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XFL is the brainchild of Vince McMahon of the World Wrestling Federation, and he's promising to do for football what he did for wrestling. For those who care about civility, it sounds more like a threat. Why? Because the x in XFL stands for extreme, as in extreme violence, sex, and "attitude."

The "attitude"—the deliberate flouting of authority and convention—was established by none other than Jesse Ventura and other celebrities promoting the new league on NBC. The game opens not with the traditional coin toss, but with a mad scramble for the ball, making it the only sport in which you can get knocked out before the game even starts. Players openly use four-letter vulgarities—words easily recognizable despite being bleeped out.

As with wrestling, sex is big. Buxom cheerleaders dispense with pom-poms and plunge into the stands, dancing suggestively with fans while the TV cameras roll. Adding vice to vulgarity, McMahon says he will ask cheerleaders if their sexual relationships with players are hampering the guys' performance on the field.

Ironically, the same week the XFL debuted, the Kaiser Family Foundation released findings from its study of sex on TV: 68 percent of all prime-time programming, and 84 percent of situation comedies, contain sexual content; 10 percent offer "strong suggestions" of sexual intercourse.

The coarsening of our culture is evident in our discourse as well. For example, news journals defer to our sensitivities, not by omitting vulgarities, as they once did, but by using three dashes after the first letter of offensive words. Really clever. Over the water cooler at work or in school corridors, no one seems embarrassed anymore by conversations sprinkled with four-letter words.

Nowhere is this coarsening more evident than in our dress. I'm used to being an anachronism—the only person on an airplane wearing a coat and tie. Yes, I know business is going casual. But T-shirts stretched over protruding bellies, shorts exposing hairy legs, and toes sprouting out of sandals are not casual—they're slovenly. And you see it more and more on airplanes, in restaurants, and even in church.

How we present ourselves to others says something about how we view ourselves. When I was a Marine, we checked our spit-shined shoes and starched khakis in a full-length mirror before leaving the barracks; it was drilled into us that if we were to be sharp we had to look sharp. That's the right kind of pride, the antidote to sloth.

The sin of sloth, as the late British journalist Henry Fairlie wrote in The Seven Deadly Sins, is "a state of dejection that gives rise to torpor of mind and feeling and spirit; to a sluggishness. … a poisoning of the will; to despair, faintheartedness, and even desirousness. … even for what is good. … sloth is a deadly sin."

How have we arrived at this state? In his A Study of History, the great historian Arnold Toynbee contends that one clear sign of a civilization's decline is when élites—people Toynbee labels the "dominant minority"—begin mimicking the vulgarity and promiscuity exhibited by society's bottom-dwellers. This is precisely what some political leaders and most media moguls have done. The result: The entire culture is vulgarized.

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April 23 2001, Vol. 45, No. 6