When I was writing yesterday, the entry really went in a different direction than what I had in mind. I'm not much of a nostalgic person* but I do begin to wonder if some aspects of the past were not preferable to what we've got now. Some of these thoughts center around communication and technology. Now, I'm as crazy about the benefits of computers as anyone. I'm more ambivalent about cell phones. It's great being about to be in touch, to call Susan from the grocery and ask if what I've got in my hand is the right thing. But texting and talking in virtually any venue? Including vehicles . . . when you're at the wheel? Please. Video game boxes that keep kids hypnotized for hours and hours? Computer games that do the same? Somehow, my gut tells me that these phenomena can't really be progress. Other things too: virtual depiction of sex on TV and in movies, debasement of the language, the pervasive fear in this society (a flotilla of cars at every school because parents are too scared to let their kids walk 2-3 blocks). How cold and hard we've become towards people we used to think it was our responsibility to care for: mentally ill, needy children, immigrants.
I was also thinking about the general decline of literacy in our society. Computers have something to do with this. Used to be there was a certain shared body of knowledge that everybody learned in high school, grammar school, even. No more. (Maybe I'm delusional, but quite a few of my contemporaries sense the same thing.) The vast sea of ignorance in which we all swim and sail is unfathomable. Used to be that reading was a leisure activity for a lot more people than it is now. People in society used to be more polite, more respectful of one another. Right. Well, that's gone.
Everything used to seem so much simpler back when. Is that because we were ignorant of all kinds of stuff we know now? Yeah, probably. But I can still miss those simpler times. I wish I didn't know half the crap I know now that just makes things seem worse.
(I decided I would allow myself this one wistful commentary on what used to be, hastening to assure you that I'm through whining.)
*I do have sentimental attachments to some strange things. Little trinkets are scattered all over my bookshelves. I still have the baseball glove and ball I used to toss around with my boys. (I've thought about how much fun it was to play catch, but then realize that I would no doubt really hurt my arm--at least make it sore for some time--and I wouldn't be able to throw as hard or as far.) Remembrances from out time in Germany: some mugs, maps, a smoker, a couple of albums of wine and beer labels. Susan and I have copies of just about every greeting card we've given each other over the 40+ years we've been married, a chronicle of our deepening love for one another. I'm loathe to part with them.
4 comments:
i love the things you're sentimental about. pretty much everything in my apartment has a person or group of people or important experience in my life attached to it. past=present= etc....
certainly there are aspects of the collective past i miss, but i think you're right about it being 'simpler' b/c we knew less. that, and the fact that the past is so secure: you can't worry about what will happen in it. and then, my favorite will rogers line---things ai't the way they used to be, and maybe they never was.....
how much child rape, wife battery, etc, was going on that most of us didn't know about? for those to whom it was happening, it certainly wasn't better. emmet till, mississippi summer, coat-hanger abortions........we may have too much info now, but we certainly had too little then. though so much of the info we have anyway is the wrong info, controlled by the same kinds of people who controlled us then.
literacy--drives me crazy, trying to teach college students how to write a sentence. but even there, 'computer lieracy,' all that stuff--maybe really is just a new kind of literacy, as oral traditions were once the 'literacy' of most poeple. all that stuff.
You're right, of course, and I know that. We knew a lot less, which as you point out is pretty much the definition of "simple."
I like your observation that the past is secure. This really says it all. We know how the story ends there in the past. But part of the consequence of knowing so much more, is realizing that some stories that have awful endings keep getting told over and over again.
And you're also correct about the quality of our information. The only way you can be equipped to judge it, evaluate it's credibility is to be literate, so you see what a vicious circle we are in--or is it a downward spiral?
there's much to be said for 'ignorance is bliss,' though maybe not depth......you know eliot's gorgeous poem about the magi? i'm too lazy to go find it now, but it's wonderful----all the happy images of the magi when they see the baby and realize he's god; but here the magi experiences the full sorrow of new knowledge; he is going back home, but what is home when you've learned a different truth? i read that a lot when i first got involved with feminism; it shakes you out of all the old assumptions and you can never go back. and sometimes you really want to........only even those times you don't really want to, at the same time [i think i'm overfond of the first-person 'you.'.....]
In 10 years, no one will be able to find someone under 55 who can read cursive writing anymore; it will be like a spy code for the elderly to communicate with.
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