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There is a natural tendency, to which I have sometimes succumbed myself, to suppose that the past had to have been tougher than (and therefore the people more virtuous than in) than the present.

A writer once speculated that this is because as people age the deterioration in their physical health, and their increasing inability to comprehend the behavior of the young they are farther and farther removed from, is confused with a deterioration in society generally.

Socrates supposedly complained about the insufferance of the youth of his day, who lacked the respect for elders that his generation had.

America does seem at once crass and materialistic and strong and indomitable.

These two observations are different flowers of the same seed.

Thanks for those thought provoking remarks. I guess it's hard to say if encroaching decrepitude or deepened insight into the human condition causes the old to complain about the young, but one thing is certain, as you say, the practice goes back as far as Socrates. No doubt it was common on the African savannah forty thousand years ago.

America's most impressive strength is technological and economic. There is also a strength of character in the American people, though not in all of us. It may well be a "red zone" thing, though those in the "blue zone" should not be written off entirely.

There is some truth in your observation that bodily decreptitude causes pessimism, but a hard life can be a school of virtue, though it isn't necessarily one. Every generation does have anxieties about future ones, but I wouldn't necessarily write off those anxieties. At some point in the life of empires, those fears are shown to be quite realistic and proven by the inability to handle certain crisis.

If we had to give it all we had, to commit much more of our resources to war, as we did in 1941, would we be able to do as well as that generation did? One can make the case that being used to a comparatively soft life and having things done for us has spoiled us, or that skepticism may be a sign of civilization, but it also makes it hard for civilizations to defend themselves.