I'm building a story and have a question to the history and humanity buffs:

So you know how trends come in cycles. Sometimes people are more decadent and opulence loving and sometimes they get all dour and calvinist as a counter reaction.

What makes the pendulum swing back from the decadence to the recanting piety?

Some kind of "punishment from God", natural catastrophes, plagues and the like? Or something else?

I would suggest you look at Pareto
who has interesting suggestions about innovative versus protective forces & classes.

But war would be the main option, I assume.

All right. At least some of this will fall under my thesis somewhere.

I think that these cycles are really complex things and again that's why the Humanities and Arts exist to debate on and about them all the time.

The "pendulum" is often influenced by Natural disasters like plagues, and also wars. Sometimes you have a cultural revolution going on which can be between classes, or minorities or minorities and majorities. Followers of a new philosophy can suggest a new path towards dealing with material sources.

Or, another way of looking at it -- albeit a simplistic one is ...

1) If there is too much instability -- either due to social, cultural or natural turmoil, most people will seek that stability by going back to an idea of tradition or embracing a strict code of behavior.

2) Likewise, if there is no visible turmoil or at least civil conflict, intellectual and artistic institutions can be focused on and maintained. There is freer trade between different economies and innovation is embraced. People would feel more willing to do more "riskier" things -- to go beyond the box.

But these are simplifications. There are a lot of militaristic innovations in warfare even as populaces starve and die. There is religion in very free-flowing and creative times. Economies rise and fall constantly. Knowledge can be forgotten, or learned about differently -- i.e. through different mediums of conception and perception. For instance, a lot of the Medieval Age used iconography or the pictorial to educate the lower classes, but that doesn't mean this medium was any less valid (just more in the control of others in many ways).

Likewise, using this example, while reading and writing did exist in the Church and the aristocracy, they were not necessarily taught side by side. I only say this to illustrate how even though there can be things construed as socio-political cycles (let's not go into Hari Seldon's "Psycho-History" from the Foundation series shall we), there are also deviations and alternative branches.

Of course, there are probably others here can answer these questions with more "buffage" than I have at this time too.

I've noticed, in terms of theatre history (and since theatre is a mirror of society, I think it's a valid way of examining cultural shifts), that during times of social unrest, the purpose of theatre is a pedantic one: to communicate a message to the audience and to encourage them to incorporate that message into their daily lives. When people are unsure as to the direction their society is moving because of war or disease or other factors beyond their control, they look to the arts to provide them with inspiration and escape. So during the years leading up to and during WWI, for example, you had playwrights like Ibsen and Shaw focusing on social issues of class warfare and women's sufferage...you had the Dadaists creating absurdist pieces to question the purpose of war...not exactly fluff.

As a counterpoint, after the war ended in the 1920's, the overall focus of many works shifted from societal turmoil (things outside ourselves) to the inner-workings of the mind...and to beauty (inside ourselves). Surrealism was born. Antonin Artaud created a theatre of spectacle, a ritualistic event of raw emotion and movement. A modern example of a post-Artaud theatrical experience would be Peter Brook's theatrical events.

On Broadway, the effect of social turmoil can be followed simply by looking at the popular musicals of each decade: in the 1960's & '70's, West Side Story, Hair, Godspell, Cabaret, and Jesus Christ Superstar were the big hits-- all focusing on pretty deep social issues-- race, social movements, religion, the effects of nationalism...and then we have the 1980's (a time of relative prosperity in the US), where the biggest hits were Cats, Annie and Phantom of the Opera. More spectacle than social commentary.

If theatre were a woman, she would be dressed in her fatigues and doc martens passing out pamphlets during the rough times, and dressed in her flowiest, glitteriest gown gazing in the mirror during the times of prosperity.

I think what everybody else has said is true. but I also think that the world is always imperfect for one reason or another. and I think that culture and society at large is "bad" at finding balance.

so the established generation does one thing. the kids grow up looking at whatever the establishment is doing, and, as all children do, they find their parents' flaws. so they do things completely differently in order to correct those problems. and, of course, that creates flaws that the previous generation had been trying to rectify, so the generation after that swings back the other way.

I think any one thing can go too far. pragmatism can be too much, so the next generation rejects John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) and turns to Oscar Wilde (1854-1900). hedonism goes too far, and we swing back to T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) and "The Hollow Man." if you eat too many chocolates, you don't want anything sweet for a while; you want steak and potatoes.

War is the big one in terms of societal change - things build up and up, there's a big fight and everyone has a sit-down.

