We are desperate to keep ourselves separate from people in “the old days”

From Why the British love ghost stories by Aris Roussinos.  The topic is as the title indicates but in substance, Roussios focuses on the writer M.R.James.  An interesting and informative essay.

Commenter Edward Hamer has a thought.

An excellent essay – thank you very much.

I must say I think this is one of the most interesting subjects going. So much of modernity is an attempt to draw a bright line between ourselves and the people who came before, and to see ourselves as a new kind of people living in a fundamentally different and improved time. We are desperate to keep ourselves separate from people in “the old days”, and to reassure ourselves that we are safe in the egalitarian, electrically-lit, hygienic present.

It seems our efforts to maintain that illusion are becoming increasingly superstitious and neurotic. Without wishing to be boringly topical, I think that’s at the root of our reaction to the Covid business; we thought disease epidemics belonged to the old days, and to the world of black and white photographs of Spanish Flu patients, so we are falling over ourselves to make this a thoroughly modern epidemic so as to maintain that delusion.

I became a Catholic (and to attend the traditional Latin Mass) partly because I think that is the only way that we can heal this part of ourselves. The only real alternative to haunted modernity is the Communion of Saints.