Whenever I read something from roughly the first half of the 20th century (I'm not sure where the cutoff point is, it seems to the 1960s), I'm struck by the quality of the writing. I'm not sure what happened, but it's pretty clear that at some point we stopped taking ourselves seriously.

We see the same thing in how people dress. People used to write "respectably", and they used to dress the same, and in TV interviews they spoke with great care and deliberation.

Then we threw all of it down the toilet.