Long vs. short shorts and low vs. high trust

It remains an unsolved mystery what possessed men to wear such short shorts during the '60s through the '80s, so let's take a crack at it. I'm focusing on men because it was a much more extreme departure from the norm, and because it didn't have to do with trying to look sexy. So it requires a more thoughtful answer.

From the timing of its rise and fall, it looks like it's tied to the trend in the violent crime rate and all the other things that are associated with it as well. But which ones? I think it's trust, but let's look at the pattern of its rise and fall first.

Unfortunately the climate was much colder during earlier major waves of violence, so we can't go back that far to examine the possible link. Men didn't wear any kind of shorts in the Elizabethan-Jacobean or Romantic-Gothic waves because they were still in the Little Ice Age. So we'll look just at the 1950s through today.

Men's shorts were knee-length in the '50s:


Even though that was a time of falling crime, the first hint of short shorts began around 1956, and a year or so later there had been several pop songs referring to them. ("Who wears short shorts? We wear short shorts!") Although they were talking about girls wearing them, there's usually a close fit between male and female fashions for how much skin is shown. So men were probably wearing somewhat shorter shorts by the mid-late 1950s as well. Because the crime rate doesn't start rising until 1959, it looks like shorter shorts slightly precede the crime wave. I don't mean they existed at all, but that they were widespread, unlike say the Beatniks who also prefigured some of the '60s culture but were totally marginal in the '50s.

Of course short shorts only exploded in popularity during the '60s, '70s, and '80s:


When did they vanish? I looked at a class picture from spring 1990, and both boys and girls are still wearing fairly short shorts, though not quite as bare as dolphin shorts. However, the class picture from 1992 shows almost everyone with shorts that hit the top of the knee, boys and girls both. That was elementary school, but here are what the teenagers were wearing in the early '90s:


Because the crime rate peaks in 1992, it looks like they had already been in sharp decline for several years before falling-crime times began to set in.

Shorts only got longer and baggier throughout the '90s, and by the 2000s every guy was wearing some version of cargo shorts, baggy jean shorts, or even the occasional closeted faggot who wore capri pants. (These were re-named "man-pri" pants in yet another case of emasculated behavior being labeled "man ___" in a poor attempt to conceal its blatant homosexuality.)


The only thing I've seen that overlaps the crime rate trends, but beginning to move up or down slightly before the crime rate does, is trust levels. That would seem to be what guys' wearing short shorts is about then. It's not about their more promiscuous mating strategy during rising-crime times, because that would've gotten started only in the '60s and lasted through the early '90s. Plus girls don't care what your legs look like anyway; to the extent that they do look you over, it's your face, upper body, and butt.

Trust levels go hand-in-hand with cocooning: low trust is just the description at the psychological level, while cocooning describes the actual behavior. So I see wearing short shorts as part of the larger trend toward leaving your own isolated cell in the hive, putting yourself out there, letting your guard down, and trusting others not to put you down or take advantage of you. You've already left your house, but why not also remove some of the remaining physical barriers between you and the outside world -- like clothing? I don't think it's a "return to nature" thing, or a generalized "lose your inhibitions" thing, since those were not underway by the mid-late '50s.

When trust levels peaked in the late '80s, that's about when shorts started getting longer, probably because people had already begun to retreat from public exposure and into their own little worlds again. From the '90s through today, we've come to trust others so little that we don't feel comfortable putting ourselves out there, even in admittedly trivial ways like wearing shorter shorts.

There's something related going on with clothes that are closer to the body vs. more tent-like, again just another aspect of wanting to hide yourself and keep people farther away in public vs. being more carefree because you trust them. I'll write that up another time, but women's dresses became more column-like and less poofy during the Early Modern and Romantic-Gothic waves of violence, also during the Jazz Age, and then skin-tight during the New Wave Age. They bloated out, hiding any hint of her actual figure, during the mid-1500s, the Age of Reason, and the Victorian era, all periods of falling crime. During the mid-20th C and the past 20 years, they haven't returned to quite that degree of circus tent concealment, but they still weren't as clingy as they were in the Jazz Age or New Wave Age.

There are two main camps regarding how fashion responds to larger social trends: one says they aren't related to anything else, and the other that they're related to material subsistence or economic health. Both are wrong. Some fashion trends really do look unconnected to other trends, but a good deal is tracking the trend in the violence rate. I've got more quantitative data going back to the late 1700s, but for now it's probably better to stick with some case studies that are richer in detail so you get a good sense of just how cyclical fashions can be, and in particular matching the cycles in the violence rate.

With rising social isolation, why don't people feel more lonely?

Loneliness is a subjective feeling that your actual level of social interaction isn't meeting your desired level. So, you feel more lonely when you raise your desired level higher, or when your actual level falls. And conversely, you feel less lonely when you desire less interaction in the first place, or when your actual level rises.

The trend in people's actual level of social interaction, over the past 20 years, has been steadily downward. I've documented too many case studies to provide links for them all, but let's look at a new case anyway, and one that gets directly to how socially integrated people are.

The General Social Survey asks a question about how many people the respondent has discussed important matters with over the last six months. * This means it's not a superficial relationship, like water cooler chat with your office-mates or conversations with family that are still impersonal. Here is the percent of people who had 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 others who they were close enough to discuss important matters with, in 1985, 1987, and 2004:


The red bar at the bottom of each year shows people with 0 confidants. It was 8.3% in '85, fell a bit to 4.3 in '87, and shot up to 22.6% by 2004. The median American in '85 and '87 had 3 confidants, while their counterpart in 2004 only had 2. In '87 there were also fewer hyper-connected people compared to '85, and that seems to fit with the more carnivalesque zeitgeist of the new wave era earlier in the decade, which had calmed down a bit by the late '80s. Still, the main difference is between the two years from the '80s vs. 2004.

