We always think we’ll be the Lords, never the serfs.
You like gangsters? Are you aware of what they do?
The word you’re thinking of is *saudade *.
P. J. O’Rourke summarized this nicely (I’m paraphrasing): “For those who like to think there was some magical time in the past that was better than the present, I have one word: DENTISTRY.”
Yet another example of how movies romanticize things.
Maybe the past was better–For White Men. If you weren’t one, forget it.
I like modern diversity (both racial and feminist), dentistry, and the whole communications/technology bit.
The single best lesson I learned from James Burke’s “Connections” series back in the 70s was how fast change is happening. I could sort of see it then but now I am fully in the face of it and it is scary. My mom (in her 80s) struggles with all the digital machines and cnn’t always remember how to use the remotes any more, much less reset the clock on anything. I have to ask the Offspring how to use the iPod and PDA. The biggest shock I had to wade through was computers moving into the graphic arts. I had been trying to talk my company into getting them before I got pregnant. Afterwards it seemed like the whole world had gone to computers and I was still making buggy whips. I had a lot of catching up to do.
I have a deep enough understanding of human history to be fine in the age I live in but sometimes I think about how simple the 70s were before designer jeans and disco…
Who needs to make a stove? I can buy one on the Internet. I can even look up how to make one if I were so inclined.
My point was that people in the past understood the things and processes that people used, and nowadays that isn’t true. NOT that they needed to and could and we need to but can’t — I could not smelt my own silicon and pound it into motherboards, melt sand and blow a cathode ray tube etc etc and fabricate my own computer, but so far I manage to get by without that capacity, when I need a new one I go buy it — but just that it’s more alienating to live a life where so many aspects of “how people do things” involve technologies and processes that we have only a skim-the-top-surface kind of understanding of.
It’s akin to the observation that of two office workers typing and filing, the one who understands the documents’ contents and the role they play in the organization’s business is likely to have more job satisfaction than the one who has no idea what or why any of it exists other than “it’s work for me to do, this is my job”. Similar observations have been made about people paid to wire up boards: people who don’t even know what the boards are going into don’t identify with the company or the endeavor as much as those in comparable jobs who do.
I’ve been rereading my Foxfire books (shuddup. I need my CEU’s to keep my hippie cred.) recently, and the one thing I’m struck by is how little money these people NEEDED, because they had neighbors. To me, a neighbor is someone who lives near me who I may or may not like enough to invite to the barbeque, and who probably annoys me at least once a year with their noise, car parking in an inconvenient place, or yappy dog.
But these folks! Oh, my goodness. Have 300 bushels of corn to shuck? Call your neighbors. They’ll come over and do it for free if you feed ‘em dinner, and bring their instruments and have a singin’ in your barn at midnight when the work is done. Havin’ a baby? Midwife don’t charge nothin’, but if you want, give her a chicken and a new blanket. Need a house? Call the neighbors - they’ll help you chop down trees, split the logs and raise you a new house in two days - free of charge, just feed ‘em dinner. Four days for a barn. Need to get all that food - go wander the forest, I got recipes for poke sallet, dandelions and a hundred other free foodstuffs. Someone died? The neighbor’ll build the coffin while you and the women wash and dress the body and lay it out at home for a viewin’. Preacher don’t charge nothin’ for a funeral, it’s part of his job. We’ll dig the grave ourselves, with our neighbors to help.
Bein’ “neighborly” used to mean something completely different than it does now. Now it means minding your own business and MAYBE lending me an egg if I’m out and ask real nice and promise to pay you back when I can get to the store tomorrow (and I have only one neighbor I know even that well.) Then it meant dropping everything for a few days hard manual labor and no pay ‘cept knowin’ that you could call on them in return.
How many of us have friends that are suddenly busy when we need to move? Could you count on them to build you a house for free? Or even a toolshed?
Yeah, I’m nostalgic for that sort of life, all right. Near as I can tell, all our medical advancements haven’t conquered death, just delayed it a while. I’d rather live life filled with life and love and short than isolated, insulated and long. I might be able to buy a stove off the internet, but there’s something oddly satisfying about making a shirt starting from a lamb, and there’s a starvation of the spirit that comes from being essentially a helpless infant dependent on others for things you don’t understand all your life.
jumps off soapbox, with no idea how to build another one.
Well, not so much if you were in China or Japan. And most of the slaves in the Roman empire were white men.
Women were protected but had few rights.
