[inglor_cz]

I think the implication is that within that time period which separates Voyagers from today, we have become distrustful or ashamed of the higher parts of the culture, and that such a dysbalanced situation is fairly new, with hard-to-predict consequences.

[qlm]

Sounds like reactionary nonsense to me. It's just some names. It's not indicative of the debasement of society.

[inglor_cz]

In isolation, yes. But other things have happened as well. People dress like slobs; interestingly, in my country, where GDP per capita skyrocketed since 1989, standards of clothing seem to have gone down, especially for formal occasions. We have a major problem with physical fitness, Westerners of the 1970s were much thinner and moved more. People read fewer books and spend their days consuming brainrot on Tiktok, Instagram and YouTube shorts.

(Notice that the very word brainrot is a neologism?)

I don't think we should pooh-pooh such developments as irrelevant, and I am very unhappy that they have been subsumed to the universal polarization of the culture wars that consume everything while producing nothing of value.

The Moloch indeed.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> standards of clothing

Examined more closely, this appears to mean nothing more than "people spend less time wearing the clothes that a previously dominant culture considered to be high status markers".

[inglor_cz]

I think you just re-formulated what I said, in a more intellectuallish and dismissive way.

People will now turn out for a funeral in a tracksuit. Yes, previously dominant culture frowned upon such things. Yes, the culture has obviously changed.

Our main disagreement seems to be whether such change is good, bad, or irrelevant.

I could live with people dressing in a disgusting way, but I really dislike the death of book reading. That will make us all worse at thinking.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

You were the one who insisted that "standards of clothing have gone down" (emphasis mine).

When it comes to culture, I believe that things change rather than go up or down. In general, I suspect there are two very long term (i.e. many millenia-long) trends that occur in parallel, one of them generally improving the human condition and one of them degrading it. The world is literally going to hell in a handbasket, at the same thing as nearly everything is getting better.

Your concerns about book reading are, of course, the opposite of those of the Greek philosophers who imagined that it would make us all more stupid.

[gcanyon]

> When it comes to culture, I believe that things change rather than go up or down.

In the '80s movie Trancers, Jack Deth is a visitor from the future, and as he's slicking his hair back with water from a flower vase a woman from the present day asks something like, "People from the future put vase-water in their hair?!" and Jack Deth replies very seriously, "Dry hair is for squids."

[inglor_cz]

Yes, I can live with it, but I think the standards have gone down. It also seems to me that you basically consider that change irrelevant. We can surely disagree on that.

As for the Greek philosophers, I feel you are being too dismissive saying that they imagined us being more stupid. First, it was mostly about Socrates and second, his position was a bit more nuanced than how you present it. He was concerned about education becoming impersonal, which definitely has some downsides (until today, we haven't discovered any educational mode more efficient than 1:1 tutoring, at least from the student's individual point of view; the economic dimension, of course, differs). Second, he believed that our memory capabilities would go down, which they probably did. We don't have much contact with purely oral cultures now, but the little we do, show that pre-literate people were indeed better at remembering their collective past, including their culture, in the sense of "actually having it in their own heads" instead of "hearing about it once in the class and then promptly forgetting what they heard".

How many people today can recite a thousand songs from memory? Not that long ago, people like that would exist and keep ancient songs alive.

Today I hear Ed Sheeran ten times a day (ugh), but I wouldn't be able to recollect the lyrics even if threatened with an execution.

That is certainly one way of being stupider than before. Yes, it is compensated by other improvements, no doubt about that.

[BigTTYGothGF]

> People will now turn out for a funeral in a tracksuit.

I bet if they had showed up in a sport coat you wouldn't have found it notable despite the fact they were the tracksuits of their day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sport_coat

[inglor_cz]

No, because they lost that meaning in the meantime.

Yes, it is possible that tracksuits will become the to-go clothing for funerals and theatres as well as gyms.

[BurningFrog]

One theory is that you, like myself, has reached the age where many modern ways seem dumb and younger people aren't even aware of what has been lost.

Importantly: even if this is the case, it doesn't mean we're wrong!

[qlm]

I suggest you reflect on the value you are placing on aesthetics, and where this way of thinking ultimately leads.

[inglor_cz]

You don't really know how much of a value I place on aesthetics (not that much, in fact, just more than zero, which is enough to make some judgments).

And "where this way of thinking ultimately leads"? Nowhere special.

[tired-turtle]

“Standards of clothing” is not a set with a total order, and society has never had one way to dress. You’re unfairly projecting your values (of a certain style of dress) onto society as if it’s shared by everyone.

[inglor_cz]

This is not maths, and nothing is shared by everyone in a human society.

I am actually an algebra major and I always felt that the need of some of my peers to stuff the entire outside world into mathematical definitions does not lead anywhere. Please don't mathematize societal concepts ("a set with a total order"), you will only mislead yourself and others. Maths isn't a good tool to understand people.

Let us talk about humans in a human language instead.

[nozzlegear]

Surely the people at NASA who are launching probes aren't the ones who've become distrustful or ashamed of higher culture.

[inglor_cz]

Do the launch people have influence on what precisely they launch? IDK. In a massive organization like NASA is, I would expect such responsibilities to be isolated.