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.

Comparing eras

When I praise the Ireland that my elderly neighbours remember, or the America my grandfather knew, or any other time and place for that matter, I get some strange reactions; quite often people grow angry and defensive, and change the subject to something terrible from the same era. If I mention the self-sufficiency of traditional Ireland to someone, they often retort that people had very little money, which is true. If I talk about Americans being happier in the 1950s, and suggest we look at bringing back the values and habits that made them happier, someone usually sneers, ‘Sure, why don’t you bring back polio while you’re at it.’

The magic of these responses is that they can be applied to any time and place, as there’s always something terrible happening somewhere. I suppose the logic goes that if a society in generations past saw injustices or tragedies, they have nothing to teach us, as their advantages and disadvantages came as a package deal. Since no human society has ever been perfect, this provides a good excuse never to have to learn hard lessons from anyone.

Of course, sensible people learn from their ancestors without passing down their shortcomings. Strict Constitutionalists hold to the 18th-century ideals of the Founding Fathers, but don’t think they have to treat people with leeches in keeping with 18th-century medicine. Evangelists who admire the fire of the second-century Christians never think that they should try to bring back leprosy or barbarian hordes. 

It is true that polio -- just to run with that example -- devastated thousands of lives a year; surely certain families affected by the disease saw a decrease in their happiness, and everyone’s lives improved when the vaccine was found. Still, more Americans said they were happier then than say they are happy now, and those numbers remain true whether polio existed or not. They had no umbilical connection; if we brought back the things that made that era great, we wouldn’t be bringing back polio.

What’s more, no one ever applies the same logic to our own era. To keep going with the disease example, we have eliminated polio and other plagues, but new ones like AIDS have appeared to take their place, and AIDS kills more people than polio did. Yet if you point out the good things about life today – say, that we can easily call the other side of the world – no one sarcastically quips that you must be a fan of AIDS. Nor does AIDS dominate our lives, except for the fraction-of-a-percent of the population who have contracted it, and the same was true of polio a century ago. Nor does the existence of those problems make all the world’s blessings disappear.

I’m not sure why modern Americans get so defensive when I praise anything from any other era, other than that they think their own culture is entitled to first prize in every category, even ones they don’t ordinarily care about. I know many people who seethe when I suggest that our generation is not the most literate, for example, yet it would never occur to them to open a book themselves. When I point out that Americans today don’t know much about science anymore, people look outraged, even though they carry very little knowledge and a lot of misinformation.  

Even if people today don’t believe their country tops the world in every category, they tend to believe their generation to be the smartest, healthiest and best at everything, and that anything before them falls short. Certainly that’s the message we get from seeing Hollywood movies or television shows – which, let’s be honest, is where most people get their images of the past.

A typical Oscar-bait film shows a bygone era – 1950s America, Edwardian England, the 19th century frontier – as a time of ignorance and hatred, until a brave visionary stood for something vaguely like what Hollywood believes today. No wonder most people think they have nothing to learn from their forebears. 

Photo: local kids riding through town. Most go with cars, which travel faster; on the other hand, cars don't have good horse sense or a personality, can't live on grass, and don't make more of themselves.