Convention

If today society is more free of convention it can be said that it has come at the price of social manners. Public civility is at an all time low but not because everyone is that way. The problem is that the bar for the worst forms of it has been lowered.

I take the good with the bad here because the stiffer and more forced behavior of my time came with a healthy dose of hypocrisy. In other words, keep up appearances but do what you will in private.  It was perhaps go to church on Sunday to make up for all that sinning during the weekdays.

Conservatives bemoan this as moral decay but then people who didn't fit convention in the past simply moved underground. Human instincts don't change and are only as visible as the current tolerance level of the society we inhabit. But we play the game that people fundamentally morph into different creatures when it is really the social mores that vary over time.

If I prefer today it is because it is more devoid of deceat and, while the warts may be more evident, at least we can see things coming much more readily..