The archetypal experience of culture in the 1960s is very different than in 2020, few things have remained the same. — Judaka

Your position on 1960 vs. 2020 is just plain wrong, because:

You are missing the fact of cultural continuity.

The 'current' economy driving western civilization (be that French, Australian, or Finn) has been in force for at least the last 150 years--and longer. products change, corporate names are refreshed, companies merge, new factories are built for new technologies (transistors instead of tubes, then integrated circuits etched onto silicon, then...), management changes, consumer preferences change. Land barges with fins, then without fins; smaller cars vs. big cars; back to big cars; gas powered cars to electric cars.

Saks 5th Avenue was founded in 1860. It's still in business, but it is owned by the Hudsons Bay Company, which was founded in 1670. My favorite beer is Stella Artois, a Belgian pilsener; the brewery was founded in 1366. There are quite a few companies that have been in business for hundreds of years.

The language has not changed. New formal words and new slang has been added; other words have been dropped. Grammar remains the same. Pronunciation of words (accents) are by their nature always changing, but the meaning--however the word is spoken--changes very slowly, 999 times out of 1000. One might take a walk around the block; in 1960 the word was pronounced the way it is spelled. In some areas (like Detroit) the pronunciation is changing to something closer to 'bleck'.

While specieshood poses limits on what we can do (literally), social styles and moral norms change fairly rapidly, but not drastically. You might be less likely to be hanged for murder in 2020 than in 1960, but murder is about as frowned on now as then. Ditto for a lot of other crimes. The use of recreational drugs waxes and wanes over time, and for the most part you could get as high in 1960 as in 2020. Birth control which became widely available in the 1960s changed the sexual equation (to some extent), and that change is still in effect.

Life has changed more for women than heterosexual men; that is a significant change. Life for gay men has changed a great deal. Sex, however, has not changed; there are no new ways. What works in 2020 will work in 1960.

Changes come and go. Some people had groceries delivered to their homes in 1960. Later that became much less common; then it became more common again. Amazon may seem revolutionary, but in 1960 there were mail order catalogues from Sears, Wards, Spiegel. et al, selling a huge array of goods. At one time Sears even sold pre-fabricated houses; not mini-houses, full sized ones.

Maybe you spend too much time among your own age group. Get out more.

If you like to read, try something from the late 18th century--Boswell, for example. He was a lawyer, man about town, friend of Samuel Johnson. Better yet, try Samuel Pepys, 1633 1703. He was another man on the make, man about town. He kept a diary (in cypher) which now makes great reading. His daily comings and goings 300 years ago aren't all that much different than what a similar socially/sexually active guy might be doing now.

Here's a joke from 1960. It's a long, formulaic joke, but I am confident you will be able to understand all the words in it, and might even get the joke; you might even smile slightly.

A fisherman’s joke

The day after his wife disappeared in a kayaking accident, a Claddaghduff, an Irish man answered his door to find a grim-faced Constable & one waiting in the front yard. "We're sorry, Mr. O’ Flynn, but we have some information about your dear wife, Maureen" said one of the officers.

"Tell me! Did you find her?" Michael Patrick O’Flynn asked. The constables looked at each other and one said, "We have some bad news, some good news, and some really great news. Which would you like to hear first?

"Fearing the worst, Mr. O’ Flynn said, "Give me the bad news first." The constable said, "I'm sorry to tell you, sir, but early this morning we found your poor wife's body in the bay." "Lord sufferin' Jesus and Holy Mother of God!" exclaimed O’ Flynn. Swallowing hard, he asked,

"What could possibly be the good news?" The constable continued, "When we pulled the late, departed poor Maureen up, she had 12 of the best-looking Atlantic lobsters that you have ever seen clinging to her. Haven't seen lobsters like that since the 1960's, and we feel you are entitled to a share in the catch."

Stunned, Mr. O’ Flynn demanded, "Glory be to God, if that's the good news, then what's the really great news?

The constable replied, "We're gonna pull her up again tomorrow."

By your definition, a culture "declines" by being annihilated, pretty much and really only that. — Judaka

No. That's the most simple, most obvious way where there is hardly any disagreement on what happened. But there are other ways.

