Nostalgia
I’ve been doing some thinking lately. It all started when I was listening to a lecturer discuss the drawbacks and benefits to globalization. He was not trying to argue one side over the other, but was wiling to accurately characterize both sides of the issue. (In Madison, believe it or not, we hear a lot more about the negatives.) His main point was that in the last 50 years, global GDPs grew at almost 2% and more people rose out of poverty than any other time in history. This, at the same time as the rise of globalism. Causation? Maybe. Correlation? Certainly.
This got me thinking about nostalgia and the curse of wishing things were “like the good old days.” I think that our culture in particular has a problem with romanticizing too much about the past. In the context of the globalization debate, this leads people to argue against the accompanying culture shifts for no reason other than a nostalgia for the way things were. What people often forget is that things were pretty terrible for a lot of people for most of history. We don’t know much about the plight of the common man, largely because no one cared to record his history. The sweatshop worker equivalent 1000 years ago (or even 100 years ago, for that matter) was in no better or worse shape than the sweatshop workers of modern times. The difference now is that we have (more or less) global free press to bring the sweatshop workers’ plight to our attention.
This problem with romantic nostalgia is a severe impediment to national politics as well. I cringe whenever I hear some politician spouting off his or her desire to bring back the era of “family values” (read: Christian values) or fretting about the lack of innocence in children. As far as I can tell, our culture today is no less valued and our children are no less innocent. The only difference I can see is that we actually talk openly about personal problems. There were abusive parents, drug addicts, and sexual predators 50, 100, and 1000 years ago. To pretend otherwise is foolish and ignorant.
I would like to see people acknowledge and accept the fact that we’re not perfect. We’re all humans, trying to scrape out our own little existence and fighting against the internal conflicts inherent with the human condition. Our modern culture is no better or worse at dealing with life. (Just more open about it.) Be very careful when you find yourself feeling nostalgic for a time past. Chances are, those good old days exist only in your head.
Filed under Uncategorized : Comments (0) : Apr 13th, 2006 by tadfad
