Prufrock and SwooP have been tossing
some interesting volleys on the topic of "Was Then Better Than Now?" As I so often
am, I'm sorry SwooP's journal is password protected, because she had some points
well worth reading. It's not that often that you hear the past defended in a non-
kneejerk fashion. ("We were all tougher then. We walked two miles to school,
uphill each way, in the snow, and we were damned glad to do it!" being the more
usual refrain. Her thesis was that despite the undeniable gains, and she
specifically lauds the broadening of civil rights, in the 1940s through 1960s the
sense of community was far more pervasive than it is now, and that's a huge loss.
She's right about that, of course, though I still wonder how much of
it is regional. I have less community because I moved to where there is less
community. My parents still live in the same house where they raised me and they
still know their neighbors nearly as well as they did 30 years ago. (Some of them
are the same people, or the children of the same people.)
On the
other hand, though our neighborhood is not friendly at all, we do know our
neighbors on the airpark property up north. Not only do people there have the
common interest in flying, there are several group activates each year and between
the flying and the wonderful weather there, people seem to spend a lot more time
hanging around outside, watching runway activity and chatting. Also, though we
don't have the built-in community of a real neighborhood, I wonder if elective
communities, both real and virtual, haven't grown stronger than they once were.
Churches have often functioned as extended family, but now I've had that sort of
thing both in my rowing program and in my online community. Was that sort of
secular group as strong in the 1950s? Or was in just that the people you knew in
your sports team or your lodge meetings were your neighbors, so the
communities were one and the same? And of course, it's easier to meet people who
share one's more recherchè (I think I have that accent backwards) interests since
the advent of the Net. Maybe communities haven't died, just migrated out of the
immediate neighborhood. Of course, they're also less likely to last a lifetime,
and it would be easy to argue this is a sign of weakening.
I imagine
SwooP deliberately limited her argument to the relatively recent past; it's easy
to argue that any time before the common use of antibiotics was worse than the
present because now the vast majority of parents will be able to watch their kids
grow up. There are still some tragic deaths due to accident or disease, but
nothing like those Victorian or earlier parents had to deal with.
My
main argument for modern times, though, is neither of the above. It's true that
the past had some things that are a sore loss. It's equally true that the present
has quite a few facets that are hardly gains: long hours of work, technology that
eats our lives, the constant pressure on kids. I can't say that Now is
immeasurably better than Then, or that progress has been unalloyed with regress.
The major advantage I do see today is that many more of our problems are the
result of our choices -- or are at least easier to overcome by making different
choices. I can choose not to own a TV or a computer, or not to spend too many of
my hours on them; my grandmother could not choose to given my mother antibiotics
when she had spinal meningitis, in about 1945. I can choose a career and lifestyle
that will not require large amounts of overtime far more easily than my great-
grandmother could, back when she had three small children to support and no labor
laws to protect her (yes, I cheated there; that was well before the 1940s). And I
can choose to live in a neighborhood where people still talk to each other, or to
join other sorts of communities; Rosa Parks' predecessors could not choose to sit
in the front of the bus or avoid other sorts of discrimination, in the North as
well as the South.
So I would argue that things have gotten better.
Do we still have a long way to go? Oh yeah -- until there is no prejudice, no
"holy wars", no discrimination, we can't even claim to have completed the job in
the areas where we have made progress. And again, it's easy to argue that a
community of people who are right there, physically, is more useful than one you
have to go somewhere to see, or one that only exists the dance of electrons and
lightwaves across a network. The hardest thing may be to regain the past's
blessings while getting rid of its ugly parts.
Damme, I'm getting
pompous here again. Sorry.