[Borges]

How did the Beatles hasten moral degeneracy? By improving a moribund pop music scene?

[null and void]

It was the long hair, I tell ya!

[Wallace T.]

I didn't say they did or did not. Rather, I was attacking the urban legend that America was an upright and Puritanical nation until the mid-1960s. The Beatles were emblematic of that era. The rise of secular humanism and moral relativism had little to do with an English band but a lot to do with philosophers like John Dewey and William James and their popularizers in academia, as well as the influence of exiled leftist academics from Europe like Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno. The first successful battles of the "sexual revolution" were waged by people like Margaret Sanger and Alfred Kinsey, whose heyday was in the musical era of Tin Pan Alley (Sanger) or the Big Bands (Kinsey).