The Good Old Days

Written by Jamie Wednesday, 25 January 2012 19:29

Most of society’s gains, such as the increase of rights for women and the working classes, just like the technological gains we’ve made, such as the free telephone calls we can now make, are usually taken for granted.  In order to understand this, I like to think about the good old days.  My father used to say that the good old days were awful.  His family had no money, no food, each bedroom was crowded.  There were old days, he used to say, but none of them were very good.

Why do we look back with such rose tinted glasses? Last night I was watching the movie Watchmen. One character, Silk Spectre, says to her daughter:

Oh, Laurie, you're still young.  You don't know.  Things change.  What happened happened 40 years ago.  I’m 67 years old.  Every day, the future looks a little bit darker.  But the past... even the grimy parts of it... keep on getting brighter.

We look back with rose tinted glasses not because things were better but because we were better.  We were younger, less close to death and our knees worked.  This feature of our maladapted brain is why some people end up becoming nationalists.  For example, a large number of Dutch citizens voted for Geert Wilders.  These citizens wish all these coffee coloured people would go away and that we could return to a time of blond haired Dutch farm girls milking the cows while the men worked the land and finished the day by drinking a biertje.  This romantic fantasy is driven by a deep fear of the current moment.

Fantasies are always a reflection of our desires.  When I am hungover, I dream about swimming in a mountain lake with clear water that I can drink.  We can learn something about our needs by listening to our fantasies.  Romantic fantasies of ‘the good old days’ reflect today’s uncertainty, they say nothing about the past and everything about the present.  The is how man made the Garden of Eden.  Imagine you are in the desert, starving, thirsty, your teeth are rotten, and to top it all off your camel is having an affair with your wife.  If your desire is for water, food and shelter, then how could you not create a fantasy that looks like the Garden of Eden?  Imagine, then, two desert goat herders meeting and chatting about this.  My goodness, they exclaim, I had the same dream!  It must be real, there must be a God!  In the face of uncertainty, there is no wonder many citizens go to bed and wake up to the same nationalistic ideas.

The good old days are in part an illusion, based on our fear driven fantasies.  But, as my father said, there is such thing as the past and the past, as he remembers it, was horrible.  Things really are better now than they used to be.  Let’s consider Matt Ridley’s take on this:

Imagine that it is 1800, somewhere in Western Europe or eastern North America.  The family is gathering around the hearth in the simple timber-framed house.  Father reads aloud from the Bible while mother prepares to dish out a stew of beef and onions.  The baby boy is being comforted by one of his sisters and the eldest lad is pouring water from a pitcher into the earthenware mugs on the table.  His elder sister is feeding the horse in the stable.  Outside there is no noise or traffic, there are no drug dealers and neither dioxins nor radioactive fall-out have been found in the cow’s milk.  All is tranquil; a bird sings outside the window.

Oh please!  Though this is one of the better-off families in the village, father’s Scripture reading is interrupted by a bronchitic cough that presages the pneumonia that will kill him at 53 - not helped by the wood smoke of the fire.  (He is lucky: life expectancy even in England was less than 40 in 1800.)  The baby will die of smallpox that is now causing him to cry; his sister will soon be the chattel of a drunken husband.  The water the son is pouring tastes of the cows that drink from the brook.  Toothache tortures the mother  The neighbour’s lodger is getting the other girl pregnant in the hayshed even now and her child will be sent to an orphanage.  The stew is grey and gristly yet meat is a rare change from gruel; there is no fruit or salad at this season.  It is eaten with a wooden spoon from a wooden bowl.  Candles cost too much, so firelight is all there is to see by.  Nobody in the family has ever seen a play, painted a picture or heard a piano.  [Etc., etc..] (The Rational Optimist, p. 13.)

The old days were dominated by oppression and poverty.  The same is true for our companies.  There was no golden time.  There is only a golden fantasy and that fantasy is always triggered when things in the present get tough.  We should not act on this fantasy but rather listen to it.  It is trying, desperately, to tell us something.