But that's not the only thing, right? For example it strongly discouraged out of wedlock childbirth and divorce, which in retrospect seem like pretty good things. Coming from an Islamic society where both are strongly taboo, it's been eye-opening to me to see the social dysfunction in the working class American area my wife's family is from. My mother in law's house is full of random teenagers who are drawn to the fact that she offers a relatively stable household compared to the instability in these kids' home lives. It's great that we got same-sex marriage, but it seems to me like that's the only kind of marriage some folks care about these days.
It's not just "prudes" looking at these moral trends with concern. Even center-left Brookings Institution has observed the collapse in marriage rates among the lower class, and how that's exacerbating income inequality: https://www.brookings.edu/research/middle-class-marriage-is-... (marriage rates for the top quantile have hardly changed since 1980, at 80%+, but have dropped from 60% to under 40% for the bottom quantile). Studies show that Asian Americans enjoy much higher income mobility than white Americans: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/27/upshot/make-y.... An Asian American kid born in the bottom 20% of income has a 25% chance of ending up in the top 20% of income as an adult. For a white American kid that number is just 10%. I strongly suspect that an important factor is that Asian Americans continue to have "Victorian values." We don't tolerate divorce and we ostracize people who don't get married. Many Asians come here very poor, but the kids have two parents and the families don’t have to deal with the massive loss of income and upward mobility caused by divorce: https://www.nber.org/digest/jul02/income-declines-after-divo...
Whenever we talk about "progress" we fixate on improvements for relatively small minorities. While that's not unimportant, it gives us a false sense that progress happens in a single direction. But our progress has resulted not only from breaking down specific possibly obsolete taboos, but breaking down the general framework for enforcing moral norms. That’s been replaced by the elevation of individualism and self determination to a religion. And it appears that this change has had costs. We have lost the ability to use social pressures to keep people from making poor and selfish decisions. The burdens of that progress of that are being borne by kids, especially kids from lower income households.
