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Quite apart from the thread below, where @self_made_human is right and you are wrong, the thesis that the "Hard times create strong men" works off genetics doesn't make sense, because biological evolution is too slow. The conventional version of the meme is that hard times create strong men within 1-2 generations - to get an appreciable eugenic effect that quickly you have to kill off so many people that the population goes through a genetic bottleneck.
I also don't see why good times are dysgenic in the pre-modern world. Good times equals population expansion, but these societies don't break out of the Malthusian trap so even as the population expands the reproduction of the lower classes is food-limited. Add even a little bit of soft polygyny and good times equals all classes growing but the higher classes growing faster, which is presumptively eugenic.
What really is dysgenic is the kind of war that preferentially kills off the warrior elite, like the English Wars of the Roses or World War One. The genetic and moral effect of WW1 on western Europe is the leading example of hard times making weak men, counter to the meme.
First, I agree with @SecureSignals that biological evolution being slow is an outdated & wrong meme at this point from back before archeogenetics existed. We now have plenty of evidence that biological human evolution happened frequently on relatively short timescales.
Second, the principle can be trivially generalized to cultural evolution. We are experiencing ourselves how fast people can spin up new memes, identities, moral/politeness rules and so on, with little concern for their practicality. Under strong selection, you expect that cultural evolution to nevertheless point towards increased function over time; But without selection, it points towards less function, for simple entropy reasons (there are always infinitely more ways to do things wrong than there are ways to do them right).
On the last point though, I actually agree with you. Wars can happen in a way where they disproportionally kill of the brave and pro-social, while the self-centered cowards survive. It needs to be kept in mind that concepts like decadence, "hard time create strong men", etc. are one among many, and they are not always the correct one. But it doesn't mean that they are irrelevant, just as the example of Genghis Khan uniting the steppe nomads and conquering the world is not a proof that the concept of state capacity is useless.
It is impossible to have human society without selection pressures. Even some kind of posthuman society would still have selection pressure on memes and their equivalent of genes.
What would that even look like? No disease? Everyone lives forever, or has 2.1 kids with identical genes? No class mobility? No economic pressure?
There is also the issue of too much selection pressure being detrimental. As an example here notes, you can induce antibiotic resistance by exposing a bacterial colony on a petri dish to a gradient of antibiotic density. You can't make bacteria immune to anything by tossing them into the sun. You can't improve human society or the biosphere as a whole by exposing us to a gamma ray burst, or even something tamer like regularly showering the surface with cobalt bombs.
There is a massive gap between " some selection pressure exists and is useful" to "the degree of selection pressure present is optimal". It takes a lot of work to bridge the gap.
The collapse of Rome set back living standards in Europe by a thousand years. I sincerely doubt that whatever eugenic benefits came out of it (if any) were worth that much lost growth potential.
War can improve civilizational fitness, and also ruin it. WW2 possibly caused a tech-boom, WW3 might regress human civilization by a hundred years.
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Biological evolution is not too slow. The Roman Empire was created in more than two generations and it declined over many generations. Biological evolution inarguably happened during the Black Death. Biological Evolution of what an "American" is is happening in 2 generations.
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