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.

Thoughts on the past and future

A few posts ago I criticised the idea of progress, that everything has changed for the better and will continue to do so in the same way, on the same path forever. I explained how previous generations grew up in what we would consider poverty, yet in certain times and places were better educated than most Westerners today. Rural Ireland a few decades ago had poverty much greater than that of inner-cities today, yet their crime rate was miniscule. Americans in the 1950s rated themselves much happier than their grandchildren today, despite a veneer of technological improvements.  

I also criticised people's tendency to change the subject to terrible things from those same eras -- polio, for example, or bigotry. Bigotry cannot be measured, and I'm not confident that it exists less now than in 1950s America -- it's just been shifted around a bit. Polio has disappeared but other diseases have appeared that did not exist then. Even if you accept, though, that in some ways those times and places had terrible things -- they did -- that doesn't negate their positive qualities. Bringing back family dinners and classical education wouldn't bring back polio as part of a package deal.

If our generation stands at the pinnacle of history so far – if everything before was just a prelude to us – then the same mythology leads us to expect that the future will continue on this path. Ask someone today to describe the future – whether in kindergarten or an old folks’ home, white or black, rich or poor – and they will casually shrug and describe flying cars, mile-high skyscrapers and casual space vacations. No one seems very enthusiastic about it; it’s just that everyone has been raised with those images for the last century, and told such a future is both inevitable and good.

No one stops to consider the logistics of any of these futuristic developments. Take cars flying overhead – how do look out for crashes in three dimensions, including under the car? What happens when they crash over a city? What happens to people under exhaust vents when you try to land?

You can see the same meek acceptance of self-driving cars today. Companies talk enthusiastically about making them widespread, but most people struggle to muster much excitement about it. Nor have I ever seen a news article that talks through the effects of such a technology – who gets sued when it crashes? What happens when (not if) its controlling computer is hacked? How easy would it be to put a bomb on a self-driving car and drive it anywhere?

Moreover, when news media show image of the future, they tend to assume that our social problems have been solved; that a world of mile-high skyscrapers or flying cars would somehow be more peaceful or healthy. Yet covering the landscape with traffic jams didn’t make us healthier, and creating giant urban housing projects only ten stories high just created slums. Why would moving further along the same path produce different results?

Finally, few people ever point how long our culture has clung to the same hopeful images of the future, all without proving they would be an improvement, and all without making much headway towards them. Illustrations from the 19^th century described a future of helicopters and futuristic machines, and silent-movie comedies like Modern Times parodied a future of constant surveillance and labour-saving devices. Magazines in the 1950s and 60s teemed with articles describing the flying cars and domed cities readers were to expect in the 1990s, while “futuristic” movies in the 1980s and 90s depicted the amazing future of the early 2000s. Such amazing futures have always been a decade or two away for more than a century, and a century from now futurists might still be telling us they're just around the corner. 

Yet humans haven’t been to the moon since 1974, and space programmes have quietly been shut down as the spacecraft have gone obsolete. Technologies like nuclear power turned out to have their own problems, and some genuine improvements – say, vaccinations – have become less common as people have grown fearful of them. For generations of people raised on myths of the future, it turned out to never arrive, or be a big disappointment.

When I point this out to modern people, many grow defensive – a sign that they had a lot of dreams invested in certain images of the future – and say things like, At least our lives are an improvement over the past. But that brings us full circle; 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 crime is higher, and many things have declined, despite certain improvements. We strain to continue our faith in a futuristic future, yet the past looks better all the time.