"Theory" about the continuous perception of social decline?

Question

"Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?" was the title of an article in yesterday's (14 Feb 2008) New York Times. One of the observations in the article was that people perennially believe that society is declining.

But, logically, this isn't possible if you believe that the world has gotten generally better over the course of human existence. And I recall once reading a letter written in ancient Rome that decries how terrible "today's youth" are compared to their elders.

The point is, there is a very strong tendency to compare the flaws in one era to a romanticized past, so each and every generation looks worse than its predecessors.

I suspect this theory has a name in social philosophy, but I couldn't find anything in Wikipedia. Anyone know what it might be called? A reference to a book that discusses this would be nice, but I'm really hoping someone knows the term of art.

Answer 1

Sorry, I don't know if anyone has officially coined a term for this phenomenon, but I can give you a reference to a book about it: The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (1992) by Stephanie Coontz, she writes that people perceive american society as being in decline because we compare the way things are now to a sort of fictituous state of affairs that is basically a selectively constructed hodgepodge of only the best aspects of various eras of past american cultural.