Your point is well taken, however I believe that by and large society did impose a certain morality that is lacking in many of today’s households.
In the past, many sins that go unjudged by our peers today would have invited scandal and ostracism. While I agree with your suggested that ignorance has been a constant in our history, I think as we’ve shed our morality, our faith, and our honor that there is little enforce certain standards of civil behavior.
Do whatever you want as long as it doesn’t harm the environment or a minority. No matter how low you go, there’s always a safety net.
“Your point is well taken, however I believe that by and large society did impose a certain morality that is lacking in many of today’s households.”
The proper term for this is “the social sanction”, which is the unwritten law, but nearly universal, and often brutally enforced by the public. It has always existed in human history, sometimes fairly and sometimes not, and politicians and leaders of all kinds want to “take charge” of it as it changes.
In the US right now, for example, were some man to put on a t-shirt that said “I molest young children”, he would likely not pass down a busy sidewalk without being confronted, and possibly attacked. This is not the written law, but the real law.
But back in the 1950s and 1960s, though children were trained to avoid “stranger danger”, such things were not for discussion. The police would be notified, and just left to them to “take care of the problem”. This resulted in *less* punishment than would be given today. A child molester might only get five years in prison, which today they would only get from a liberal judge in New England. In Texas, highly unlikely.
Often, the morality imposed by society back years ago was not truly moral, but had other purposes. For example, a rural preacher might strongly condemn cigarettes and “sipping whiskey”, used by the city folks, calling it “immoral”, but would be indifferent to the chewing tobacco and “white lightening” preferred by rural people.
The end result was a wise, if unspoken choice made by the public: to separate the ideas of “morality” from “ethics”. Though almost synonyms in the dictionary, the public was tired of the misuse of *sectarian* morality, which was almost whimsical, based on whoever was currently defining what was moral and what was not.
So instead, they vied for “ethical” behavior. That is, public behavior is determined by the written law of man on Earth, not in heaven. Morality can add to that law, but that is a personal choice, and should not be enforced in the law.
Today, this is seen at election time, with a distrust of politicians who proclaim themselves “moral”. Whose morality? Obama’s morality, taught by the odious Reverend Jeremiah Wright? Or Sarah Palin’s morality, at the Wasilla Bible Church, so hated by the left that it was burned down by an arsonist?
Too many alternative moralities. But ethics are the written laws. A politician either obeys the law or violates it. Very clear.
Much of the vice and immorality of the “good old days” is obscured solely because they did not publicly revel in it. Those who practiced it didn’t brag, and nobody would publish or broadcast it. But this didn’t mean it didn’t happen.
Medical students made fortunes giving illegal abortions. Country lanes were often strewed with condoms and single socks. Child pornography was less because there was no great effort by advertisers and the media to sexualize children. Ordinary child abuse was pretty common, and many was the time that a parent would beat their child to death and it would be met with a shrug.
Homosexual acts, though often illegal, were likewise pretty well ignored.
Better or worse than today? Hard to say.