Pack93z as "hoity toity"...now I've heard it all! And the only time I remember him being old-ladyish is when he had to dress up as Brunhilde because an ill-fated bet with Nick.
Actually, the loosening of morals *can* have an effect on society's stability and sustainability. I'm not particularly worried about thug culture (partly because I live in a town of 1200), but to me that thug culture is symptomatic of a larger problem.
I'm not going to blame gangsta rap or television or Hollywood. To my mind, these are all symptoms [except for some Ice-T/Public Enemy stuff and the Steven Seagal movies, of course, which are part of coolness] of a larger problem of self-centeredness and entitlement in America. Like DakotaT, though for different reasons, I blame the baby boomers. They were the first spoiled generation and the first generation that started to take God systematically out of public/community life and so they [er, we] started us on the path. Two more generations of spoiled adolescents followed. And so we are now threatened by a pervasive culture of me...me...me, and instead of leavening the bread of life pursued out of self-interest by the temperance and social responsibility of following and pleasing God, we leaven it with the moral relativism of "good for society is what I (or the President or CNN or my professor or my charismatic preacher) say it is.
People might find it odd that I put both professor and preacher in that parenthetical. But today's professor is far more willing to put faith in (his/her) human reason than defer by faith in God. And as for the charismatic preachers out there (I'm thinking in particular of the "prosperity gospel" types), they're more Madison Avenue, New York Times, Harvard, and Playboy in their argument than they are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
And forget about Paul. Oh, those TV preachers love Paul, especially when they want to stay Old Testament. But in their lives, and the prosperity they preach, they completely ignore the real meat of the Pauline letters: the God first part, the Bible as Truth part, the passes all understanding part, and above all, the submission part of being a "slave" to God's Word.
Just like the mainstream culture and, for that matter, almost all of the fringe cultures. (Indeed, this is the biggest problem with most of the libertarians and anarchists with whom I am otherwise usually so sympatico: even more than the mainstream, they have bought into the secularization of life.
After all, secularization and modern economic growth c. 1750-present have appeared to be joined at the hip. The Enlightenment, the industrial revolution, technological change, innovation, democracy, liberalism [either the classical kind or the modern kind], nationalism, communism, social democracy -- these are all human inventions and human institutions and human systems. And they are inventions, institutions and systems that have accompanied historically unprecedented wealth and opportunity and quality of life.
Yet while all of those human changes have been erecting more and more valuable buildings, higher and higher skyscrapers of prosperity, the land underneath has been decaying. And a big part of the decay, the biggest part of all IMO, is replacement of a God-inspired and God-following morality with a morality that, to paraphrase a famous agnostic pagan from a while back, holds that man (and his values) are the measure of all things.
And, so, instead of ensuring that we are grounded upon the (bed)Rock of Ages, we simply, in the manner of Vegas, simply build bigger and fancier monuments to our self-importance on beds of sand.
I still believe that ours is the greatest nation in human history. But so was Babylon.
And remember what happened to *its* towers.
And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
Romans 12:2 (NKJV)