If I could buttonhole you for a moment, fellow citizen, to lament a general concern that may seem rather secondary amid the shrill noise of other pressing concerns. Have you also noticed it, the painful degradation of our cultural standards? 

How awfully elite that sounds! How cheese-tastingly, pearl-clutchingly, museum-board precious. Especially in a time of acute societal divisions, horrendous wars abroad and political enmity at home, disinformation everywhere, and all manner of uninvited gate-crashers occupying space in our thoughts. All very much more nettlesome to our consciousness than nebulous notions of “culture.” Until, that is, we are confronted by the bizarrely inappropriate spectacle of the Village People gyrating onstage at a presidential inauguration, supposedly an august occasion that embodies the sacred dignity of our highest institutions. 

The inescapable hurdle one has to overcome upfront is defining what constitutes culture as opposed to, say, politics, entertainment, or religion — a tricky question since culture leaks into all such spheres. But then the question becomes less tricky when we talk of “cultural standards,” especially the violation thereof. We need not define its compass because vulgarity of conduct in any public category instantly becomes a cultural issue. Here we can fall back on the old adage of “I know it when I see it,” which deftly avoids an endless Wittgensteinian discussion of meanings. Put another way, we don’t think about it much until some outrage to our senses jolts us awake, and we start noticing — all too common of late. It’s usually an incident in which there’s a clash between conduct and occasion. Ask any fashionista if the Duchess of Y or Z wore the appropriate garb at a royal event and you’re roughly, if tediously, in the zone.  

Doesn’t every generation, as it ages, bemoan the decline in standards? Wasn’t it ever thus? Standards have been declining for years, and yet most of us are still here relatively safe and sound in sufficient numbers to do the bemoaning. Therefore, it’s best to down a large cocktail, put your feet up, and put away the doom and gloom — this, too, shall pass. So goes the argument. To which one can only reply by saying there are relative declines and absolute declines. We have come from the days of first seeing housewives walking around airports wearing pajamas to the astonishing sight of Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) arriving at the inauguration in knee-length gym shorts. Can there be any more indisputable evidence of absolute decline? 

I say this only partly in jest. Sartorial unseemliness may, at first, appear to be a trivial indicator of plummeting standards. Let’s face it, nobody gets hurt. These days, men don’t even wear jackets to the office. Sadly, though, that’s not where it stops. The loss of community norms in formal dress, dignified deportment, and good manners in public does serve as an early warning of widening holes in the moral safety net that keeps us from barbarism. Look around you at our cultural landscape. Cage-fighting brutality is on display for the masses, vicious insults on social media, shouting and boasting and chest-thumping in televised sports, the compulsory taunting at boxing weigh-ins, and the immodesty of young women in the private/public zone of internet videos. A central assumption underpins our societal fabric, that an invaluable cordon sanitaire divides private and public behavior. The peculiar status of Instagram, TikTok, online pornography, and the like have elided that separation, corrupting both. No, the truth is we are facing a grim stage in the degeneration of civilizational values.

Speaking of boxing — it’s no good using the term “professional fight” anymore, which nowadays can apply to so many genres of ticketed bang-ups —  if any one event prompted this essay, it had to be the soul-destroying spectacle of the Mike Tyson vs. Jake Paul fight, watched by 65 million viewers. In other words, a genuinely collective experience. Those involved got huge paydays, reportedly Tyson got $20 million and Paul $40 million, not to mention Netflix, the promoters, the stadium, and everyone behind the ignoble enterprise. An old man at 58, Tyson showed his age fairly quickly — he normally walks with a cane — and Paul, mediocre to his fingertips, awkwardly held back thereafter for fear of hurting him. Humiliation and shame so pervaded the bogus proceedings, infecting the audience and making it feel complicit in the cruel charade, that the experience evoked some vile sadistic spectacle from Roman times — depraving both participant and witness. 

One should pause here and briefly contribute to the yearlong semi-ironic viral chatter on the internet about the Roman Empire. “How often do you think about it and why” was the general meme, the underlying suggestion being that normal people didn’t think about Rome and those who claimed to (mostly men) were pompous and their reasons specious. It has become rather fashionable to know nothing about the Romans, in sharp contrast to our forefathers in the West who grew up learning all about the classical age. Many before me have mourned the loss of this particular aspect of cultural literacy for numerous reasons, but mine is particular to our topic here. Knowledge of Roman history usually came packaged with a sense of its decline and fall, serving as an implicit road map of how to recognize milestones in the downward arc. 

