Why do so many people want to live in the past?

[AngryAmish]

Especially an idealized past that has no relation to how things actually were way back then?



"Here’s an idea. America needs to have a neomodernist party to oppose the reigning primitivists of the right, left and center. Let everyone who opposes abortion, wants to ban GM foods and nuclear energy, hates cars and trucks and planes and loves trains and trolleys, seeks to ban suburbia, despises consumerism, and/or thinks Darwin was a fraud join the Regressive Party. Those of us who believe that the real, if exaggerated, dangers of technology, big government, big business and big labor are outweighed by their benefits can join the Modernist Party. While the Regressives secede from reality and try to build their premodern utopias on their reservations, the Modernists can resume the work of building a secular, technological, prosperous, and relatively egalitarian civilization, after a half-century detour into a Dark Age."

[Zoeisright]

1. Because they know how it ended.

And we tend to idealize the past, emphasizing the good and minimizing the bad. It's a basic human trait. But only stupid people really and truly want to live in the past.

Oh, and good luck to them doing without vaccinations, clean water, clean food, and much of modern medicine.

[DCKit]

2. Separate checking accounts, I would hope. nt

[lumberjack_jeff]

3. I want to live in 1998.

It really was the good old days.

[KamaAina]

4. Excuse me?

The author conflates transit and smart-growth advocates like myself with the anti's and evolution deniers. :wtf:

[bluestateguy]

5. I'd kind of like to go back to pump first gas stations

and telegrams from Western Union too.

[Pancho Sanza]

17. Not to bum you out but all the gas stations around here are pump first

pay after.
:D

[jobycom]

6. because they know they survived it.

Notice how all these "Things were much better in the old days" folk predict some dire end if we continue to change? Armageddon, nuclear winter, the Rapture, 2012, Peak Oil... Not saying all of those have the same likelihood--certainly there are dangers in progress without controls and oversight, and concerns about Global Warming and over-exploitation of resources are legitimate--but love of the past is a fear of the unknown, and the future is always unknown. The past comes complete with pre-solved problems (even if they were once the future that everyone was afraid of), and the future is the realization of all the worst things that could happen. It's people's own fears projected onto a realm over which they feel powerless.

And sometimes that's not bad. The "Damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead" folk hit those torpedoes sometimes. It's not always bad to have someone warning of the dangers, to counter those who never see them.

That's my philosophical brilliance for the day. I'm going to get a coke. :)

[bigwillq]

13. You're going to go do coke?

:shrug:

Dude, the 1970s are over, man!

:rofl:

[jobycom]

15. The Hell tyou say!

My clock must have stopped sometime around Thriller...

[old mark]

7. First because they want to live in the past as they imagine it, not in the reality of it,

and second because the present sucks, at least to them...and the future seems to be getting even worse.

Someday, someone will recall this as a great time and wish they were back here again...all fantasy.


mark

[Kennah]

8. I'd be OK with ...

... the progressive tax rates and trade policies of the 1950s and 1960s.

[OHdem10]

9. Changes and Transitions in the overall society make people

fearful. It is human to want to retreat to something
more familiar.

Right after the 9/11 even high end restaurants started
serving comfort foods from the past;i.e, Meatloaf, Mac and
Cheese, Mashed or Whipped Potatoes. They had gotten
requests.

It is also human to have more idyllic visions of the past
--a more simple time can be appealing.

[DeSwiss]

10. "Why do so many people want to live in the past?"

- Because of:

1. Ignorance of history (often willful ignorance).
2. Fear of the future.

The transparency scam

It is a form of cultural ignorance to believe that at some point or other, we were more in charge and that our government was somehow more transparent in the past. Societies declining into obsolescence understandably resist looking forward, and hang onto their past mythologies. Consequently, both liberals and conservatives in America feed on myths of political action which died in Vietnam. The results are ludicrous. Tea Partiers attempt to emulate the 1960s protest gatherings by staging rallies sponsored by the richest beneficiaries of the status quo. For the average TP participant, the goal, near as I can tell, is to "start a new American Revolution," by wearing foodstuffs, screaming, threatening, and voting for nitwits. Media pundits proclaim the Tea Party "a historic populist movement."

Neither populist, nor authentic movement, the Tea Party may yet prove historic, however, by seriously fucking things up more than they already are. Spun entirely from manufactured spectacle (and thus void of cohesive political philosophy or internal logic), the Tea Party lurches across the political landscape bellowing at the cameras and collecting the victims of cultural ignorance in sort of a medieval idiots crusade. But to the American public, seeing the Tea Party on television is proof enough of relevancy and significance. After all, stuff doesn't get on TV unless it's important.

Progressives also fancy a revolution, one in which they participate through the Internet petitions, and media events such as the risk free Jon Stewart Rally to Restore Sanity, where no one risked even missing an episode of Tremaine. Seeing people like themselves on television was proof fighting the good fight. The Stewart rally was nonetheless culturally historic; we will never see a larger public display of post modern irony congratulating itself.

In the historical view, cultural ignorance is more than the absence of knowledge. It is also the result of long term cultural and political struggle. Since the industrial revolution, the struggle has been between capital and workers. Capital won in America and spread its successful tactics worldwide. Now we watch global capitalism wreck the world and attempt to stay ahead of that wreckage clutching its profits. A subservient world kneels before it, praying that planet destroying jobs will fall their way. Will unrestrained global capitalism, with all the power and momentum on its side and motivated purely by machinelike harvesting of profits, reduce the faceless masses in its path to slavery? Does a duck shit in a pond?

Meanwhile, here we are, American riders on the short bus, barreling into the Grand Canyon. With typical American gunpoint optimism, we've convinced ourselves we're in an airplane. A few smarter kids in the back whisper about hijacking and turning the bus around. But the security cop riding shotgun just strokes his taser and smiles. Not that yours truly has the ass to take on the security surveillance state. Hell no. I jumped out the window when the bus shot past Mexico.

http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2010/12/america-y-ur-peeps-b-so-dum.html">~Joe Bageant, "America Y UR Peeps B So Dum?"

K&R

[pampango]

11. The good ol' days were in your youth, which makes them good indeed. But the world

continues to change, even if we want it to stop, so we should embrace, and try to shape, rather than rail against it.

[HockeyMom]

14. Good points

and I make it a point to say so to those of my generation when they go on and on about how "good" the past was. Well, the past wasn't always so good and today isn't always so bad.

[WhiteTara]

12. ? They are afraid and yesterday is familiar. n/t

[Pancho Sanza]

16. Not sure about anybody else but I miss the days when my pecker was longer than

my memory...

[DonCoquixote]

18. AS someone who,

is under 40, but remembers when atomic war was a real likelihood, there is much about the past I do not want. Indeed, before the Obamas and Clintons destroyed the term centrist, I used to consider myself one because I disliked both the "greed is good" of the Yuppies, and the "anything past the 60's bad" mentality of some self described "hippies". There is only now and a yet to be.