If you look at the English Civil War - it didn't start out Puritan. That came partly as a result of the war. It chimes in with your 'punishment from god'. Look what happened when we had a decedant self-serving king! Lets try another way. But of course that wouldn't have happened if the leaders of the post-civil war had not been Puritans. It was not an innevatable reaction, but SOME change was bound (she says, with her hindsight) to happen.

At the other end of the scale - the First World War (from a UK point of view). That involved populations on a far, far greater scale. EVERYONE is involved, no one is unaffected. This moves society away from the overwrought jingoism of before, back to just wanting peace, in the same way that someone weary wants to rest. You see that all the way throught the C19th,

I'm not sure about generational views changing (parents vs children) - for the most part that isn't the case so much, not on a societal level. Most of the time they do the same things as their parents, generation-wise. But the big one for generations changing is the 1960s.

It's a cliche, but I have also studied the politcal and social history of the UK in this period, and a lot of the hype is based on fact. Here you have several things happening COMBINED with a generational shift which opens the gulf between them even wider than normal.

The generation hitting adulthood in the 1960s are the first one since 1914 who don't remember a World War. National service ends in 1960, so most kids born in the last two years of the War or later have not been to war.
They are the first to be living with the huge technological change that is in their lifetime revolutionising the way they live at home and the way they see the world. Girls might still expect to be housewives, but they don't expect that to be all they do now it doesn't take all day to do the laundry.
Science fiction is coming true for these young people - their horizons are very different from their parents'. Look at their fantasies of the future - that tells you a lot.
It has also been only a few years since rationing ended - wartime rationing continued well into the '50s. They can have luxuries now, they want them, and they have the disposable income to get them.
These kids are also more aware of the world than any generation before them - they see it on TV, they meet people from other countries, they travel, they had black and Asian friends at school and their parent's colonial view looks dated to them. They know about civil rights in America.
Then a few years into the decade you have a Labour government, elected by people sick of Tory incompetence and jaded by Suez, starting to realise their place in the world has changed. This decade sees race relations legeslation, the abortion act, the legalisation of homosexuality (which everyone seemed to feel was rather overdue), and reform of the divorce laws.
Then you have the Pill, which kicks the door open for women who before would have been risking terrible consiquences if they had sex. Although if you look at the statistics, there wasn't nearly as much of that going on as is portrayed, it was the attitude which was changed.

All that comes together to stop the batton simply being handed from one generation to the next - the divide is something beyond teenage rebellion. They are from different worlds. And that pendulum hasn't swung back from that one quite yet.

So I'd say if you want your world to change you want either a generation who've lived through something enormous which has changed the way they think, or one who's parents have but who now take it for granted.

*reading closely!*

This shouldn't all be so new to me. Thank you! This really helps.

How much of a role do supernatural matters play in the story? That is, are there gods or are there entities of such power that they could be seen as gods? If there are, then piety might simply be a matter of survival.

Right now the idea is this:

There is a kind of magic system that involves calling up powers by symbols, but the true meaning has been more or less covered by more and more opulent occultism that is half taken seriously and half is just for show (think magical gimmicks and good luck symbols, ouija board ceremonies as party games and the like.)

This is only vaguely connected to religion (which at the moment involves a complicated pantheon). But in general the whole society is at a rather decadent stage.

Everything goes haywire when strategically important people start dying, and the use of occult symbols seems to make it worse not better.

Ah. If the gods are the laissez-faire sort, then it's not an issue. I've just read more than a few fantasy novels where the gods form the universe from primordial ooze with their bare hands, but can't seem to get rid of a perfectly corporeal demon who isn't all that impressive. Apparently because of quantum.

Hmm ...

So is it the fact that there was a religious system and pantheon but as time has gone, the system became more bureaucratic and intricate? That does happen in some "decadent" societies as well -- where a simple religious philosophy becomes so bogged down in its law and institutionalization that it forgets its original purpose.

And in the case of a supernatural world, I can also see how these symbols can be obscured and misinterpreted to create greater horrors than it could have been prevented.

Also, you can attribute this decadence to the actions of an aristocracy or higher class -- who uses the religion or occultism to either control "the lower classes" and/or to amuse themselves in debauchery. There may have been meaning to it all once, in addition to its influence on population, but now it may well have become some higher class' plaything or fad of the year.

So really, you can play the "old religion bogged down by opulent occultism" card or "religion so changed, its mythology is now the ruling class' amusement." But when you consider that there is real magical or paranormal power there ...

Misinterpretations, especially of matters that may well have been clearer in the past such as omens could be a very bad thing indeed.