Since the arc ended up in horrifying scenes of collective demise, well known to one and all until recent decades, the various stages acquired deeper significance, stages that went from public immodesty to the eventual mass slaughter of citizens. Underlying awareness of the process meant, yes, certain types of incidents, seemingly minor, raised alarms because they fit into an ominous pattern. The return of neo-gladiatorial spectacles, feral violence for popular consumption, would be one of them. We are not encouraged to think in civilizational terms anymore. These days, colonialism, racism, and sexism provide the criteria, essentially political, by which to shape and understand our historical imperatives. Personal morality, the dignity of bearing, reticence from public showboating, and the like used to be virtues to be upheld for the sake of one’s civilization — constricting, to be sure, but the alternative led to unthinkable disaster, or so one thought. We internalized the dialectic so deeply that we even knew what the good looked like, which, in turn, fashioned our aesthetics, our sense of high art and beauty. The loss of that connective tissue between civilizational awareness and personal grace has meant that neither matter anymore along with much else critical to the societal fabric. 

If we can’t keep up standards as a duty to each other, we might at least do it for others far off who admire those standards in us and yearn to live by them. Let me tell you a story that happened to me in Iraq. I had more or less developed a new journalistic genre, that of reporting on culture in war zones, spending months in Baghdad and roundabout in the years before and after the “surge” (2008) — all for the Wall Street Journal’s art and culture pages. Unlike most other outsiders who lived on the base, for my kind of work, I really had to live in the city, meet people, and make friends. Which meant roaming the streets unprotected and unembedded but free to operate discreetly and keep my ear to the ground. I tried to look as shabby as any civilian surviving in war-torn surroundings. And so I covered subjects such as the last art gallery in Baghdad, the embattled ballet school, historic buildings from the golden age, the National Symphony Orchestra, and the like. I managed to contact the symphony’s director and cellist to arrange an interview. His orchestra members were constantly AWOL, their numbers forever dwindling and forever affected by incessant violence around the city. 

We arranged to meet near my inconspicuous apartment building in a suburb. When the time came, I ran out to the empty parking area featuring a bombed-out Fiat. Suddenly, a rather grand, lofty, all-white Range Rover sailed into view. Surely one of the very few in Baghdad at the time. It drove up, and the figure at the wheel waved. I walked over and gawped. “Are you my interview person?” I almost failed to utter because the 40-ish man sitting at the wheel was impeccably dressed, sporting a blazer and ascot and white flannel trousers, looking exactly like one of the Three Tenors. Surely, it was a mirage, the perfect simulacrum of a symphony director at any other time and place. You have to imagine that the average garb on display was either militia colors, al Qaeda Islamic or black, or deeply street-worn. The usual bangs and booms from far and near punctuated the Schubert wafting from the car’s sound system. 

Instantly abashed by my own down-at-heel attire, I asked him to wait and rushed back to don my own hitherto undeployed blazer over preppy button-collar shirt, returned with recouped self-respect, and we took off toward the town center. He changed the music to Wagner, and Ride of the Valkyries boomed out as we gained speed, hurtling into abandoned blackened cityscapes. I asked him if he normally dressed that way. His English, having studied lots abroad, also sounded like a Placido Domingo, both in accent and gravitas. He said, “If I dress the part, it helps me remember why I do what I do, the values I represent. I choose to embody them visibly like a flag. We live here in a war between barbarism and civilization. I love classical music of course, but the music is also a soldier in the war. It’s part of the fight back and the middle finger to barbarism. If you’re someone who chooses to stay when you needn’t, then it means you’re willing to die for what you’re doing here. I would rather die dressed in the garb of what I stand for.”  

My education was only just beginning. At each checkpoint, of which there were several, I noticed the odd behavior of the guards. Invariably, they took one look at the singular vision confronting them and waved us on hastily. In war zones, you learn to read reactions instantly. Theirs was a mixture of astonishment, fear, and awe. Fear because any conspicuous or anomalous sight boded ill. It might cause an incident or attract attention from snipers. Occupants of a vehicle surely knew that and were being foolhardy, a concern in itself. But there was something else. They recognized dimly the long-forgotten, far-distant but unmistakable signals of an atavistic authority, that of the civilized world, a sort of supernatural apparition amid the chaos. “For them,” said my companion, “it’s like seeing a maestro at a piano in mid-desert.” A messenger from a fearless, timeless, abiding cultural force. 

I remember thinking then, and it haunts me still, how little we revered our own cultural strengths. By which I certainly don’t mean pop or consumer culture. Pop culture has no context if not defined against classical culture and certainly sets no standards. Rappers holding their crotches might be emulated by K-pop bands but scarcely enhance or propagate our foundational values. Nor am I advocating a sort of casting call for all those in the world, bless them, who admire the best in us to come right on over and help maintain our own standards. No, this is something the West must first resolve for itself with a re-hearkening to first principles. Something else the director said should haunt us all, in light of current events, “You’re very lucky over there because, from the legacy of centuries, you share a basic understanding of values high and low. You don’t go far wrong as a society. It’s just built into you. Just a basic sense of how to conduct yourselves to keep things from going crazy. Imagine if the world didn’t have that as an example to aim for.”

That was less than 20 years ago when it felt as if he was uttering an ageless truth about the permanent state of things. 

Melik Kaylan writes about culture for the Wall Street Journal and a column on foreign affairs in Forbes.