seen as symbolic of a new age of moral decline by their detractors, nightclubs were raided, closed, and fined, and revellers harassed by the Metropolitan Police. The campaign was spearheaded by the Conservative Home Secretary, William Joynson-Hicks (‘Jix’), and the Chief of the Metropolitan Police, Thomas Horwood. The Bishop of London, the churches, and various morality pressure groups were also key protagonists. This chapter asks: as a campaign of moral policing coming from the right, what does the nightclub campaign say about the nature of popular Conservatism, the party's relationship with the state, and the place of Jix within that party?

This chapter examines the historical and ideological aspects of women's dining. The scholarship reveals that, during early periods, women sat to dine while men reclined; whereas “now,” women too recline to dine, just as men do—their posture must therefore have changed at some point. On the other hand, by linking the alleged shift in women's posture to overall moral decline, these studies reveal that the distinction between the two postures has ideological implications. That is, dining posture is a locus where practice, gender, and ethics intersect. The chapter suggests that the seated posture functioned pragmatically, placing women under male scrutiny and control. Moreover, whatever the vagaries of actual social practice, the seated posture for women remained at all times the “strict protocol,” even in the Imperial period.

This chapter examines the thematic structure of Wulfstan's Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, a fiery sermon written in 1014 during a crisis of Danish invasion. It explains that the sermon's stern denunciation of political and moral decline and its accumulation of appalling detail are meant to move its hearers to remorse and action. It also suggests that the central theme of the sermon which is the nation's progression to disaster is set out in a long opening sentence that sets the tone and suggests the structure of the rest of the sermon.

This chapter discusses how nostalgia was a frequent theme in Hopper's gossip throughout her career. Nostalgia for small-town America, where everyone knew and monitored each other's private lives, informed and justified her mass media gossip about public figures. Nostalgia for the era of her early years of acting in Hollywood helped her distinguish herself in the crowded field of celebrity journalism and benefited her gossip career. Nostalgia for the values and principles of an earlier time in the United States fueled her various campaigns for moral and political conservatism, and nostalgia for both the Hollywood and the United States of yesteryear became a way to bond and build her relationship with her audience. Through her constant references to an imagined, older world, Hopper constructed and repeated a narrative that presented the history of the twentieth-century United States as one of decline, due to the triumph of liberalism in politics and morality.

This book argues that from the very founding of the United States, the “question of Union or Disunion” was inseparable from the issue of slavery's destiny. The central premise of American political culture, in the North and South alike, was that the republic was fragile—beset by external and internal enemies, and in perpetual danger of moral decline. Americans proved endlessly creative in tapping deep anxieties about the republic's survival as a rhetorical weapon in their political combat. By the time immediatists took the stage, Americans with rival political agendas had already, for nearly half a century, honed the art of casting their opponents as traitors bent on destroying the Union.

The book of Judges begins the unsparing critique of Israel’s national leadership that is central to both Former and Latter Prophets. A major theme of the book is how the divine will may be known and executed by those in positions of responsibility. Instead of following Deuteronomy’s injunction to do what is good in the eyes of YHWH, the people repeatedly do what is good in their own eyes. The stories of the judges trace a gradual decline in faithfulness. The book features numerous memorable women, even when the focus may be on a male figure, such as the ambiguous and troubling portrayal of Samson. Here and elsewhere, violence against women is a primary marker of Israel’s moral decline.