It seems the first society was also the first nostalgic society.

From Open: The Story of Human Progress by Johan Norberg

When were the good old days?

In a wonderful episode of the podcast Pessimists Archive, Jason Feifer explored nostalgia throughout history. If you want to make America great again, you have to ask yourself when America was great, he thought. The most popular answer seemed to be the 1950s. So then he asked scholars of the 1950s whether they thought that was the good old days. Definitely not. People were worried about race and class, riots in American cities and the very real threat of instant nuclear annihilation. There was anxiety about rapidly changing family life and especially the new youth cultures and mindless, consumer-oriented students on campus. American sociologists warned that rampant individualism was tearing the family apart. And by the way, in this era that we remember as tranquil, job churn was much more rapid than today. Many pointed to the 1920s as the good old days.

However, back in the 1920s, people worried about how rapid technological change was threatening our fundamental sanity – radio and recorded music gave us too much speed and too much choice. So did the automobile, which would probably ruin the morals of the young. In the New York Times, you could read on the front page that scientists had concluded that ‘AMERICAN LIFE IS TOO FAST’. The famous child psychologist John Watson warned that increasing divorce rates meant the American family would soon cease to exist. Many romanticized the calmer lifestyle of the late 1800s. Seeing how family life was changing, some began to idealize the Victorian family, when they thought that fathers were really fathers, mothers true mothers, and children respected their elders.

But at the turn of the century, the railroads, the telegraph and rapid urbanization were undermining traditional communities and ways of life. And everybody worried about a fast-spreading disease: neurasthenia. The idea was that the unnatural pace of life sapped people of energy, and gave them neurasthenia, which could express itself in anxiety, headaches, insomnia, back pain, constipation, impotence and chronic diarrhoea. The Victorian middle classes handled the transitions of the era by becoming the first generation to value the old as such; they started to care about antiques and covered their walls with portraits of ancestors. The historian John Gillis has shown that their fear of urbanization and work outside the household ruining family life led them to invent the notion of a traditional family life that has been lost – a time that was simpler, less problematic, more rooted in place and tradition. They felt life before the Industrial Revolution was better. In the US, many longed for the quiet, happier life in the days before the civil war.

Before the Industrial Revolution family life was indeed different. Around half of a birth cohort died before they were fifteen years old, and 27 per cent of those who survived were fatherless by the time they reached that age. The share of marriages broken up by death was similar to the share broken up by divorces today. Most families sent children away to live in other households as servants or apprentices.  After the French Revolution, Edmund Burke thought, ‘The age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.’  In America, many worried the republic had somehow lost its way since the founders created it.

Jason Feifer and the scholars he talked to continued to look for the good old days, and kept wandering further back into the past, until they finally reached ancient Mesopotamia, five thousand years ago. After having invented civilization and writing, it didn’t take more than two centuries before humans started writing about how difficult life is now and how it must have been so much easier in the past.  It seems the first society was also the first nostalgic society.

The American scholar Samuel Noah Kramer found examples of the Sumerians in cuneiform script complaining about how their leaders abused them and the merchants cheated and, above all, how family life was not what it used to be.  One clay tablet frets about ‘the son who spoke hatefully to his mother, the younger brother who defied his older brother, who talked back to the father’.  On an almost four-thousand-year-old clay tablet, Kramer found the story of Enmerkar and the land of Aratta, and expression of the idea that there was once a golden age of peace and security, and that we had since fallen from this blessed state:

Once upon a time, there was no snake, there was no scorpion, There was no hyena, there was no lion,

There was no wild dog, no wolf,

There was no fear, no terror,

Man had no rival. […] 

The whole world, the people in unison,

To Enlil in one tongue gave praise.

In other words, if you happen to think we have uniquely difficult problems today, with a more rapid pace of life, corrupt rulers and unruly youngsters, don’t trust your feelings. Every generation has thought the same. Every generation has interpreted its struggle with the human predicament and the difficulty of relationships as a sign that things have become worse since a supposedly more harmonious time in the past.

One important explanation for this historical nostalgia is that we know we survived these problems, so in retrospect they seem smaller.  Otherwise we wouldn’t be here. But we can never be certain we will be able to solve the problems we are facing today.  That has been the predicament of every generation, and that is why we always look back at a simpler time.  We know the radio didn’t ruin the young, but we don’t know if the smartphone will.  We know we survived smallpox and polio, but we don’t know about Ebola or the coronavirus.  We know the planet didn’t blow up during the Cold War, but who can say for sure that we won’t do it this time around?  And this also leads us to forget the terrible anguish our ancestors suffered when dealing with what were then the worst difficulties that they could imagine.

Another reason is that we often confuse personal nostalgia with the historical sort. When were the good old days?  Was it by chance the one incredibly short period in mankind’s history when you were alive and – more importantly – young?  I can’t say anything certain about you, of course, but whenever I ask people this question, that is the most common answer.  And polls bear this out.  A British study found that people in their thirties think life was better in the 1990s than today.  Brits in their fifties prefer the 1980s, and those over sixty think life in the 1960s was the best.  A US poll found that those born in the 1930s and 1940s thought the 1950s was America’s best decade, while those born in the 1960s and 1970s preferred the 1980s.  (It is interesting that the great nostalgic 1980s television show was Happy Days, set in a glamorous version of  the 1950s. And thirty years later, we had another influential, nostalgic television series, Stranger Things, now looking back fondly on the fashion and music of the 1980s.)