P. J. O’Rourke on Moral Progress

For as long as I can remember, conservatives have been bemoaning “moral decline” in America. The reality may be different, as I’ve noted before. And now comes P. J. O’Rourke with a similar reflection. P. J., who has moved from editing an underground newspaper in the ‘60s to writing for conservative magazines to cultivating a reputation as a curmudgeon, has a new book titled The Baby Boom: How It Got That Way (And It Wasn’t My Fault) (And I’ll Never Do It Again). 


Talking with P. J. about the book, Will Pavia of the Times of London notes (gated page): 

I’m not sure [the baby boomers were] better or worse than the current crop of American teenagers, to judge from some of the things they post on YouTube. O’Rourke disagrees. “I would say there has been a considerable improvement in public morality. It’s probably been going on since the anti‐​slavery movement at the beginning of the 19th century.” He gives the example of his own son, Cliff. 


“Admittedly, he goes to a little private day school. You know, a gentle place. I don’t think he’s ever been in a fight nor shown any desire to be. Nor have I seen his friends get in fights; it’s not just him. It’s definitely a less violent world, a more tolerant world.”

Less violence and more tolerance is a pretty good slice of morality. Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, backs up O’Rourke’s intuition in the New York Times:

It’s easy to focus on the idiocies of the present and forget those of the past. But a century ago our greatest writers extolled the beauty and holiness of war. Heroes like Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Woodrow Wilson avowed racist beliefs that today would make people’s flesh crawl. Women were barred from juries in rape trials because supposedly they would be embarrassed by the testimony. Homosexuality was a felony. At various times, contraception, anesthesia, vaccination, life insurance and blood transfusion were considered immoral.