Pundits and preachers try to find future history in the movements of persons and society as they find them. If done skillfully they gain some prophetic insight. Perceptive persons not limited to their own emotions, prejudices, and traditions, even intellectual orientation, may be quite perceptive in what will happen in this or that context during their lifetimes, perhaps after. Psychics often play on the process, so to retain their reputations among some groups for what appear to be insightful proclamations. Even guessing at the future a person will often feel wise in that thoughtful guesses will often become realistic. Not all accidents are negative. Chance is chance, and can go either way or enough in change in our presumed directions that our predilections seem insightful. The tendency to perceive something of the future is most effective coming from affirmative persons who are interested in the future from an objective viewpoint so to feel the movements, both affirmative and negative related to emerging life patterns.
Again – the above perception leaped out at me as I was reviewing Flannery O’Connor in The Atlantic magazine. On the backside of the first page of the article was the closing page of a previous article for which I have incomplete information at this writing. Reading it in November, 2014, I became impressed how the author, in 2008, anticipated almost exactly what happened to the candidate for President of the United States, Barack Obama. Obama has experienced the predictions for his ensuing administration – through 75 % of it at the time of my reading. The writer covered the encompassing context in which Obama has worked in his administration. Such insight is the consequence of rightly evaluating the small and inevitable increments of life and culture that one finds in the world of the analyst – professional or amateur. Currently, there is a cortege of prognosticators predicting changes in popular culture, and therefore in daily life, of the extension of physical nudity in both men and women so to nearly erase the concerns of modesty in general society. The evidence is strong that the flow of small changes is that we expect bit by bit the extension of interest, the decline or advance in various contexts affected by events with those contexts in change related to the issue at point and making more of the issue relating to future direction. We may follow the patterns for Miss America during the last century, the increasing competition for attention through forms of nudity by Hollywood celebrity women (nymphs) and increasingly casual men (hunks) showing skin. Women have already been filmed in frontal nudity, and some pressure is on for men to display similar exposure. Incremental forces, which are many, may succeed. The incremental forces that drew women into smoking publicly in the 1920s began with women, dressed in male tuxedos and presented in widely circulated ads, then shifted with women in dresses – smoking aided by the pseudo-sophistication offered by filmmakers and even popular writers all driven by the gradual influence of vicarious experience to actual participation. The decline in smoking began with the incremental influence of health literature, the force of leadership (especially that of the surgeon general), increasing costs of the habit, the unethical claims of tobacco firms, and other influences that now mean the once popular smoking habit (sophistication) is now carried on privately or in corners of buildings outside where workers go on breaks – winter or summer. It is believed that the decline of the habit will improve the health of the citizenry – perhaps to be replaced by the growing number of increments that are helping the drug industry to make marijuana legal. The massive offenses of both drugs seem not to be sufficient to criminalize them.
In the matter of nudity, the socially alert person can fairly well predict what it means to parenting children, and maintaining the modesty vital to an intimate family. We already know of children who, in adult life, have interpreted the casualness of their parents in nudity and other sexual interests, as matters of abuse that negatively impacted their lives and attitudes. Nudity will further influence the quality of conversation and life distractions so to reduce the time and quality of thought and action that improves the human situation. The matter is moral, the main point, but a social evil stealing time from the real needs of mankind. Even availability of communication gadgets may have reduced preparation of persons for life disciplines. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020