Another thing is simply assimilation. Several conquering people have simply assimilated to the population that they have conquered and their language and beliefs have disappeared. The people might have been excellent horsemen and warriors, but usually the tribal nomad culture etc. is simply no match against a so-called "high-culture" with all the lures and prestige they have.

Let's take (just as a random example) the Langobards, a Germanic people (possibly from Northern Europe) who ruled most of the Italian Peninsula from 568 to 774. They did have their language, an own religion, a Norse god Vanir that they worshipped, and an own culture. And then they hadn't. They became Christians and basically Romanized before Charlemagne conquered their lands. Hence the language isn't spoken, there's just some artifacts that may possibly be in Langobardic texts. Italian does have words from the Langobardian language (so there's that Cultural heritage) and there is Lombardy in Italy, yet I don't think modern Milanese think of themselves as being Langobards (I don't know any, so maybe I'm wrong).

And this is what has happened to many cultures that have been victorious on the battlefield and carved up their kingdoms yet have assimilated to the culture they have taken over (and not the other way around): Huns, Vandals and so on.

Oh but there are these reenactor guys roaming around as langobards! Culture saved?

As I said, any category of culture will have changed in so many ways from 1960 to 2020 that it is far from unreasonable to say that the changes are immense. Anyone living today with pretty much 100% certainty is not practising 1960s culture, people have adapted with the times, it is not a matter of me going out and meeting older people.

Remember that we're talking about culture, businesses lasting hundreds of years is not relevant to the culture because that business will have adapted with the times. Of course, today's technology is built upon the technology of yesterday, but if I said that technology in 2020 has advanced a lot since 1960, that'd be true regardless of this last point and so it is.

We can categorise the changes from 1960 to 2020 in two ways, firstly, the ways things which existed in 1960 have changed and the effect of new things which came into being between 1960 and 2020. As for the former, nothing is unchanged, for instance, you acknowledge the changes for women and homosexuals have been significant but let's look at heterosexual men. I will just list some things.
Meeting your partner
https://flowingdata.com/2019/03/15/shifts-in-how-couples-meet-online-takes-the-top-spot/
https://news.stanford.edu/2019/08/21/online-dating-popular-way-u-s-couples-meet/

Getting Married
https://www.thespruce.com/estimated-median-age-marriage-2303878

Going to college
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_United_States

Fatherhood
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/30/health/fathers-united-states-age.html

Number of Children
https://www.statista.com/statistics/718084/average-number-of-own-children-per-family/#:~:text=The%20typical%20American%20picture%20of,18%20per%20family%20in%201960.

The decline of Nuclear Families
https://www.ozy.com/news-and-politics/the-nuclear-family-is-in-decline-but-did-it-ever-represent-america/258493/

Increase in Single Parenthood
https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/04/25/the-changing-profile-of-unmarried-parents/

We can look at changes in divorce, hookup culture, homeownership and types of homes, the effect of females joining the workforce, stay-at-home dads and like I said, pretty much everything will have either changed a bit or a lot.

That's the group you said didn't have big changes but is that really true? I automatically assumed you meant white heterosexual males because I doubt you'd argue that 1960s and 2020 is similar for the majority of ethnic minorities in the US. Every other group has clearly gone through far more changes than this group which has clearly changed a lot.

It's not a question of whether this one thing convinces you, it's just that I could do this for genuinely any cultural thing you want to talk about.

Then there's the stuff is really different, the explosion of computer, phone and internet usage from the 1960s to 2020 has revolutionized businesses, entertainment, education, sex, income, social interaction and the list goes on.

English has clearly changed a great deal, it's not that words are being changed but rather becoming more or less common. How could you even attempt to say that 20-30-year-olds today are speaking as they did in the 1960s? It's not even possible for them to do when the things they're referring to often didn't exist in the 1960s. Whether it's the internet, film, television, education, so much which has had a profound cultural effect in the last sixty years, why would it be barely changed?

As I said, any topic you want to bring up, I can do this, because you are severely understating the differences. If you want to agree to disagree that's fine but do not misrepresent my position, I'm not saying I can't understand people from the 1960s, I'm saying the culture has changed dramatically. Be careful about what you say is not a significant change because at some point, you will effectively end up denying there's any difference between any of the Western countries because the differences are there ar less substantial than many of these ones.

You talked about cultural decay but you give examples of people just totally converting to a new culture or genocide. I think that language is at the heart of your understanding regardless of what anyone else says. To avoid a cultural collapse in Australia we've got to
1. Call ourselves Australians
2. Speak English
3. Be mostly white? If we become 90% ethnically Asian does that still count?
4. Not let Australia be destroyed or something

Is that about right?

You talked about cultural decay but you give examples of people just totally converting to a new culture or genocide. — Judaka

And your problem? Decay is something different from the ordinary evolution and transformation of a culture.

I think that language is at the heart of your understanding regardless of what anyone else says. — Judaka

What you have said is that 1960's is totally different from today because... I guess you didn't live then.

To avoid a cultural collapse in Australia we've got to

1. Call ourselves Australians
2. Speak English
3. Be mostly white? If we become 90% ethnically Asian does that still count?
4. Not let Australia be destroyed or something — Judaka

I don't know where people get this obsession with race (and racism). Or you think that Australian culture is inherently white and ethnically Asians cannot nurture/promote/enjoy/advance Australian culture? And with the point of 4. Yes, it might be a good thing not to let happen. Or something.

On the one hand, we will have to agree to disagree. On the other hand, you did a fine job of supporting your position in this post. I looked at the seven links you provided and found them compellingly informative. (Some of the information was familiar to me, some not.).

Uncle Karl (Marx) said that the conditions of culture depend on/are caused by the nature of material production. What and how stuff is produced, in other words. We can over-generalize this truism, but it seems like the critical change in production during and following the 1960s was miniaturization of electronic parts -- tubes to transistors, individual transistors to printed circuits, and ever-smaller but more powerful printed circuits. Programmable computers existed in 1960, and they weighed a ton. in 1980 they weighed a few pounds. Today the computing power in a cell phone so far exceeds that of a 1960 computer that a comparison is difficult to make. Most of the components in a cell phone existed in a [much) larger-form.

I was involved in educational technology in the late 1960s and 1970s. What we were trying to do with media [remote supply of educational material] didn't begin to become feasible until the 'personal computer' of the 1980s, and the World Wide Web became casually usable around 20 years ago. The key was miniaturization of components, and the resulting increasing in power.

A lot of what you are talking about is the result of miniaturization squared of electronic components.

Other changes of which you speak are the result of changes in wealth flows which got under way at the end of the post-WWII boom, starting in 1973. Domestic production (and jobs) began to decline; working class wages both stagnated and declined. Changes in tax laws benefitted a minority of high-end earners at the expense of low-end earners. Et cetera.

These material changes made it impossible for most people to continue the single-earner nuclear family model, resulting in a lot more social change (and perhaps decay).

So I'll grant you a major win here: things have changed a lot since 1960.

See my next post.

Let's make a comparison of 1900 with 1960. In 1900 new technology had changed the way people lived and interacted. Production and distribution of electricity was about to become a common-place thing. Big change. The telephone was changing the way people communicated, as did the telegraph (introduced about 60 years earlier, 1840). Photography was becoming much easier. Radio was becoming a thing (not broadcasts yet, just point to point). Airplanes and automobiles were coming over the horizon. These were all BIG changes.

Take the auto. A car allowed one to move around more easily compared to bicycle, a horse, or on foot. More to the point, a car eventually offered mobile privacy. People could quickly escape the immediate vicinity of family, friends, and onlookers. (Granted, this didn't happen until cars became common and reliable.) This was a huge change with far reaching consequences.

A person living in the first decade of 1900, transported to 1960, would probably find life less comprehensible that a 1960s transplant to 2020. But your point stands.

But so does the idea that in reverse, a 1960s transplant to 1900, or a 2020 transplant to 1960 would NOT find life incomprehensible. When you read material from 1900, 120 years later, it makes perfect sense. Sure, characters in a story might navigate a dark house by candle light instead of electric light, but... one can understand that.