These contrasts between years show up in both sexes, all races, age groups, social classes, and regions of the country. It's not a result of changing racial demographics, which would have stricken the regions with more blacks and Hispanics and left the rest of the country alone. It's not due to there being more elderly people in recent years than when the country was over-run with young people, since it shows up even among 18-29 year-olds. There has instead been a society-wide shift toward much lower levels of actual social interaction.

Isn't it strange, then, that we don't see popular movies that treat the theme of loneliness, such as Taxi Driver or L.A. Story? And what happened to all those hit songs about yearning for more and deeper connections, from Roy Orbison's "Only the Lonely" through Al Green's "Tired of Being Alone", Billy Idol's "Dancing With Myself" and Whitney Houston's "I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)"?

In fact, when people's actual level of interaction and support was highest in the mid-late '80s, it seemed like every other song was about lonely hearts. Sometimes it was directed toward the supernatural -- "Where's that higher love I keep thinking of?" More likely, though, it was about romantic connection -- "You can't start a fire without a spark / This gun's for hire, even if we're just dancing in the dark".

Given how powerfully these songs resonated with people, and also considering how high their actual level of connectedness was, their desired level must have been to encompass the entire nation. And indeed we were much more patriotic back then; it's funny to think that it took until the 1984 Olympics for us to invent the chant "U-S-A! U-S-A!" which has since fallen out of use and not been replaced.

This underscores the importance of looking at both components of loneliness, the desired and the actual level of interaction, since someone who didn't know better about how incredibly social people were in the '80s might wrongly assume from all those songs about loneliness that they were socially deprived.

As the violence rate fell after 1992, causing people to feel less of a need to connect with others for mutual support, their actual level of interaction plummeted as shown in the chart. So you might think people since then would have identified even more strongly with songs or movies about loneliness than during the gregarious rising-crime period before. Instead people are content with their existing level of interaction, often bordering on smug and glib.

And it has never been more popular to drip derision and scorn on the call to connect with more people, and at a deeper level. You can just hear Jon Stewart's simpering sarcastic voice: "Oh look at meee, I'm.. going to... reach out to... other... people... [grin]" If anything people subjectively feel the opposite of lonely -- too connected, frazzled, and over-loaded. How can that be, when they barely interact with anyone beyond a superficial level?

It is because their desired level of interaction has fallen off a cliff. Having even one confidant is already grating on their nerves, two is pushing it, and three is asking too much. We see this desire for minimal interaction in their other cocooning behavior as well, like avoiding public spaces, eating dinner in separate rooms or at separate times, and not touching each other with their hands when they pose for pictures or go dancing.

Obviously we do not have survey data on people's actual level of social interaction from the mid-century or other periods of falling crime, but the qualitative picture looks like they were less broadly socially engaged. And like the past 20 years, in other falling-crime periods people looked down their nose at the desire to belong to a broader community. In the eras of Renaissance humanism and the Age of Reason, the cool thing was to espouse cosmopolitanism -- i.e., to bond with no other soul at all.

As the Anglo empires neared their peak, cosmopolitanism was no longer the right way to wall yourself off from your countrymen. In the Victorian era and the mid-20th century, the focus moved more toward locking yourself up in the domestic sphere, not just women who had no life outside the house, but also men who restricted the domain of manliness to the nuclear household -- being the patriarch or good dad, not a pillar of the broader community or a leader / conqueror of some kind.

Now that the Anglo empires have declined from their peak influence, the "leave me alone" strategy is moving back toward cosmopolitanism again, though still mostly about the cult of domesticity, again for males and females alike.

In contrast, it looks like most periods of rising crime had people who were more tightly integrated into a large community, while still burning to belong to an even richer network, whether mundane or supernatural. Shakespeare's sonnets and John Donne's poetry show that from the Elizabethan-Jacobean wave of violence, and the explosion of mystical nationalism across Europe from the Romantic-Gothic wave of violence.

The mechanism seems pretty clear: rising violence causes people to value mutual aid more, so they desire more and deeper social connections. The rise in their actual level follows from that greater desired level, but that's not enough because the violence rate is still going up. During a wave of violence, every year blows a colder wind than the last year, so you always need more people than last year to huddle around with to keep warm.

I don't think people back then always felt lonely, though. It was probably a transient phase for just part of the year. First, raise your desired level of interaction, then feel lonelier as a result, and finally go out and develop those deeper connections you want, alleviating your loneliness. My guess is that people raised their desired level in the late spring or early summer, so that they'd be out and about during summer, when the weather is more conducive for making new friends. Plus if the connection is romantic, you want to raise your goals in time for the start of mating season. I couldn't find out during what month "Dancing with Myself" caught on, but all the other songs I mentioned above were released as singles between May and July.

* The question is called NUMGIVEN.

Hover hands, mid-century and today

One of the more striking signs of how disconnected people are today, especially in the boy-girl context, is the hover hand (click for endless hilarious examples):




In a situation where hand-on-body contact should be fine, even called for, the guy wimps out and doesn't touch her. There are degrees of hover-handedness: he might drape his hand over her shoulder, leaving it dangling in the air, or stretch his arm out behind her while not turning his hand in to grip her arm or shoulder at all.

It clearly shows how neutered the average young male is today, but let's not forget the boy-phobia among young females either. If they wanted to be touched, few boys would go against those wishes. But as cocooners, girls get weirded out when touched, particularly by a boy. You see this in the context of dancing too: even if she's giving a guy a standing lapdance, he usually can't touch her with his hands. If he does, she'll either scurry away, or stay but pick his hands off her.

Letting someone touch your body with their hands shows that you trust them enough to make yourself vulnerable around them, and let them into your personal space bubble. Only letting the other person go as far as hover-handing is still keeping your guard up and treating them with suspicion. The commonness of the hover hand therefore tells us how little friendliness there is among people these days, even between boyfriend and girlfriend. It may not be confrontational hostility, but it is still keeping everyone else literally at a distance.

I remember when girls wanted their boyfriends to grab their ass, no matter if it was in public, and when the average person (young or middle-aged) was easy-going enough to put their arm around someone else without worrying whether or not they'd set off an alarm. That was the norm in the '80s (I was too young to have a girlfriend but still saw it among the teenagers), and died off gradually during the '90s. By the 2000s we had a full-blown epidemic of hover hands.

Poking around Google Images for prom pictures from the '70s and '80s, I could only find one or maybe two showing hover hands. And the one case was with the geekiest guy in his school. So back then, it affected maybe the nerdiest 1% of guys, whereas now it's more like 40% who would pussy out if given the opportunity.

Since this seems like just another cocooning behavior, we'd expect to find it during the falling-crime era of the mid-'30s through the late '50s. I didn't do an exhaustive search of the earlier part, when the culture would be in transition, plus they didn't have very frequent or popular proms that far back. But they did in the 1950s. I didn't even search specifically for "hover hand vintage" or "hover hand 50s" -- just "prom 195_" for each year in the decade. As now, it was not exactly the norm, but still I was amazed by how easy it was to find examples.

And remember that these people have no excuse -- they're prom dates. If the guy or girl isn't comfortable with him holding her shoulder, it isn't because it would be inappropriate. It's because they are just plain weirded out by normal physical contact.


Busted! I cannot believe how eerily contemporary that pose looks. along with the frigid and impatient expression on the brunette's face, during what is supposed to be a fun night out.


It's a little hard to see this one, but he's clearly holding his hand away from her skin. His ring and pinky fingers may not be touching at all.


Along with the drive-in culture, the non-trivial level of hover-handing should make us revise our picture of the mid-century. Obviously the people pictured in that post and this one are not at each other's throats, but that's a low standard to set. When you go out to eat, you should be near (even if not right next to) other people. And when you head off to the prom, you should just relax and get close. These hover hand pictures provide further detail of the isolation, unspoken suspicion, and self-consciousness of a period that our revisionist mythology portrays as community-minded and carefree.

Uplifting or weepy songs in memory of the dead

After John Lennon was shot, the other former Beatles released two memorial songs, "All Those Years Ago" and "Here Today". Given how close they were to him, how widely worshiped he was across Western societies, and how abruptly and senselessly his life was cut short, you might expect to hear something somber or even grief-stricken. Yet they don't go there. The emotional coloring is mellow, cooling down rather than stoking the fires of their grief, and cheery enough for a celebration of their shared experiences.

By 1997 that approach had evaporated. The rapper Puff Daddy made "I'll Be Missing You" in memory of the Notorious B.I.G., whose murder, along with that of Tupac Shakur, had come to symbolize the west coast / east coast rap feud. The tone has turned toward the morose and nihilistic. Although there are references to heaven and life after death, he doesn't sound convinced at all, and this lack of comforting beliefs probably only amplified his depression. In 2005, Eminem made a similar song called "Like Toy Soldiers" with a similar brooding and fatalistic message.

Lying on separate sides of the rising vs. falling-crime divide, these examples show how effectively people cope with death, even senseless murder. When violence is more familiar, our coping strategies get more practice. That may sound callous -- yay death, for giving our moral fiber more exercise. But we must always ask what the alternative is. Here it is getting little or no such practice during falling-crime times, so that when we ultimately are confronted with the death of a loved one -- which may happen less frequently, but still will happen -- we are blown apart and have trouble moving on with life.

The tendency away from supernatural thinking in falling-crime times only compounds this weakening of our ability to cope. One of the most basic and universal functions of religion is to help us deal with death, both materially (what to do with the body?) and supernaturally (what should we do for the deceased person's spirit?). If we come to not even believe in the persistence of a person's spirit after death, we clearly cannot be comforted with the belief that they're in a better place, and that by doing the right things we can even help them get there and stay happy when they arrive.

In the limbo period of 1991-'92, right as the crime rate is peaking, Eric Clapton composed "Tears In Heaven" in memory of his son who had fallen out of a window. Lying right on the divide between the two eras, it feels a bit like both. It sounds like he really believes in spirits meeting in heaven, although he also sounds drowned in melancholy.

Just after the crime wave began circa 1960, the song "Last Kiss" dealt with the (fictional) pointless death of the singer's girlfriend in a car wreck. As with the songs about John Lennon, the mood is almost upbeat, and the singer pulls himself together so that he can meet up with her again: "She's gone to heaven, so I've got to be good, so I can see my baby when I leave this world." Tellingly, the 1999 cover version by Pearl Jam sounds more tortured, as though he might not be able to get things together to prepare for their would-be reunion.

Probably the greatest memorial song is "Nightshift" by The Commodores (from 1985), about the legendary singers Jackie Wilson, who had died after nine years in a coma, and Marvin Gaye, who had been shot by his own father. Unless they are paying close attention to the lyrics, most people would not even suspect it was a song about two deaths. The tone is not mournful at all, but cool, cheerful, and celebratory. They're certain that Marvin and Jackie are enjoying themselves up in the spirit world, and that by making the song in their honor, they can sustain the bonds of friendship even after one of them has died.



I reject the view that by emphasizing the value or importance of the afterlife, we cheapen the lives of others here and now, like "Well as long as they wind up in a better place, we don't have to worry so much about what happens to them in this world." When during falling-crime times people lose touch with a supernatural worldview, they are also cocooning themselves away from their neighbors, heaping scorn on the rituals that bind a community together (a brainless mob, in their view), and outsourcing the care of people in their social circle to private enterprise or a state bureaucracy, rather than attend to them first-hand (inefficient!). That's the rough picture of the past 20 years, during the mid-20th century, the Victorian era (the world of Ebenezer Scrooge), and the Age of Reason.

In contrast, when during rising-crime times people's minds are moved toward a more supernatural worldview, they are also socializing more with their friends and neighbors, yearning for a brotherhood of folks-like-us, and reaching out to take care of others on their own (e.g., by giving rides to hitch-hikers, passing out candy on Halloween, having schoolchildren visit the elderly at the senior center, and so on).

If anything a world of rising violence teaches people how precious life is, and to get straight to living it while it lasts. The ever safer environment of a falling-crime world tells people to put off living their life because it'll still all be here tomorrow, and just as orderly as it is today. It is they who come to devalue present life compared to some distant future life, albeit not a supernatural one, since a steadily safer world leads them to not discount the future so steeply. We need only look at the brain-in-a-vat Millennials who would rather wither away playing video games than be out around their fellow man, or the Silent Generation who wasted much their youth indoors listening to radio programs, and whose mild misanthropy led to the explosion of drive-in businesses where they wouldn't have to interact with other people.

The culture experience -- getting absorbed vs. finding out information

The Western world has become obsessed with NO SPOILERS since sometime in the 1990s.

When exactly? Hard to tell, but there was a 1991 episode of the Simpsons where, in a flashback to 1980, Homer is leaving the theater after seeing The Empire Strikes Back and blabs that Darth Vader is Luke's father, angering the people in line who haven't seen it yet. I'm almost certain that was projecting the mindset of 1991 back onto 1980, since you didn't see any comedy sketches, movies, TV shows, etc., from the 1980s that assumed a NO SPOILERS attitude among the audience.

Then in 1992, The Crying Game derived its popularity from its spoiler-able ending, where a chick is revealed to be a dude. Again you didn't see that in the '80s. In the slasher movie Sleepaway Camp, the killer is a female character who turns out to be a boy. A more popular thriller, Dressed to Kill, also had a transvestite slasher whose identity is revealed in a shocker style ending.

Yet as far as I know, people who liked horror and thriller movies -- basically everyone back then -- didn't throw a temper-tantrum if somehow the ending were leaked to them before seeing or finishing the movie. If that mindset existed at all, it was so uncommon that no one else in the culture referred to it, as The Simpsons did in 1991.

Even video games have become infected by NO SPOILERS. I only rarely play them anymore, but I do keep up roughly on the state of the video game world, and it amazes me how psychotic people are about not learning any plot details.

This is a radical change from even 20 years ago. In Metroid, an incredibly popular game from the late 1980s, you controlled a space hero character hidden under a suit of armor. If you beat the game, the armor came off to reveal a woman, unlike what you'd expected. Most kids did not beat the game, so when they found out, it should have triggered their NO SPOILERS alarm. But back then people were not as autistic as now, so none of the millions of kids who played Metroid curled their toes when they learned what the shocker ending was before finishing the game for themselves.

What is the best way to view this shift? Before, consuming a work of culture was about getting absorbed in some other world -- connecting emotionally with the doomed crew of Alien, feeling transported out of your body at a New Wave dance club, or visually exploring the sublime far-off worlds of Star Wars. Because it was a personal, visceral, and emotional reaction to watching the movie or hearing the song, only the movie or the song itself could give you this desired experience. Others could try to tell you what it felt like, but it never came close to the real thing. Emotional responses cannot be spoiled.

Unlike emotions, communication through language is not an intensely personal experience. Indeed its impersonality and abstractness is what allows us to convey ideas so easily to scores of other people far removed from the topic of conversation. "Kimberly went out on a date with Joey" is not one of those you-had-to-be-there kind of things. It's not perfect, since the "game of telephone" effect will eventually distort the original information. Still, the signal degrades very slowly, unlike with an emotional reaction to a movie, which cannot be shared to even one other person -- they have to see it for themselves.

These days the point of consuming culture is to find out information, the "who did what to whom?" stuff that a journalist would write up for newspaper readers. Is some female character really a male? Does one character betray another? Or maybe sacrifice themselves for another? This propositional information can be effortlessly conveyed from one person to another through language, and so is very easily spoiled.

This shift toward an impersonal and logical relationship with cultural works reminds me of the abstract and conceptual art of the mid-century. That was not art that you had to see for yourself; someone else could tell you the punchline and save you the trouble. I don't mean that you could content yourself with seeing a color print, or a black-and-white copy in a book, vs. seeing the original. I mean you didn't have to see it in any form at all -- "there's a series of stainless steel rectangles sticking out of the wall" or "there's an entirely black canvas" or "there's three American flags stacked on each other".

That was a sharp break with figurative and expressive art from the first several decades of the 20th century, and unlike the return to such styles during the '70s and '80s. Staring at a stainless steel cube offers the spectator no potential to leave this world for some other; it was made instead so that people, whether they saw it or not, could convey propositions about it through language. I wonder then if there was a NO SPOILERS attitude about it.

"You just have to see the new exhibit of Davidovich's work! It's so avant-garde, he's taken these stainless steel cubes and -- "

"No! Don't tell me! I'm going to the Whitney tomorrow, so don't ruin it for me!"

These shifts look like another example of our mindsets moving more in the autistic direction during falling-crime periods, and more empathetic in rising-crime times. The impersonal relaying of propositions appeals more to the systematizers, whereas the direct emotional absorption into the world and lives of others needs a more empathizing brain.

This psychological change is also linked to a behavioral change, namely cocooning during falling-crime times and being out-and-about in rising-crime times. The biggest misconception about the Romantic movement is that they were inwardly focused because of their concern with personal emotion. In reality they were more concerned with experiencing life from another person's perspective, hence their obsession with the exotic and primitive.

Emphasizing the emotional while walling yourself off from the rest of the world is pulling your mind in two different directions, since the emotional lobes of the brain are designed for social interaction. So we generally do not see culture-makers taking that stance. But where it does occur, it is always in a falling-crime period, such as the emo and goth sub-cultures of the past 20 years -- not '80s goth, whose fans got out of the house, and whose bands reached out to and found success among normal people too. Or the way too self-conscious Symbolist literature of the Victorian era, such as Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil from 1857.

It's good that they're at least trying to pull the culture away from the nerdy extreme of the people-vs-things spectrum of interests, but their hermit-like behavior cripples their ability to create works that will resonate with others. Instead it comes off as self-indulgent navel-gazing. One more reason to look forward to the end of the current period of falling crime. It won't get very high on an absolute level (at least an order of magnitude safer than Early Modern England), but the fact that it's going up will switch our minds back into the other-oriented, "people person" direction.

South Korean uniqueness and its rising murder rate

From a bird's-eye-view the Northeast Asian peoples are all remarkably similar, lack of variation being a hallmark of intensive agriculture because taking risks does not pay off, only the same monotonous grind day-in and day-out. So a variety of types playing different strategies will not be maintained as they are in pastoralist or horticulturalist groups, where you can certainly do well by playing it safe, but where taking big risks is also a viable strategy.

Pastoralists can attempt raids for livestock to boost their material wealth, while horticulturalists can try raiding nearby groups for wives, not only boosting their wealth (since women do most food production in gardening societies) but their reproductive output too. Agriculturalists rely on land to settle and plant crops on, and that cannot be gotten so easily through a get rich quick scheme, unlike herd animals or women -- movable things that you can run off with. They also won't bother raiding for women because without more land in the first place, they'll have a hard time producing more food to feed another wife and set of children.

Still, there is variation among the Asians that's worth trying to explain. For example, why are South Koreans more out-and-about, pleasant, and likely to laugh around each other, compared to the Japanese or Chinese? I didn't get a very strong sense of that among the Korean-Americans I've known, but wherever there's a large concentration of foreign students from these three groups, the pattern is hard to miss. This particular set of differences would then seem to be related to something going on in South Korea, not to evolved differences shared between them and the diaspora.

A good idea continues to pay off no matter where or when you apply it. Given how much social change we can explain by whether the violence rate is steadily rising or falling, that's where we should turn first. I could only find data back to 1995, but what do you think the trend in South Korea's homicide rate looks like?


That's an increase of over 120% since 1995, and who knows how long it had been rising before then. China, Taiwan, Japan, and Singapore have all had falling murder rates over this time, and Japan's has been falling since at least the late 1920s. (Data not shown, but from here and here.) South Korea is truly unique among its neighbors in having a steadily rising violence rate.

So its people and culture should be taking a detour toward the kind of society that the West turns into when its murder rate begins rising. Koreans are more out-and-about and fun-loving, like Westerners during the Jazz Age and the New Wave Age. They've begun exporting movies based on revenge and the Culture of Honor (such as Oldboy), just like the vogue for such plays during the Elizabethan-Jacobean violence wave, or the vogue for dueling during the Romantic-Gothic violence wave, or all those vigilante movies from America in the '70s and '80s.

The flipside of a thirst for revenge is the Culture of Hospitality (re-paying kindness with kindness, and starting off kind). I'll write the whole thing up later, but I checked every country's entry in a Wiki for hitch-hiking around the world, and the South Koreans came off as the most hospitable to travelers among the East Asians (for example the people who pick you up might also invite you to rest for the night in their home).

And their religion in recent decades has steered more toward the supernatural, apocalyptic, and proselytizing strains of Christianity (after America, they have the most missionaries), plus the large New Age / cult movement of the Unification Church, still going strong. It's just like the fundamentalist and cult movements that sprung up in the West during the 1900s - 1920s, and then again during the '60s through the '80s.

I don't dig Asian girls, but the prediction from all the rest is that they should have more cool chicks than neighboring countries, like American girls were in the '60s, '70s, and '80s, in contrast to the colder, bossier, and more cocooning girls of the mid-century or the past 20 years. Anyone with yellow fever, chime in.

How do we know it's their rising violence rates and not something else special about them? Like maybe it's due to their cultural clash between them and North Korea -- but then Taiwan should look like them, and they don't. That follows from the murder rate idea, since Taiwan's has been falling like the rest of East Asia. The South Korean pattern fits in with the Western countries that saw rising homicide rates during the '60s through the '80s that were not, however, engaged in a clash of civilizations -- England, Italy, Australia, etc.

So what ties it all together is whether the violence rate is rising or falling. Not too surprising given everything I've written about over the past... two years or however long, but it's nice to have another case study, especially from outside of Western Europe and its off-shoots.

The anti-social mid-century and present day: Drive-in churches, restaurants, and theaters

One of the greatest misconceptions about periods of increasing safety, such as the 1950s, is the view that people are out and about, chatting up their neighbors, strolling down Main Street and socializing with fellow pedestrians, and so on. In reality, the falling-crime period of the mid-'30s through the late '50s was one of ever greater cocooning. The TV show Mad Men depicts this very well, almost as vividly as the paintings of the mid-century's greatest representational artist, Edward Hopper:


To many people I've talk to about this, it seems paradoxical that cocooning and falling crime rates go together -- what do they have to be afraid of? And why are people in rising-crime times more outgoing -- aren't they afraid of all that crime? But it is people's isolation in tiny, private, controlled spaces that sends down the crime rate -- criminals find it a lot harder to get at victims. Also, heat-of-the-moment fights will become less frequent when people stop going out in public, where accidents can escalate into fights. Similarly, when people start venturing out into larger, public, not-so-controlled spaces again, criminals have an easier time finding victims, and heat-of-the-moment fights will become more common.

So, the social isolation and community fragmentation that come from cocooning are the price we pay for enjoying falling crime rates. When we leave our cocoons, we make ourselves more vulnerable, so rising crime rates are the price we pay for enjoying a rich public and community life.

To illustrate how anti-social the mid-century was, consider one of the era's most iconic building types -- the drive-in. People were so mistrusting, suspicious, or just uneasy being around strangers in public that they didn't want to leave their cars for anything, even if it meant sacrificing the quality of the rest of the experience.

The best known example is the drive-in movie theater:

These became popular from the mid-'30s onward, after the wild culture of the Jazz Age ended and its sublime picture palaces were no longer popular with movie-goers. They started to die out themselves over the course of the '60s, when patrons once again wanted to be part of a crowd of real people inside a climate-controlled theater. Surprisingly, drive-in theaters have not made a comeback in the falling-crime period after 1992, perhaps because home video, Netflix delivery, and Redbox have already made it easy to see newish movies without having to be around other people.

Movies shown at the drive-in suffered from poor picture quality, contaminated as the space was by ambient light, which also meant movies could only be shown at night. The original sound, which came from little speakers attached to the car windows, was also poor, although it did improve when customers dialed it in on their car radio. Lacking an enclosed structure, people had only their cars to protect them from the elements. This is why most nostalgic portrayals of the drive-in take place during balmy summer nights, not when it is cold, windy, raining, snowing, or thundering.

What these theaters did offer was the ability to go out and see a movie without having to sit next to other people, hear their comments, smell their body odor, feel their legs brush against your knees as they squeezed down your aisle, and so on. Catering to cocooners, they did not spring up during the more violent but pro-social Jazz Age, when being absorbed into the crowd was all part of the fun of seeing movies.

By the '20s car ownership had begun to soar, so it's not as though there was no potential audience for drive-in theaters. It's just that few back then would have wanted to use their cars as an isolation chamber, except for young people who made out in the back seat away from prying eyes.

After the theater, the most iconic example is the drive-in restaurant:

Aside from the odd example during the '20s and early '30s, these restaurants really began taking off in the later '30s, becoming fixtures of the culture during the '40s (which tended to have a wheel-spoke shape) and the '50s (when the shape was more a long canopy with cars parked side-by-side underneath). As the crime rate and desire to interact with others took off again during the '60s, '70s, and '80s, they started dropping like flies, either being demolished outright or being converted into fast food joints like Burger King. There's a scene in Footloose that's set at a drive-in, although tellingly for 1984 all the kids are out of their cars, moving their bodies in time with loud dance music.

However, during the falling-crime period of the past 20 years, they have seen a rebirth with the Sonic Drive-In chain, and in a modified form with the Checkers chain.

As with theaters, the drive-in restaurant allowed you to park your car close to the restaurant, enter, order, find your car again, and peel out as fast as possible, minimizing the time you had to be around others in public. It's like how in the past 20 years no one sits down to eat in fast food places anymore, but either order their food to go or more likely hit up the drive-thru window so they don't have to leave their cars at all. I remember when the tables and boothes at popular fast food chains would be rather packed during busy hours, but now it's all shifted to the endless drive-thru lane.

Space to eat in the drive-in's dining room itself was minimal and usually featured only or mostly stools with no backs, so that you felt like leaving soon, instead of providing comfortable seats to encourage lingering. Before long they began offering curb service, where you park your car in their lot, an employee (called a car hop) walks out to take your order, re-enters the building to place it, and returns with your food, either in a to-go bag, or on a tray that rested on your open car window. You ate the meal entirely while seated in your car, sealed off from anyone who wasn't riding with you, limiting your interactions to family members or close friends.

Except for that pesky car hop -- sure she's young and pretty, but still she's a stranger, so wasn't there some way to cut out even her? You bet there was -- the motormat. This type was not widespread at all, but the mere fact that they even tried it out, let alone got enough customers to stay in business, just shows how antithetical it was to the mid-century mindset to be a people person. Here are some pictures:


You'll notice that the usual wheel-spoke shape is there, but the cars are parked quite a ways from the restaurant itself. Conveyor belts connected the kitchen to a covered space that hugged the car window, taking in orders, cash, and used trays, and sending out the food. Otherwise it's like a normal drive-in, where you eat from a tray in your car, but now all functions have been completely mechanized and you don't have to see a single human face to go out for a meal.

Finally there was the drive-in church:


These started popping up in the '40s and reached their zenith during the '50s, falling into gradual disuse once people came out of their cocoons during the '60s, '70s, and '80s. However, just as with the Sonic Drive-In restaurants, drive-in churches have made a comeback in the falling-crime times we live in now. They go at least back to the 2000s, although I'm not sure if they were there in the '90s as well.

