I’m not really sure this belongs in GD so I’ll put it here. Phil15 (I think) started a thread on the moral decay of America in GD.
Now, is this sort of attitude (we may have new things, but in the past things were better) uniquely Western?
In my Lit of Chivalry class last year I encountered the same attitude that the past was better in the material I was reading. When I brought it up, the teacher said it was a product of Judeo-Christian views, a Western concept stemming from the whole “Garden of Eden, we were in Paradise and new we’re not” idea.
So, do people in China grow up and think “When I was a boy, it was all better”? People in Africa? Indonesia?
There are lots of ancient Roman writings about how the old republic was better- more morality, ethics, etc. This was around 60BC to 1BC, when people were saying things were better a hundred years ago. I don’t think it’s a new thought, but I guess you could argue that ancient Rome is still Western thought
I don’t know about modern Eastern thought, but I’ve read that ancient Chinese philosophers like Lao-tse and Confucius would often refer to the “good old days” when people were more moral and less corrupt.
I think it’s fair to say that almost all “revolutionary” movements throughout the world have been REACTIONARY movements. That is, they’re almost always inspired by a widespread belief in a previous Golden Age when things were wonderful, and a desire to return to that time.
Many, perhaps most of us, have seen the famous quote that “the youth of today are unlike any other; they show no respect for their elders, and tyrannize their teachers.” The whole point of reading that quote is to get people nodding in agreement, talking about how much better behaved kids USED to be… and then telling them the quote was from Plato.
Even the ages we NOW view as “golden” didn’t necessarily seem so to the people who lived then! Progress always has victims, you know. What we NOW regard as marvelous advances in technology resulted in tremendous economic upheaval, and all sorts of skilled craftsmen and artisans lost their livelihoods as a result.
Actually every other culture but the Western puts it’s Golden Age in the Past. Western Culture is unique in that it puts our best years ahead of us. We have a sense of “progress” that until recently was completely alien to most of the world. This concept is a fairly new one, coming in with the Renaissance (ironically enough, a backward looking time amongst the intelligentsia). Also, as mentioned before, the very Christian idea that time is moving inexorably forward towards an “end time” can be contrasted with other concepts of time, which universally tend to view time as “circular”.
