The news isn’t doing a great job of supporting our faith in human nature. Boris Johnson has managed to get a committee with a Tory majority to conclude he’s a liar, Donald Trump’s got arrested (again), and we’ve all been reminded since his death that Silvio Berlusconi taught generations of men that behaviour towards women that is wrong was right.
So maybe it’s not surprising that new research, published in Nature, looking across 60 nations, reveals a widespread belief that we’re in moral decline. Some attribute this to people becoming less moral as they age, and younger generations being more immoral than their predecessors.
However, I’m sharing this research to rebuild, not further tarnish, your faith in humanity, because it shows something else: that we’ve always believed our morality has been in ongoing decline.
The researchers trawled through mounds of US survey data to demonstrate that this belief was as true in 1949 as it was 2019. Indeed, it stretches back millennia – the historian Livy was busy bemoaning the morals of Roman citizens 2,000 years ago.
Now, maybe you just think we’re very slowly degenerating, but the researchers showed that the idea of moral decline is nonsense. There is huge progress on some issues (eg less homophobia); and in looking at what people think about the day-to-day morality of their peers, in surveys dating from 1965, they conclude there is absolutely no decline going on over time.
Basically, we’re just hard-wired to think there was a more moral past, just as we remember favourable events but not the rubbish ones. So don’t give up on humans yet – just elect some better ones.
• Torsten Bell is chief executive of the Resolution Foundation. Read more at resolutionfoundation.org
• Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk
