Moral standards change so much across time and between cultures that works once thought ordinary come to seem shocking, and the reverse.
TV Tropes uses the name for the jolt a modern audience feels at attitudes a work treats as normal, and for audiences in other cultures reading a work's values differently. Measured attitudes do move quickly: Charlesworth and Banaji found in 2019 that implicit and explicit attitudes towards sexual orientation shifted sharply in American data over about a decade.
In practice
- A company's training video from the 1980s, reissued as a joke, produces a formal complaint.
- A grandparent's once-standard joke silences the table.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation is moral change, since norms shift, especially where contact and exposure increase. Another is that works fix the values of their moment while their audiences keep moving.
- In its favour
- Supported by survey and implicit-attitude data showing rapid change on some moral questions, and by the experience of every audience that reads old works.
- Against it
- Judging the past by present standards is itself criticised as presentism, and the dissonance can be overstated: many past works contained the same disagreements that modern readers have.
- Standing
- Compare the Overton window and moral panic.
- Subject
- Sociology & Culture
- Essay
- The measured patterns of social life