There’s a new paper out now in the Journal of Positive Psychology describing a pair of studies that show a decrease in the frequency of “moral words” in the books of America, as represented by the Google Books archive. And it turns out we’ve gotten less moral by a significant degree, or our books have, or there are fewer words “related to moral excellence and virtue” in those books. One study found “the frequency of 8 words (character, conscience, decency, dignity, rectitude, righteousness, uprightness, virtue) showed a significant negative correlation with time,” while the second found an overall decrease in a much larger batch of 74 words, like “diligence, thankfulness, gentleness, [and] temperance.”In case you’re thinkingoh it’s just a word analysis, the researchers, identical (rhyming) twins Pelin and Selin Kesebir, seem pretty willing to cast this in the much broader terms of society itself becoming less moral. “The words in a book reflect what is salient in the minds of a culture's members, and simultaneously make these words even more salient. It's a feedback cycle whereby people make cultural products and the cultural products make people,” the researcherstoldThe Atlantic. “It would be a stretch from data to say that our findings reflect an actual moral decline in the U.S.—that people are less moral now. But we believe that even if not outright moral decline, a moral confusion would be an unsurprising consequence of this downward trend in the cultural salience of morality concepts.”Though, that’s actually a stretch they’re eager to make: “People simply do not think/talk/write about morality and virtue as much anymore. The vocabulary for talking about issues of good and bad, right and wrong thus seems to be shrinking.”See, the reason for this is the rise of individuality in America, our “narcissism epidemic,” according to the brothers Kesebir. Which is fine — we are a bunch of assholes. But are we worse? Are we a less moral society in the year 2012 than in the year 1901? Is that even a question? Apparently it is, and one of our pals would like to think he has an easy answer, and that answer sounds an awful lot like a conserative talking point. If this study says much of anything, it might actually be that talking about morality in florid, old-timey terminology (“temperance”?) doesn’t actually translate to American society doing right in practice.The thing about talking or writing about morality and moral codes — and the next step is dogma, right? — is that it usually indicates an interest in pushing or reinforcing your morality in the face of something you don’t like. The books of 1901, written by the dominant, literate classes (white, wealthy, educated, Christian), didn’t emphasize shared anything except what was was shared in words and writing by that group of people in America, the same group of people that went on to force a few hundred “other” people into internment camps during World War Two and enact Jim Crow laws and respond with murder and terror when their shared moral code became threatened by desegregation, equal rights, worker’s rights, gay rights, and so on.No, I’m pretty sure we’re talking different moral codes: the one we really all share that’s been drilled into us biologically (empathy, say) and the elaborate fiction being written at the beginning of the 20th century by rich white men.
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