One theme I keep coming back to in this blog is an annoyance at the notion that there was some perfect yesterday from which we are in decline. I notice it probably most often in those seemingly evergreen pieces that bemoan the state of “kids these days.”
Doghouse Riley takes down Maureen Dowd who apparently wrote one of those “things fall apart” columns in relation to the Jerry Sandusky matter. She suggests that our “formerly hallowed institutions” are sinking into a moral dystopia; leaving our sense of right and wrong more malleable. To which Doghouse responds:
Listen, I dunno about you, but I was filled to dyspepsia with mid-range Boomers like Dowd pretending there were such things as hallowed institutions and icons in their (my) youth, which have mysteriously sunk into anything in the interim, around two decades ago. Pius the Fucking Twelfth for the win, MoDo. These institutions were hallowed-out by the end of the 19th century. Did two World Wars escape your notice growing up? Maybe they weren’t routinely ignoring boy-buggering football coaches at Penn State in the 1950s. Would you care to guarantee it?
(Internal link added). This notion that humans have been in a state of decline since being ousted from Eden drives me nuts. It’s a kind of fatalism that’s frequently used to blame other (presumably lesser) people for things you don’t like. It allows you to sit on your ass, do nothing to change yourself or those around you, and bask in your moral superiority.
Humanity is not entirely good or entirely evil. We have a stunning array of coalitions of the two, both within ourselves and among others. Those coalitions are constantly regrouping, preserving, destroying and building. And if you think that, at one time, there was a center holding it together, that’s because you weren’t stepping back far enough to have much perspective. Like thinking the earth is the center because you have no notion of the sun or that the sun is the center because you have no notion of the galaxy, and on and on.
The kids are all right.
Very well stated. I do not if it is peculiarly American, but we Americans have an apocalyptic and fatalistic strain that runs from the bottom of our fungal toes, thorugh the racing stripes in our undergarments, up to our collective ahistoricalistic brains.
I wish I had more time to write now, but I am on a work jag. I think that this fatalistic and our sweet reminiscences come from our our delusions of American Exceptionalism (we are not, we floss our teeth just like the Finns) and our studied and anti-historicalism. And there is also a healthy dose of narcissism and dopamine in Americans to keep us acting like entitled PITAs.
Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years might be worth reading for its brilliant exposition on the Platonic origins of mainstream Paulinism.
I liked his book on the Reformation.
This is more a perception problem with the middle aged and elderly. Face it, our time is slipping past quicker and quicker every day so we romanticize how things were SO great when we were kids and how it’s all going downhill now. In truth it’s just us, and things will be fine for the kids. They’ll have to clean up our messes and will properly curse us for it when we’re gone (or earlier) and then moan about things were SO much better when THEY were kids and the circle rolls on.
I agree with you for the most part. All we can do individually is leave a legacy for our own kids that prompts them to exempt us from their indictments of our generation. Thank God my kids agree with me politically (or I with them)! We do have our differences, however, but I think one side or the other, or both, will mellow a little as we all age. At least the divides won’t get worse (crossing my fingers). Now, if only my son would get over here to fix this darn computer!
You should see the now-playing movie “Moonrise Kingdom” for a take on the good old days. Spoiler alert: I thought the storm was a metaphor. My husband thought it was just a storm.
A few years back the Colbert Report did a piece about this – they “interviewed” people about various decades, noting that, for example, the idealized 1950s had polio and segregation. I daydream about making that piece required viewing…