… everyone of a certain age, but especially those who love history, tend to assume everything was better in the past, because the present sucks so much.
For example, beer. As ganderson points out in the comments below, beer these days is better than it has ever been. I quote:
the “old” microbrew brands, like Sam Adams, Summit, Sierra Nevada, Brooklyn, etc, are shunned by many millennials as not hip enough.
The very fact that excellent suds like Sam Adams can be found in gas stations across the land — making it tragically un-hip — is all the proof you need of ganderson‘s thesis. I didn’t mean to leave the impression, below, that I consider Lone Star, Natty Lite, etc. to be good beer. They are, in fact, very bad beers. But since I went to college back in the days, and was on scholarship to boot, my choices were almost always between “bad beer” and “no beer”. And since beer, any beer, made me much more interesting and attractive to the opposite sex, and they to me, it was never really a choice at all. I have great sentimental attachment to Lone Star beer, but the very thought of drinking it gives me a hangover. […]
The modern world sucks, but lots of things are far better now. Cars, too. I know, I know, they’re mostly Karen-mobiles, but the muscle cars have a hell of a lot more muscle, and they’re orders of magnitude more reliable. I grew up in a world where you could reliably expect cars to start falling apart at 30,000 miles on the odometer – you expected to lose an alternator at 30, a starter at 50, and by 100K miles you’d have a beater, no matter how scrupulously maintained. These days, with just routine idiot maintenance 100K passes without a hitch. That’s a win, and if “shade-tree mechanic” no longer exists (since you need three computers and a special wrench just to get to the spark plugs), well … still a win.
Materially, these days, most things are better, and the things that aren’t better are cheaper, way cheaper. It’s an open question as to whether the latter fact is good or bad, but the fact is, materially life really is, in some ways, what the Leftards say it is. We pay the spiritual price for most of it, but when it comes to alcohol, at least, give me the Current Year.
Severian, “A Historian’s Fallacy”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-12-07.
July 26, 2023
QotD: Things were better in “the old days”
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A few years ago I had the opportunity to read a 1918 publication by the Department of Agriculture. One article of particular interest was essentially a survey of how to improve the lives of poor farming families. Recommendations included things like testing seed to make sure it’s viable, and that it’s what they were sold (swindling was extremely common). But one thing that really stuck out to me was the recommendation to grow vegetable gardens. People in the United States of America in 1918 were malnourished and starving because they were so poor they couldn’t afford to waste land on feeding themselves. THAT is the reality of the past.
When people say the past was better they always mean that they were (or would have been) higher status in the past. The reality is that the past was pretty horrific–not in ancient times (though it was there too) but in living memory.
As an aside, to be fair to the people of 1918, the tone of that report serves as a fascinating contrast to much of today’s writing on allegedly important issues. In 1918 the tone was very much “We have identified a problem, we’re working on solutions, let’s fix this.” You can imagine the writer rolling up his sleeves and getting down to business. In that way, I will confess to believing the past to be somewhat better than today–we’ve lost that mentality.
Comment by Dinwar — July 26, 2023 @ 07:56
About twenty years ago, I bought the Good Old Days – They Were Terrible by Otto L. Bettmann, which provided a couple of hundred pages of evidence that we should not be nostalgic about the way our grandparents and great-grandparents lived.
Your point about people imagining they’d somehow be part of the educated elite “back then” holds for almost every case of nostalgia for a time you weren’t around to live through. Everyone wistfully thinking about Jolly Olde England in the Middle Ages seems to think they’d be in the 1%, when they’d almost certainly be feudal peasants along with the vast majority supporting that 1%.
The 1918 “let’s fix this” mentality went away very quickly once bureaucracies were put in place to “fix” it. If your career depends on not fixing the problem, you’ll be very diligent at appearing to work towards a fix without making much, if any actual progress toward that goal. It’s just human nature. Volunteers can fix things, but professionals can only implement the process of assessing strategies to synergize all efforts to study, classify, identify, etc.
Comment by Nicholas — July 26, 2023 @ 10:37