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When looking back at the past, people often speak of "the
world as it was" and of "how good we had it." Others will speak of the
ever-present pair of rose-tinted glasses--and how wrong people are about those
days gone by. Somewhere in between is a reasonable position of looking
backwards.
First, allow me to be clear: I'm sitting under a tree in a
car from 1993 writing this article with software from 1997 on a laptop from
2004. There's a definite bias here beyond a simple "it was convenient," and
I'll readily admit to it. Some things just work better. Some things are just
"better." (The jury's still out on the car. The roof's a bit leaky, the AC
doesn't work, and the muffler decided to come ajar and set itself to the
factory-optional "annoy the neighbors" setting a few months ago.) The question
is whether or not there's a reasonable argument to be made about the past being
better.
Take a look at the nostalgia-baiting accounts. They'll
post advertisements and architecture from decades ago and shout "Life was so
much better in <insert decade here>! We have to return!"
Right. That's the past the marketing department wanted you
to see. It's a flashy picture of the latest Walkman, a spacious airliner cabin
(with included dining room), or perhaps that Countach you're still drooling
over twenty years later. It was the era where Diet Pepsi was the drink that
attracted girl-watchers, regular Pepsi painted an entire Concorde, and Coke was
off doing whatever Coke did in the 1990s. And let's not forget the gameshows,
video arcades, theme parks, and Radio Shack.
(I still miss Radio Shack.)
Peel away the magazine covers, flashy music, and "my MTV," though, and you'll
see a completely different world. Apart from the rise of the Internet
(which--don't get me wrong--is a major change), their world is a lot like ours.
You listen to the music for longer than ten minutes and you hear people
bemoaning the same strains echoed on today's Twitter feeds--racial infighting,
sexual immorality, wars, death, destruction, and so forth. We sugarcoat the old
days with a coat of whatever paint they used back then and say "It was better,"
when, in reality, the world has never changed. Has it worsened in the
intervening decades? Certainly. Free-flowing information has a penchant for
creating both great societal value and terrible decay. When you open the
floodgates for anyone to say anything, it would be unreasonable to expect that
people would behave themselves.
In other words, we make the past we want to see. If your
memory of a given period is that of social triumph and corporate glory, you
lament the loss of the office watercooler and the Reagan politic. If you miss
"free love" and long-haired hippies, you might lament the Dobbs opinion and
going to the barbershop. If you're one of those guys who wants to RETVRN to the
Roman Empire... got nothing for you, sorry.
The issue with writing your own past is that it ignores
specific facts that made the era what it was. In order to properly go back to
an era, everything about that era would have to fall into place. There might be
a "way things ought to be done" that a given time period did better than
another (I still prefer dense interfaces to modern OS), but those are often
practices based upon limitations and not binding moral law. When moral law
issues do come up, we might as well argue that it's based on "the truth"
instead of "how we've always done it" or that "people did it better back then."
(Sin is sin, regardless of whether it's 980 or 1980.) I'm sure there were
coalitions of drivers who preferred horses with buggies just as much as there
are coalitions of end users who prefer Windows 10 to Windows 11. People will
always complain about change, even when it's better.
(For the record, Windows 11 is categorically not
better.)
All that to say this: When looking at the past, don't look
at it from the perspective of "we can never do this again" or "we have to go
back." It exists in a space to learn from. Take what worked and use it. Take
what didn't work and apply that knowledge to make something better. It's
perfectly fine to appreciate an era for what it was and build new things based
around what you like about it. Do not, however, assume that the era you see in
photographs and documents is what actually was. The camera and pen will only
record what the operator directs them to, and inventive framing has been around
for almost as long as humans have.
(See also: Architecture photography, Eve blaming the serpent for sin she
committed, and every use of "the dog ate my homework.")
- Echovita
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