There are plenty of theories floating out there, which purport to describe our history, reality, and what our future may be…all from various social sciences. I have read so many of them that they start to flow into one another… An idea which I haven’t seen is that there is a relationship between the ways our society has been stratified and the growing forms of informality in our culture.
In the 18th century the ‘colonies’ had a society mostly based upon European antecedents, with slavery, bond servitude, and large land owners were seen as out aristocracy…That is, they we powerful because of their standing in society, versus the implicitly greater share of wealth and political power which they held. Bear with me, I am making some rather large assumptions to make my point (as in, these previous points are arguable…).
This pre-revolutionary world had notions that there were appropriate forms of address, attire, and general deportment, based upon ‘our betters’ (this was as in the UK)… In the succeeding decades since 1776, there has been a steady erosion of these social norms.
Is it that we didn’t have a real aristocracy to be able to continue as with our European forebears? Is the growing lack of formality in American social life a cause, or is it a result of these structural changes in our culture?
Even in my lifetime, you can see this growing lack for formality in our lives. I see a slow movement to divest ourselves of so many social traditions, in how we speak… This relates to the increase in vulgarity in common everyday discourse, where cursing has become a means to punctuate sentences. There is a growing sense that basic ‘American’ , while it may be a lingua franca for many forms of interaction is also taking upon itself less and less rigid structure (rigid as in it has become grammatically more arbitrary…look up prepositional phrases to see what I am talking about…).
In general deportment, we have ( as a society) been increasingly seen as more and more rude, informal, and pushy by a number of more traditional societies which we deal with (on the international stage) quite often…you could easily replace the term traditional society with almost any group outside of western college life…
Maybe all of this is merely the increasing amounts of social flux catching up with us… It certainly looks like almost every aspect of our personal lives are becoming less and less traditional…in speech, attire, how we deal with personal relationships, and by the growing lack of situational awareness (it may already be an epidemic…).