They don't represent a separate building type, as they were just drive-in theaters that had no better use on Sunday morning. A preacher stood on a central stage, and attendants listened through the little speakers or over the radio as usual. They still offered no protection from the elements and prevented the crowd-vibe from igniting. How did Sunday School work if the children didn't have cars of their own?

We tend to think that the spread of the car caused all sorts of trends that have only gotten stronger as cars have become more common. We see it as an exogenous technological change to which the main workings of society respond passively.

There's something to that, but I think it's over-rated. If people don't want to spend much time in their cars, then they won't. Cars were growing in popularity during the Jazz Age, but who would want to hang out in them all day? Aside from joyriding and making out, they used them to travel to a more carnivalesque space like a speakeasy, a movie palace, a cafeteria or automat, or grand-scale department store. Same thing happened in the '60s, '70s, and '80s -- all of this drive-in stuff disappeared because people felt like hanging out in a nightclub, shopping mall, indoors movie theater, or any other place allowing lots of strangers to pile in and enjoy the community feeling.

During the mid-century and for the past 15 to 20 years, tastes have gone the other way, and people have changed their use of cars accordingly, using them as protective bubbles during their as-short-as-possible trips away from home. The car is equally happy to take the passengers to a curb service drive-in restaurant or to a mall with a bustling food court.

In contrast to the idealized view we have of drive-ins, a look at the real culture shows something unsettling, like a bunch of drones plugging their portable cubicles into a cell within the hive. The cars all facing the same direction and with anonymity makes it look even more hive-like. With people in a movie theater, food court, or church pews, you can make out individual faces, notice unique mannerisms, etc., but not with cars.

It also reveals how socially distant rather than close people were back then, as well as these days. The most they were willing to risk was going to a diner, but those were still pretty small, quiet, and featuring lots of backless stools. That's another restaurant type that has seen a total rebirth over the past 20 years, most of them very self-consciously retro. But I'll get around to covering other changes later.

Black Friday, from community carnival to me-first melee

Examples of people cocooning themselves more over the past 20 years are too numerous to list. But one apparent counter-example is Black Friday -- even if only for a day, aren't people out-and-about, strengthening social bonds by buying gifts for others?

For awhile I didn't have too good of a feel for what this day has been about. I've avoided shopping on Black Friday for a very long time because I sensed that it was degenerate, totally unlike the mall during Christmastime in the '80s when it felt more like a carnival, everyone feeding and feeding off of each other's high spirits. After a little reflection and a look through newspaper articles from the '90s through today, it turns out not to be a counter-example at all.

The vague image we're given in the media, or that we invent ourselves, is of people who are so intent on buying so many presents for so many people, that they can't get in the doors early enough or behave themselves well enough. The competition to get the best gifts for others has just become too chaotic.

In reality, hardly anyone goes out on this day to buy gifts for other people; at best it's an after-thought or rationalization. Rather, buying a handful of things for others has become an excuse to buy stuff for themselves at deals that will never show up the rest of the year. Estimates from the 2000s were that anywhere between 50-75% of people were buying things for themselves while Christmas shopping, and that the average person's self-indulgence accounted for nearly one-quarter of all dollars they spent (around $150 out of $650 total).

The first references to this practice of Christmastime "self-gifting" (how's that for Newspeak?) appear in 1993. This is right as the crime rate is turning around, causing society to shift from the tragic-romantic side of the spectrum to the trivial-efficient side. Already by the early 2000s, this gradual change has moved far enough so that newspapers regularly comment on the self-centeredness of Black Friday shoppers.

An article from 2003 is headlined, "Looking out for no. 1; Survey: Consumers plan to shop for themselves this holiday season". Another from that year reads:

There is an increasing consumer-cultural emphasis on self-oriented spending - from Be Good to Yourself meals to a bespoke cable channel called Me TV. Buying baubles for yourself is just the decadent, high-end version of this. "Self-gifting is the new normal," declares Maria Salzman, global trend predictor and head strategist at Euro RSCG. "It's a real part of December. And Valentine's Day is a second self-gifting event. If there's no lover in your life, it's time to indulge yourself all the same."

By now, many of the people interviewed are so shameless in their egotism that you'd think the reporter made the quotes up. (Until you remember the "I'm-a get MINE" mentality of the 1992-and-after period.) From a 2010 NYT article which shows that this practice was not limited to the housing bubble euphoria:

Americans are shopping selfishly again.

On this year's Black Friday, retailers and analysts said they saw a surge in traffic at stores and malls over last year, and also were noticing that shoppers snapped up discretionary items for themselves rather than gifts or necessities. . . .

At an Oakland Best Buy, Jan Paolo Patena, a 19-year-old college student, was waiting to buy an external hard drive.

''Black Friday is all about me,'' he said. ''I'm not here for anyone else. This is not about Christmas presents. If somebody else wants something, they can stay out here in the cold all night.'' [Reminder: execute all Millennials.]

Rebecca Bolivar, 19, a college student who was shopping at the Garden State Plaza in Paramus, N.J., said she came to buy shoes, jackets and gifts for her boyfriend, in that order.

''If I run out of money, I go first,'' she said.

At a Best Buy in Patchogue, N.Y., despite a chilly rain, the line for the 5 a.m. opening stretched about 350 yards down the street. Julio Jaber, 25, was there to buy a 55-inch TV. ''It's for myself,'' he said, shaking his head as rain fell on him. ''For somebody else? Forget it.''

Malls, like the Fair Oaks Mall in Fairfax, Va., and the Beverly Center in Los Angeles, Calif., reported similar sentiments. At Sears and Kmart, many shoppers bought on layaway, said a spokesman, Tom Aiello, indicating that the items were not gifts.

