Personally, I think we are becoming ruder and nastier, and I’d put it down to two things:
First, overcrowding. There are just too many people, full stop. The 20th-century won’t be remembered for the Beatles or the battle of Somme. It will be the century in which the population exploded. In 1900 there were a billion humans. By 1960 that had trebled to three billion. It’s now eight and heading for ten. Animals packed together in a zoo bite and savage one another, and we’re no different. My local woods have been hacked down to make way for a new estate, and at night I’m woken by the screeching and backfiring of boy racer idiots. Too many people, too many houses and too much noise. It’s frazzling our nerves and making us all irritable. If you could jump in a time machine and visit a suburban street in 1950, you’d be struck by how quiet and empty and calm everywhere seemed.
The other problem is how hyper-competitive and status-hungry everyone has become. When I was a child in the ‘80s, the class system was still intact. Middle/lower middle class mothers were terrified of being thought vulgar or common, so they taught their children to behave in a certain way. We had to say “thank you for having me” if we went to a friend’s house, for example. And my grandfather even made my brother step off the pavement for a woman!!! All that has gone. But we’ve replaced it with a greedy, materialistic, Americanised culture, in which people are judged purely on how much they earn and how big their house is, not on their accent, education or manners.
Put those things together - a crowded country that no longer values manners or ‘class’ - and people will become ruder and nastier.