Hey, those aren’t hippie books. They’re redneck books. I just started re-reading them, too. I just finished the one about blacksmithing and gun making.
To sum up what I think you just said: I don’t own all of my stuff, all of my stuff owns me and I have too much of it.
(This is directed to everybody who longs for the closeness and lack of materialism of yesteryear.) I can definitely see the charm in such a life, but not enough to actually partake in it. If I really wanted to, I could do so by leaving Canada and heading to, say, a farm in the Third World. I mean, there’d be language barriers, but heck–a professor from my town’s university was named honourary chief of an (African?) tribe with which he lives, so it isn’t as though fitting in would be impossible. Do many people take that route?
I can only speak for myself, but I’ve been lucky enough to live a mixture of contemporary and rustic lifestyles for most of my life. In fact, as I type this, I’m supposed to be figuring out how to change the local bus speed on an integrated PowerPC without getting bit by the pipelining of code on that bus. Last weekend, I was sawing my own lumber from a storm damaged tree.
There’s something to be learned from what WhyNot says, but at the same time, it’s easy to fall into a selective amnesia for the “good old days”. Let me see if I can create an example.
The other evening, I caught part of an episode of Dirty Jobs where they were using a team of mules to skid logs. The loggers were waxing nostalgic about the advantage of the mules over heavy equipement. Well, I’ve used a team of horses to grow a small (1/2 acre) garden as a teenager because we were too poor to have a tractor. It’s hard work. The horses are not low maintenance and it takes a lot of time. To take the example further, I’ve known a few old-timers that did such work full-time before tractors were readily available. It was brutal, boring, soul-crushing work. The same could be said for the coal miners, the lumberjacks, the railroad workers, etc. of earlier days.
Here’s a question for you, WhyNot as a thought experiment (I’m not trying to pick an argument with you, I just want to hear your thoughts). How would you like to know you would need to have 10-12 kids just to keep the family farm economically viable? How would you feel knowing that 2-3 of those kids would likely not live past their first year?
I’d better get back to work.
I always hear people say this and I guess there’s some truth to it, but I fail to see how life was that much better for Irish immigrants, poor Scots-Irish in the South, Eastern European immigrants coughing up their lungs after working in the coal mines every day with no unions, and a lot of other white people that got the shit end of the stick. I think what you really mean to say was that the past was better if you’re a rich white male.
Exactly! That’s why it’s in a thread about nostalgia. No, I don’t actually want to live like that - or at least, not enough to ditch my husband, who doesn’t want a life like that, and go live on The Farm or some other self-sustaining community. But I’m nostalgic for it, because, as you say, I can be wistful for the things that I like and ignore the things I don’t. But, at the same time, I agree with **AHunter3 **that people who dismiss nostalgia or appreciation for “the old ways” with arguments about how everything is so much better today miss a valuable point. No, not EVERYTHING is better. Some things are better and some things are worse. What a wonderful world it would be if we could reclaim the good parts of then and retain the good parts of now!
Well, I wouldn’t have lived past number 2 without modern antibiotics, so it’s rather a moot point. I would be saddened at the thought of my babies dying, of course, just like people were back then. I would have loved to be pregnant and give birth that many times and raise all those kids, though.
Plus, of course, modern medicine is no guarantee of a healthy child. The odds are better, of course, but I think that leads to its own problems - people nowadays feel entitled to a healthy child, and if they don’t get it, are devastated and feel that someone must be to blame, perhaps themselves. I suspect I would have actually taken some comfort in the fact that my best friends and neighbors had lost children and could understand my grief, instead of feeling like I was totally on my own.
I think at least one thing that was better in the past was craftsmanship - traditional metal and wood working, particularly in home interiors. I think most newly-built homes have zero character.
You can get that today, if you have enough $$$ 
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Yes because the cost of craftsmanship has gone up, because the pool of skilled laborers has gone down, because nobody wants to take apprenticeships in skilled trades anymore, because everybody feels the need to go to fucking college and spend 4 years sleeping in class and getting a bullshit degree!!! AAARGGHH!!! Now get the fuck off my fucking lawn!
The argument I’ve heard against this and similar arguments ( for home cooking instead of supermarkets, or craftsman made furniture instead of the mass produced stuff, say ) is that is was only true if you had access to or could afford a good craftsman/cooks/whatever. If you didn’t, then you put up with whatever crude stuff the not-good craftsman ( or whatever ) managed to produce, or did without.