''You have more spontaneous shoppers buying things for themselves,'' said Maureen Bausch, executive vice president of business development at the Mall of America.

And so on. Again these are just a representative handful from a stream of similar articles.

If people's mindset has changed from other-focused to self-focused, that also explains why there is such a war of all against all devastating retail stores during the Christmas shopping season. We naturally hold our own satisfaction above others', so if we see a rival shopper about to get a coffee-maker that we planned to give our friend, well our friend will be just as happy with some other coffee-maker, or maybe he won't mind getting something else entirely. But if that was the coffee-maker that I wanted for myself -- then get your fucking hands off of it!

We shop for ourselves all the time without this chaos, but this time there are DEALS DEALS DEALS, and they're only here once a year. Still, the main cause of the shift has been a change in people's mindset, because they had Christmas specials before the '90s and people did not kill each other over them. It's only when combined with a newly egocentric population of shoppers that all Black Friday hell breaks loose.

Turning to Wikipedia instead of doing another Lexis-Nexis search of newspapers, the first pop culture reference to violence or chaos during Christmas shopping is the 1996 movie Jingle All the Way. This doesn't depict the general melee of the 2000s, and the battle is over a gift for someone else, not for the shoppers themselves, but remember that this is only a few years into the shift. Regular reports of violence and hostility begin showing up in the 2000s.

As late as the 1989 movie Christmas Vacation, there was an atmosphere of excitement, even anxiety, during Christmas shopping, but the department store where Clark goes for his wife didn't look like a battlefield. The only time during the '80s when anything like that happened was when Cabbage Patch Kids came out, but that was only over one product and in one year only, not a retail-sector-wide brawl year after year.

The fact that these crazed shoppers are out there hunting for deals for themselves also fits in with another major change in Christmas gift-giving since 1992 -- the gift card. After all, if everyone out there on Black Friday were so busy scooping up real tangible things for others, then why the hell do we all wind up getting a pile of gift cards?

Gift certificates existed long before gift cards, so the technology was there if anyone wanted to make use of it. But because a gift card is a half-gift, no one bothered buying them except for recipients on the outskirts of their social circle. The first gift cards began with Blockbuster in 1994, right as the crime rate was dropping, and have only exploded since then.

It's even more bizarre because gift cards are one of the few items that are NOT included in the store-wide sales. If shoppers were making such a mad dash to Black Friday bonanzas in order to get deals on gifts, rather than on indulgences, then why do they end up buying so much of something that never goes on sale?

The only way to make sense of all these changes over the past 20 years is to view Black Friday and Christmas shopping in general as now a mostly egocentric shopping spree, not an other-regarding community carnival, and one that appeals to efficiency and convenience rather than romance and fantasy.

From a rough look through articles on Black Friday shopping from 1900 through 1960, I got the same impression that the rising-crime Jazz Age had a more sublime and community-focused Christmas shopping atmosphere, while the falling-crime mid-century felt more like today's bargain-hunters temporarily leaving their cocoons to shove others off of their epic find. But I'll have to poke around more before committing to that.

There is nothing like the superorganic feeling of belonging to a crowd, but the spirit of collective effervescence, or communitas, or whatever you want to call it, has totally evaporated from Christmas shopping. A crowd or a mob feels united, whereas today all that a Black Friday shopper can join is a melee. Cloaking this naked selfishness in the garb of the gift-giving spirit just makes the whole thing even more disgusting. Don't mean to end on such a bitter note, but I just can't stand how rotten the Christmas season has become, and so quickly.

Thanksgiving parades, a Jazz Age invention

Many of our most visible and cherished "traditions" don't go back very far at all, showing that traditionalism isn't about maintaining whatever there was in ye olden days, but about preserving the good innovations of earlier eras (and weeding out the bad ones).

A good example are large-scale Thanksgiving parades, where all of the major ones were founded during the 1920s and early '30s. The Macy's parade began in '24 and introduced the balloons in '27, the America's Thanksgiving Parade in Detroit started in '24 too, the Gimbels parade in Philadelphia before either of those in '20, the Hollywood Christmas Parade in '28, and Chicago's Grand Holiday Tradition parades in '34. The newest parade I could find that has been going for any time is Pittsburgh's Celebrate the Season parade, which began in 1980.

Not surprisingly we see all of these popping up during rising-crime periods, and especially during the second apocalyptic half of such a period (except for the Chicago parade that began one year after the 1933 peak in the homicide rate, but close enough). They are yet another example of a visual spectacle whose creation seems possible only during such times of mounting danger in the environment. Others are Art Deco skyscrapers, movie palaces, the carnivalesque form of the department store and mall, the automat and food court, sublime golf course architecture, public Fourth of July fireworks events, massive Christmas displays, and many others.

In contrast, the falling-crime era of the mid-century (1934-1958) brought us Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, a catalog of gentle and secular Christmas songs, and not much else in the way of holiday traditions.

By the way, I've never really felt possessed by any of those Christmas songs, so they seem over-rated to me, although I realize most people do feel warm when they come on. The only Christmas songs I've loved are "O Tannenbaum" and "Silent Night," which just so happen to have been composed during a period of rising homicide rates across Europe, in 1824 and 1818 respectively. That was during the apocalyptic second half of the Romantic-Gothic period of 1780-1830. Throw in "Man in the Mirror" by Michael Jackson from the recent crime wave, which sounds like a Christmastime song.

In any case, even if you value a falling violence rate over cultural innovation, you should still be thankful that we have had periods of rising violence rates in the past that led to more inventions. Most experiments went nowhere, but some of them were great successes, and we're blessed to still enjoy them.