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.
Here I resolutely disagree. America's great strength, I believe, is that it is a society built on the premise that people are by and large fit to run their own lives. Technology and economic might is just a by-product of that. It is an idea that runs through us deeply, although that could certainly change if we are not careful. Those downward-glancing foreigners who seem to be so well-represented in the foreign press, IMHO, don't understand that the outpouring of flags and bunting during and after 9/11 was not a rube-ish burst of naive, obsolete patriotism, something the better folk have long since left behind. Nor was it even just a sign of resolve (although it certainly was that).
Rather, it was an affirmation of the belief that our ideal was under attack, that we think pretty highly of the ideal no matter what the (hopelessly corrupt, to many) rest of the world thinks, and that we won't give it up because of the brayings of the latest fanatic-come-lately.
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.
I think this is a fair concern. While I have been unwilling to reduce our global presence to the unreflective label of "empire," I certainly agree that it presents great danger to the American ideal I referred to above. To put it bluntly, is there anything happening in the Middle East that is worth the life of a single Georgia lance corporal? Good arguments could be made either way.
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.
The late-Rome analogy is just begging to be made. But Rome was a society that had fallen into stagnation, while we are one that is dynamic in every meaningful way -- economic and technological to be sure, but in many other more important ways IMHO.
After 9/11 but before the bombing started, I was in a local ice-cream parlor. Many of the other customers were hopelessly overweight, and many of them, I would wager, had no idea before 9/11 who Amir Shah Massoud was or what a jihad was. I wondered, like Mr. Brooks, whether a nation full of people like this was up to the job. What has happened since hardly answers the question, since other than soldiers and their families and WTC victims and their survivors, Americans have had to sacrifice very little since 9/11. But I think about those people differently than I did that day -- not as undisciplined, perhaps dangerously uninformed chickens ripe for plucking, but as members of a society that can constantly reinvent itself, and will when circumstances so dictate. Those patrons are not fighting and dying (although their children might well be), but when they are asked to do what needs to be done they will, I think.