Plato does this too. Was his head also up his ass? Anyway, he was right, no? He was writing at the end of the Classical period.
The truth is just that there's a constant struggle between past and future, tradition and innovation, and to go all in on one side or the other (which is what we are all drawn to) is insane. Pointing out the downsides of innovation is not wrong unless you're arguing for doing away with it altogether.
If you discount that factor: these sentiments are also a pretty normal reaction to any society that has experienced substantial improvements in the average person’s well-being within the speaker’s lifetime. If you’ve watched your country emerge from pre-industrial poverty, then of course your forebears are going to seem (in retrospect) powerful and resilient to harsh conditions, while your contemporaries are going to appear relatively soft and materialistic. That doesn’t necessarily mean you want such people leading you into the future. Indeed, Solzhenitsyn‘s late-life endorsement of Putin shows the peril in that.
It must be terrifying for people like this (and those in this same thread trying to make statements from the late 70s sound like prescient warnings for the 2020s) to see the world turning away from their writings or simply deciding that they were not as important or significant as society once thought. When the crowd goes one way and you desperately want it to follow in the direction you are trying to lead it must be quite frightening and depressing.