When (exactly) did common courtesy and self-responsibility die and was it murder or suicide?
Courtesy isn’t dead, it’s merely on life support. Every declining civilization has several symptoms, and one of them is the decline of courtesy. It occurs because people start believing that good manners are a sign of weakness instead of strength. In our present civilization this process started with the close of the Victorian era during WWI. It’s hard to pinpoint a specific date, but it started because young people found all those silly conventions worthless when there was a war on–so much bigger and more important than little behavioral rules that after all were ridiculously stilted and old-fashioned. Victorian mores certainly WERE far too stilted and restrictitive, so much so that they were a principle cause of widespread hypocrisy at every level of society. So between the wars western civilization jettisoned practically all Victorian mores, and good went with the bad. The false cynicism of the ‘Lost Generation’ is an excellent example of what replaces good manners. If you think co
