Maybe the old days weren't as good as we think
21/06/23 02:30
The events of the past week have got me to thinking about the past. Last Thursday I turned seventy. Over the weekend we celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary. The actual day of our wedding was June 22, so tomorrow will be the anniversary. We adjusted the celebration of our anniversary so that our daughter and son-in-law could attend our celebration and also be present at his parent’s 50th. They were married the day after we were and live in Virginia, so having the two celebrations on the same weekend wouldn’t have worked. We get along well and the adjustment in the time of the celebration was not difficult to negotiate.
Being 70 years old and having been married 50 years does give me a bit of perspective on the passage of time. I have become one of the elders of our family.
Although we have a number of friends who are in our age range, we were among the elders at the celebrations of the past week. We were not, however, the oldest participants. My sister, who is nearly two years older than I was there. A brother-in-law is eight years older than I. Some of our friends are a few years older as well. Still, I think it is reasonable for me to claim a bit of perspective on time, especially when compared with our children’s generation. I observed our children in conversations with their cousins and others their age. They are active in their careers and are in positions of decision-making in several arenas of life. The pastors of our church are the generation of our children.
Still, I am younger than the President of the United States. There are a lot of senators and members of the House of Representatives who are older than I.
From my point of view, however, I find that one of the most common political assertions to be inaccurate. I disagree with those who claim that the past was somehow better than the present, that the culture is undergoing a moral decline, and that there is some kind of a mythical golden age to which we ought to return. Unlike the rhetoric of many politicians, I am not convinced that the present is somehow worse than the past. I’m not sure that there is a golden age that needs to be restored.
I know that I have no desire to go back to some other period in my own life. I like being the age that I am. I enjoy having been married for 50 years. Sure there are things about the past that I miss, primarily people who I have known and loved who have died. But I would not wish for a time before my grandchildren were born. I do not want to go back to the 1950’s when I was a child or the 1970’s when I was a newlywed. I’m not eager to return to the 1980s when we lost a lot of sleep caring for our children when they were very young. I like those memories. I enjoy remembering those times, but I am quite content living in the present.
Politicians have use a promise of a return to an imagined golden age through history. From Caesar Augustus to the Medicis and Adolph Hitler, leaders have gained power by vowing a return to the good old days. President Xi Jinping of China, and President “Bongbong Marcos of the Philippines have spearheaded campaigns that promise to restore the past. Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” and Joe Biden’s “America is Back” both include promises to return to an imagined better era of the past. Religious leaders have often touted forms of “original sin” that imagine people to be somehow morally worse than they were before some ancient fall from grace.
As the old joke goes, the thing that makes the good old days seem good is that we weren’t so old.
I need to say that I am not convinced that things are getting worse. Sure there are some consequences of past overconsumption and injustice that have come to light. The pace of environmental destruction has sped up. The peril of life on this planet is evident. I am not pleased with the violence in American schools and the frequency of mass shootings in our country. But it seems to me that there have been threats of destruction for all of my life. Today’s children have active shooter drills in school. When I was a student, we were taught to crawl under our desks in case of a nuclear war. The thread of violence has hung over the heads of children for a long time.
I think that we are prone to believe that things have gotten worse because of several cognitive biases. While polls and studies have shown that the majority of people believe that humans are less kind, honest, ethical, and moral today than they were in the past, there is little evidence that this conclusion is objectively accurate. In fact there are some studies that demonstrate that humans have become less violent and more cooperative. Some of the most heinous forms of human immorality such as genocide and child abuse are declining. Social scientists have been measuring cooperation rates between strangers in lab-based economic games for decades. A recent analysis of these results found that cooperation has increased 8 percentage points over the last 61 years. There is hard evidence that our children and grandchildren are not less moral than we.
Rather than imagining that we need to go back to the golden age, I choose to believe that there is evidence that the future is bright precisely because we are moving ahead, not backwards. I find less racial bias and the promise of a decrease in racial injustice as our society moves forward. My grandchildren are growing up with more capacity to accept those who are different from themselves than was the case with my generation. Leadership for climate justice has come from people who are a lot younger than I.
As I look back, I am aware that my brain sorts my memories. I am far more able to remember pleasant experiences than painful ones. The pain of loss and grief fade with time while the joys of faith and love grow stronger. Looking at my wife I can easily remember the joy of our first date. It is harder for me to remember the feeling of tiredness when we were getting up multiple times in the night to care for infants. Just because I am better at remembering positive experiences than pain does not mean that things are getting worse with time, however. It is simply a cognitive bias of which I need to be aware.
