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Comment by rsaarelm | Hacker News Reader

The article sets up two options, either morality has been in genuine decline for 2000 years or more and we're still somehow standing, or the perceived local decline is an illusion. Isn't there a third option where the decline is real, proceeds at a faster pace than over several millennia, and leads to the collapse of the civilization of the historical observer? The Bronze Age kingdoms collapsed, the Roman Empire collapsed, and people who dig up these funny examples of people bemoaning imminent decline from thousands of years ago don't usually bring up this part or the dark ages that followed.

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> Isn't there a third option where the decline is real, proceeds at a faster pace than over several millennia, and leads to the collapse of the civilization of the historical observer?

If this were true, shouldn't we see intermittent periods of "moral uptick" after the collapse of civilization? Either there has been a steady decline (i.e. the next civilization starts lower than the end of the previous one), or the feeling of decline is false due to the missing opposite.

Don't we? It just looks like a new culture establishing itself instead of something that happens in the circumstances of the collapse. There was the early history of the Roman Republic, High Middle Ages in Europe, the Puritans in America. The Victorian era in England feels like a moral uptick that wasn't an entire new culture or nation.

The question as I understand it isn't whether there is a moral uptick from our point of view, but from a contemporaneous one. During Victorian era people still perceived a constant moral decline.

There's another option:

1. Morality of a society is not a single dimension. There are multiple aspects of life in which society could become more or less moral, depending on what activists choose to fight for (e.g. exploiting other's labor)

2. The morality level doesn't have to go straight up, down, or be flat. It can move like a wave (or in some cases, a roller coaster), increasing or decreasing over different eras as people learn and forget the value they derived from certain morals.

> and people who dig up these funny examples of people bemoaning imminent decline from thousands of years ago don't usually bring up this part or the dark ages that followed.

Because of confirmation bias. When doomsday prophets are wrong, they're rarely remembered. When doomsday prophets are right, was it because they had insight that others lacked or was it simple chance?

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