A different kind of childhood

When I ask most modern people to remember a particular decade, they usually remember the television shows and video games that took up much of their young life, or the clothes and hairstyles that were fashionable. They remember what Hollywood celebrities were doing at the time more than their own lives. They don’t typically remember what my elderly neighbours do, like the wildflowers that grew in a particular meadow, or peeking as children into the nests of herons and listening to the eggs. They don’t remember playing children’s games, or exploring the woods, or swimming to an island in the middle of the pond, or declaring themselves kings and princesses of their newfound lands. Most of them never had the friendships to even have such adventures – people moved around too much, or were always playing video games -- even if they had been allowed to roam, and even if there were any woods to explore.

Most people my age spent 20,000 hours of their best years warehoused in a school that looked like a prison, but few remember anything they learned. Most remember spending many more hours in the backseats of cars, but never rode a horse or sailed a boat as children, or did anything that depended on skill and subtlety. Most modern people grew up with enough toys to fill an orphanage, but remember few of them, no more than their own children can remember the fifteenth toy they received last Christmas.

Perhaps most importantly, most people my age don’t remember ever having done anything useful. As children they might have been indulged or ignored, but when I ask if they ever contributed to the family, most are confused even by the question. A few cleaned their room or raked leaves outside. But few people my age grew up feeling necessary, or learning any skills, or feeling alive.

As working adults, most people I know spend their waking hours moving electrons around a screen, but they are still not necessary, and they feel it. Most depend entirely on electricity, but have no idea where my electricity comes from. They depend on pressing a button to keep warm, but don’t know what the button does. They need purified water from the tap, but have no idea where it comes from, or how pure it really is, or how it could be cleaned.

They know the president, but not their mayor or councilman, and know more about their favourite movie star than the old lady down the road. Most, I expect, have spent far more time watching others make love than they have making love themselves, and have spent thousands of hours watching actors feign death but have never bathed a body for burial.

Many Americans these days see family only on uncomfortable holidays, have no traditions to pass down, and little knowledge of songs or stories older than their parents. Most have spent their lives drifting across an ocean of strangers, committed to nothing and no one. No wonder suicide, which was once rare, has become a common cause of death. Most people don’t kill themselves in any identifiable way, of course – but when I return to my native country, I see many people who have ballooned in size, or require drugs of one kind or another to get through another day.

Even those who are nominally successful – who live in houses the size of barns, drive trucks the size of school-buses and have enough toys to stuff an orphanage – remain deeply unhappy. One way or another, they grow angrier every year; they know in their bones that something has gone terribly wrong.

Most of them know they’ve lost something, and search for it in different ways. Some of my friends build things in their shed, or cook, or in some way find pleasure in creating something. Some read books about people who lived more traditional lives, anything from Amish romances to medieval fantasy. Some drive off on weekends to hunt or fish, something to get them back to nature, and draw far more from their surroundings than from the animal. Some understand how much of the natural world has already been lost, and march in the streets to shout about it, or buy “eco-friendly” products with pandas and dolphins on them. Some of these approaches do more good than others, but I don’t mock any of them; all these people, I think, are trying to fill the same void.

The rural Irish around the same time offer an even more extreme contrast, with almost no money and what we would consider desperate poverty, but with an even lower crime rate than Americans had at the time, and with a literate, healthy society. Talking to people from these eras, I realised, could help us identify what the world has lost, and could restore. 

A healthy society

I've been interviewing my Irish neighbours, and the vanishing world they grew up in -- and while that wasn't the world I knew, it wasn’t completely alien to me. I grew up with a lot of older relatives, some born as far back as the 19th century, and listened to them describe their early lives, and while they usually grew up with more money and technology than their Irish cousins -- the USA in the 1950s was prosperous, Ireland in the 1950s was not -- they had many elements in common that differ greatly from our lives today.

It was not uncommon for children to play safely in the streets, or wander far from home, know all the neighbours, and see their second cousins more often than most people today see their brothers. By the time they were teenagers they were men and women; they found work and began a family, joined their unions and local groups like Kiwanis, the VFW, the American Legion. They showed up to city council meetings, took part in their school and parish, and occasionally ran for office. Clothes and toys were passed down through long lines of relatives, child to child, and glass jars and bottles were used over and over again for decades. My family grew vegetables in a garden, composted the kitchen scraps, canned and pickled, and shared what we had.

As a young journalist I reported from small towns across the Midwest, and in every town I could – even if it wasn’t relevant to the story I was reporting – I looked at its old newspapers. In town after town they told the same story, of clean, healthy towns with farms and factories, whose citizens endured depressions and droughts and whose young men dreamed of home when they went to Verdun or Iwo Jima. School records described students learning Marcus Aurelius, building windmills or performing Shakespeare, in towns where few people today seem to have much education anymore.

City halls boasted photos of the city band gathered around the gazebo in the town square back when townspeople took part in a city band – and old newspaper photos showed local chapters of Kiwanis or Oddfellows celebrating some now-forgotten milestone. Most of these men spent their days in crop fields or factory floors, yet they dressed up for their meetings as they did for church – back when people dressed up for church -- and the suits were as clean as the buildings.