So I choose hope in this world. I choose to believe that people are getting better. And I believe that I have a lot of evidence on my side. I probably would be a horrible politician. I would not promise to bring back the past. I would challenge us to build a better future. And I’d love to support a politician who issued that challenge.
Being 70 years old and having been married 50 years does give me a bit of perspective on the passage of time. I have become one of the elders of our family.
Although we have a number of friends who are in our age range, we were among the elders at the celebrations of the past week. We were not, however, the oldest participants. My sister, who is nearly two years older than I was there. A brother-in-law is eight years older than I. Some of our friends are a few years older as well. Still, I think it is reasonable for me to claim a bit of perspective on time, especially when compared with our children’s generation. I observed our children in conversations with their cousins and others their age. They are active in their careers and are in positions of decision-making in several arenas of life. The pastors of our church are the generation of our children.
Still, I am younger than the President of the United States. There are a lot of senators and members of the House of Representatives who are older than I.
From my point of view, however, I find that one of the most common political assertions to be inaccurate. I disagree with those who claim that the past was somehow better than the present, that the culture is undergoing a moral decline, and that there is some kind of a mythical golden age to which we ought to return. Unlike the rhetoric of many politicians, I am not convinced that the present is somehow worse than the past. I’m not sure that there is a golden age that needs to be restored.
I know that I have no desire to go back to some other period in my own life. I like being the age that I am. I enjoy having been married for 50 years. Sure there are things about the past that I miss, primarily people who I have known and loved who have died. But I would not wish for a time before my grandchildren were born. I do not want to go back to the 1950’s when I was a child or the 1970’s when I was a newlywed. I’m not eager to return to the 1980s when we lost a lot of sleep caring for our children when they were very young. I like those memories. I enjoy remembering those times, but I am quite content living in the present.
Politicians have use a promise of a return to an imagined golden age through history. From Caesar Augustus to the Medicis and Adolph Hitler, leaders have gained power by vowing a return to the good old days. President Xi Jinping of China, and President “Bongbong Marcos of the Philippines have spearheaded campaigns that promise to restore the past. Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” and Joe Biden’s “America is Back” both include promises to return to an imagined better era of the past. Religious leaders have often touted forms of “original sin” that imagine people to be somehow morally worse than they were before some ancient fall from grace.
As the old joke goes, the thing that makes the good old days seem good is that we weren’t so old.
I need to say that I am not convinced that things are getting worse. Sure there are some consequences of past overconsumption and injustice that have come to light. The pace of environmental destruction has sped up. The peril of life on this planet is evident. I am not pleased with the violence in American schools and the frequency of mass shootings in our country. But it seems to me that there have been threats of destruction for all of my life. Today’s children have active shooter drills in school. When I was a student, we were taught to crawl under our desks in case of a nuclear war. The thread of violence has hung over the heads of children for a long time.
I think that we are prone to believe that things have gotten worse because of several cognitive biases. While polls and studies have shown that the majority of people believe that humans are less kind, honest, ethical, and moral today than they were in the past, there is little evidence that this conclusion is objectively accurate. In fact there are some studies that demonstrate that humans have become less violent and more cooperative. Some of the most heinous forms of human immorality such as genocide and child abuse are declining. Social scientists have been measuring cooperation rates between strangers in lab-based economic games for decades. A recent analysis of these results found that cooperation has increased 8 percentage points over the last 61 years. There is hard evidence that our children and grandchildren are not less moral than we.
Rather than imagining that we need to go back to the golden age, I choose to believe that there is evidence that the future is bright precisely because we are moving ahead, not backwards. I find less racial bias and the promise of a decrease in racial injustice as our society moves forward. My grandchildren are growing up with more capacity to accept those who are different from themselves than was the case with my generation. Leadership for climate justice has come from people who are a lot younger than I.
As I look back, I am aware that my brain sorts my memories. I am far more able to remember pleasant experiences than painful ones. The pain of loss and grief fade with time while the joys of faith and love grow stronger. Looking at my wife I can easily remember the joy of our first date. It is harder for me to remember the feeling of tiredness when we were getting up multiple times in the night to care for infants. Just because I am better at remembering positive experiences than pain does not mean that things are getting worse with time, however. It is simply a cognitive bias of which I need to be aware.
So I choose hope in this world. I choose to believe that people are getting better. And I believe that I have a lot of evidence on my side. I probably would be a horrible politician. I would not promise to bring back the past. I would challenge us to build a better future. And I’d love to support a politician who issued that challenge.