I'll grant you that language changes, sometimes significantly. I find 18th century prose more accessible than a lot of the more recent Victorian prose. Style of expression does change. Granted.

As you said, we'll have to agree to disagree, but I think you have supported your view, and I think I have too. The leaves on a tree change every fall, but it's the same tree with new leaves in the spring. Languages add and subtract, but they stay the same language, at least over the short run of a few centuries. You can understand Shakespeare. You have no difficulty understand 400 year old language when Dick the Butcher in Henry VI, part 2, says "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." Right?

Cultural decay is clearly a generational thing, how many people talk of a cultural decay of longer than a hundred years in contemporary times? When people say Western culture is decaying, they're talking about youths diverging from the incumbent culture, abandoning the things that were thought of as important by the older generation. They're absolutely not talking about an existential crisis like ww3 or a disease which wipes them out. They're talking about reality television or sexual liberation and the like.

I guess we just agree to disagree, your emphasis on names and disregard for nuance is not interesting for me to debate. The comment about me not living in the 1960s while educating me about Langobards is just silly.


Thanks. We can agree to disagree, I do think you are likely not appreciating that when I say everything from 1960 to 2020 has changed, I mean it. We take just any old topic and someone has probably written a book on how much has changed from 1960 to 2020. economically, health, music, fashion, food, you name it. From 1960 to 2020 changes were dramatic in a way never before seen in history and from 2020 to 2080 will also be unprecedented in history.

My original point was just to say, these rates of change are miles away from life before the 1800s and especially before the 1400s. To compare the cultural change in the roman empire with the modern US is all kinds of silly. The Roman empire didn't change as much in all of its life as the US did in just 60 years and that's true of 1900 to 1960 or 1960 to 2020.

It's important to remember that even very different cultures to ours like those from Asia are still similar enough that we "get" it, right? Even today, many Westerners watch k-dramas, anime or tv series from China. I have too and I don't struggle to relate to characters whatsoever, I can usually pick up on some cultural difference without becoming lost. I called 1960s culture alien to that of 2020 but I didn't mean it as literally as you may have taken it, just meant to say, the changes are dramatic and there's no end of evidence to support that.

There is a lot of talk about culture as if it was something separate from man. Culture is what makes us what we are. Cultures cannot be morally reprehensible, or self-indulgent; only people can. Donald Trump is the cultural symptom of 75 million minds that couldn't find a more compelling truth. Which speaks volumes to the quality (and motivational power) of education...a cultural value. Culture is our attempt to preserve our highest ideals. Culture is not decaying; possible the quality of humanity is.

My original point was just to say, these rates of change are miles away from life before the 1800s and especially before the 1400s. To compare the cultural change in the roman empire with the modern US is all kinds of silly. The Roman empire didn't change as much in all of its life as the US did in just 60 years and that's true of 1900 to 1960 or 1960 to 2020. — Judaka

Very true. The "collapse of the Roman Empire" was a slow-motion event requiring centuries to be complete. The centuries after its demise were times of more slow-motion change (for the most part). The 1066 Norman Invasion of English was an exceptionally high speed event.

When people say Western culture is decaying, they're talking about youths diverging from the incumbent culture, abandoning the things that were thought of as important by the older generation. They're absolutely not talking about an existential crisis like ww3 or a disease which wipes them out. They're talking about reality television or sexual liberation and the like. — Judaka

This is actually one thing I commented earlier as one of the separate discourses in the subject:

Many likely aren't implying that our culture would end up for archaeologists to dig up and with nobody speaking English, but likely that we lose some crucial parts of our culture. If we don't hold up values that once were important, many will see it as cultural decay. — ssu

And of course, it is those values and norms they hold important. Yet wasn't Sokrates convicted of spoiling the youth? So I guess this idea of youth diverging from the incumbent culture may be older than you think.

The "collapse of the Roman Empire" was a slow-motion event requiring centuries to be complete. — Bitter Crank

Especially if we consider Eastern Roman Empire as also representing the Roman Empire. Of course it's an interesting question just how Greek were the eastern parts of the Roman Empire right from the start (as the Romans conquered an area dominated by Hellenistic Culture). Byzantine Greek language is still used in liturgy in the Orthodox Church, btw.