By the time I reported from those towns, in the 1990s, they already looked like the Zombie Apocalypse had come through; boarded-up storefronts, giant holes in the roads, and walls covered with graffiti that no one bothers to clean up. Few businesses remained in town centres; the remaining companies often stayed far outside of towns, sometimes displaying signs in Spanish for their low-paid immigrant workforce, and fenced off with increasingly savage-looking barbed wire. Many of the people I met seemed functionally illiterate, surly and suspicious. Most quickly turned any conversation to conspiracy theories they seemed to have picked up from talk radio and other media, their link to the world.

That was in the middle of what the media called an “economic boom,” although it didn’t affect the red states I grew up in -- and since then, life has only grown worse. When I visit my native country, much of it is functionally the Third World; in many small towns a large segment of the population survives solely on disability payments or Social Security of some kind, and drugs and despair eat away the generations. Deaths from legal and illegal drugs have increased more than 500 per cent since these old photos, killing more than half a million Americans since 2000. Among middle-aged men – the people who would once have been pillars of the community – the suicide rate has doubled in the last ten years.

You could see the same thing in the big city; I saw black-and-white photos of my grandparents in urban St. Louis in the 30s and 40s, smiling young people smartly dressed, standing in a neighbourhood of clean houses and front lawns, ready to take the trolley to a school dance or first job. You don’t want to go through those neighbourhoods today; many of the houses are windowless shells, with pieces cut out as from explosions, and graffiti covering every reachable surface.

By the time I grew up, the healthy days of a vibrant civic life, close neighbourhoods and self-reliant, literate men and women seemed like an alien universe, even for a relatively old-fashioned family like mine. I read more books and explored more land as a child more than most of my peers, but even I can look back and see how different my own life was from that of my grandparents, and even more from that of my Irish neighbours. Young people today grow up hungry for something, feeling the absence of something they've never experienced and can't recognise. Next week I'll talk about how we might be able to regain some of what we lost.

Remembering the past

I explained last week that when I talk about the advantages of previous eras or criticise our faith in eternal and universal progess, people often grow defensive – a sign that they had a lot of dreams invested in certain images of the future. They often say things like, At least our lives are an improvement over the past. In some ways, I tell them, but not in every way; compare modern Ireland to the traditional one, or the modern America to the America of a century ago, and you’ll find that suicide rates are higher today, crime has risen, and many things we value have declined, despite certain improvements.

Of course the Ireland that my neighbours remember had many problems, like any society before or since. Farms take a lot of physical work, and sometimes long hours, for little money. Their communities included the usual grudges and rivalries, boys who looked for trouble or girls who adored the wrong boys, men who loved their drink too much or their families too little. 

The pastoral Ireland of my neighbours’ memories also saw a lot of chaos, although you wouldn’t know it to listen to them. I talked with people born when the British Empire ruled Ireland, and they lived through the First World War, Ireland’s war for independence, an internal civil war, a Great Depression, the Second World War and decades of poverty, punctuated by the occasional terrorist attacks between Catholics and Protestants. I remember how terrified and panicked Americans were after the September 11 attacks; proportional to the size of the country, these must have been like a 9-11 every week or so. Earlier generations remembered worse; my neighbours might have known grandparents who survived the Famine, when half the country died or fled in the greatest genocide in modern Europe until the Holocaust. If you’ve ever listened to Irish folk songs, this is why they sound so sad.

I’m not saying they lived in a watercolour painting free of troubles; I’m arguing that they knew skills that could sustain their bodies, values that sustained their souls, and a social union that allowed them to be part of something larger and more important than themselves. Together, these things gave them a fulfilled and happy life, and a safer, more literate society than we have today – even when frightening things happened around them.

I’m not suggesting that we precisely copy their lives and culture; we couldn’t even if we wanted to. Many modern cubicle workers nurse fantasies of getting away from it all, going “off the grid” and living an all-natural, old-fashioned life, and I sympathise – to some extent, that’s what we did when we moved to rural Ireland. Yet few couch potatoes have developed the sinew and muscle for such a life, the toughness of mind and body, nor have the lifetime of skills to get fuel from a bog, meat from an animal or dinner from a field. On television we often see action heroes start a fire in the woods, hunt an animal or gallop away on a horse, but in reality those things take months or years of training, and most of us don’t need them.

Their lives demanded other, less obvious skills as well, which have also atrophied in recent generations – to play musical instruments and sing songs together, tell stories that will entertain people through the long winter nights. It required neighbours to make easy conversation, settle differences peaceably, and share with neighbours or face the consequences when you need their help later. We can’t join the communities they were part of, for they no longer exist; Ireland is a modern country now, and my neighbours a dying breed.

I am saying that the elderly people I’ve met here in rural Ireland grew up with less money than most modern panhandlers, and a lot less than most inner-city families, and endured hardships most of us can’t imagine – and yet lived as part of a healthy, happy, safe, civilised and highly literate culture. The same is true of older generations in many countries; while not all times and places were alike, many seemed to live better lives than we do, despite all our wealth and technology. I wanted to learn what I could from them, and see what they did right that we do not.