The problem with nostalgia
I belong to a Facebook group of people who grew up in my hometown. It’s a forum for sharing memories. I think nostalgia is fun, but I know it’s not real. It’s falsified memory - memory through a cloud of unknowing. It might even be a kind of mental illness. Some people in this group are carried away with the delusion that the past was better than the present. Okay, let’s consider that. So, when was the Golden Age? When were times good? When were they better than the present? I grew up in the 1970s. Honestly, the 1970s were pretty crappy. Let’s be completely arbitrary on a whim and say the Good Old Days were about a century ago. Since nostalgia is delusional it doesn't really matter when in the past I choose. Some cadre of dreamers will advocate any time in the past so long as it’s not the present. Preferably, so far in the past as to be insulated from modern statistical study.
Nostalgia might even be a kind of mental illness.
Crime was low, children could play safely in the streets unsupervised, and most people knew their neighbours. Life expectancy for Canadians was about 56 years. Infant mortality was about 125 deaths per 1,000 live births. Average annual income for Canadians was about $600. Antibiotics didn’t exist yet. Women had the right to vote, but they were not recognized as legal “persons” until the start of the Great Depression. Don’t get me started on the condition of minorities. The Statues of Westminster were still in the future. Only a little more than half the population finished high school. There were only about 1,000,000 cars in Canada, and road and highway development reflected that. Rail was still the primary long-distance mover. I like rail. Indoor plumbing and modern sewerage were still in the nascent stage. (My own grandparents’ house used a hand pump in their kitchen to draw water from a basement well right into the 1970s.)
Universal health care didn’t exist yet. Labor standards laws; food and drug safety laws; civil rights; universal literacy were only dreams. Smallpox and polio were unchecked and uncheckable. People thought radiation was therapeutic. The chance of any individual dying violently was measurably higher than it is today (meaning that the world is actually safer and more peaceful now than at any time in recorded history, despite the industrial scale wars of the last century, and despite the apocalypticism of the religious right).
The Good Old Days weren’t really so good.
The Good Old Days weren’t really so good. So, when some people stubbornly insist that times were better in the past, what do they mean? I guess they mean that they feel they were less challenged, more entitled and more powerful in the past, and psychologically more secure. They have seized on to a fantasy to comfort them in times of change. The greater the change, the more comfort they need, the more false memories they indulge in. It’s kind of a circle.
But I could be wrong.