I recently attended a blogging conference in Berkeley. From the perspective of interesting conversation, it was probably the best weekend of my life. Lots of super smart people.
As I get older (I’m 68), I notice that most other people in the blogging/twitter world are one or even two generations younger than me. Most of the ones I follow are also smarter than me. At times, I wonder whether I have anything of value to offer.
Consider these claims:
1. With age comes wisdom.
2. As people age, they lose a few IQ points each decade.
Which view do I hold? Both. I believe I’m getting dumber but wiser. When I read some of the better posts I wrote 15 years ago, I cringe at the thought that they were written by someone smarter than the current me. How did I write that? But when I read some of my lamer posts from the early days, I cringe at their lack of wisdom. What was I thinking?
Just as the past is another country, our past selves are another person.
In this post, I’ll try to explain one of the few areas where old people do have an advantage. It’s something I never really realized until I got to be older. Old people have a sort of double vision about the past—an ability to see the past from the perspective of today, and also from the perspective of the people who lived through those times. When then was now.
Of course this only applies to periods that we ourselves have lived through. I have no feel at all for the 1890s. I know that it was a disgrace for respectable women to show their legs in public, or to go out on the town without an escort, but I don’t actually have much of a feel for why. I understand that men in the early 1800s felt they had to respond to insults with a duel, but don’t understand why. I understand that thoughtful people like Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, but don’t understand why.
To be clear, I could write an essay explaining all these social practices and many more. I am capable of putting the words down on paper. When I say I don’t understand something like women’s fashions, I’m saying that I don’t intuitively find it shameful if a woman shows her ankle in public. Today, I think it’s obvious that slavery is evil, and wonder how brilliant people would have missed that fact.
More and more often, I see younger commentators pointing out some quaint or bizarre or offensive aspect of life from back when I was young. “Can you believe that back in the 1960s it was considered OK to . . . ” I find these observations to be a bit jarring. Not because they are wrong, rather because they force me to examine my past with a sort of double vision—how it seemed at the time, and how it seems today. Unlike the 1890s, I do understand why people of the 1960s (and 1970s) behaved in the way that they did. I was there. But I also understand why some of that behavior now seems quaint or bizarre or offensive. To quote a 60s pop star, I see “both sides now”.
It wasn’t until I got old that I realized that history doesn’t seem weird to the people that live through it. It seems normal. You often hear people say, “You can’t even believe the horrible conditions that people had to live through in such and such a country or time period.” But in most cases, the conditions didn’t seem horrible at all, just normal life. (The exception being temporary conditions that were horrible even by the standards of the day—say Europe during WWII.)
It wasn’t until recently that I realized that the world of the 1960s was filthy. There was dog poop everywhere, as no one picked up after their pets. People spat on the sidewalk. People smoked almost everywhere. Lead concentrations were high. Pollution was bad. Etc., etc. But the world I lived in during the 1960s didn’t seem filthy at all, it seemed perfectly normal.
On the other hand, when as a child I read that in the 1890s there was horse manure all over the streets of NYC, or that there were spittoons in office buildings, or that most people had crude outhouses, that seemed disgusting. At the time, I assumed that people of the 1890s understood they lived in a dirty world. Now I know that it must has seemed perfectly fine, or at least normal.
Some of the most fascinating (but hard to explain) differences are in the moral realm. I recall when it was OK to tell ethnic jokes, or gay jokes. Maybe not completely OK, but much less offensive than today. Indeed, there are subtle distinctions that are hard to explain to a contemporary audience. Drunk driving wasn’t exactly OK, but it was much less frowned on than today, unless you were falling down drunk. A 20-year old guy dating a 15-year old girl wasn’t exactly OK, but it was less frowned on than today (and not generally called “pedophilia”, a term then reserved for situations with even younger victims.) Ditto for professors dating students. It wasn’t completely OK for pregnant women to drink or smoke, but much less frowned on than today.
If I tried to explain how people felt at the time, I’d probably give the wrong impression, as if trying to justify the unjustifiable. I know that because I have “double vision”, I also see how we see these things today. I’m not just a creature of the past, I’m both a creature of the past and a creature of the present. This is perhaps the only consolation of old age (which generally sucks.)
Nonetheless, I’ll offer a few observations. We know that people are living longer and healthier lives. We know that in the old days everything used to occur at younger ages. Children used to work in factories. People used to marry and have kids at a young age. When I was young, life expectancy for men was 67. In that sort of world, things like safety and the protection of children seemed a bit less urgent. And as you go further and further back into history, the world was more and more brutal by today’s standards. That caused people to be less caring by today’s standards, less “woke”. In addition, the rules of the 1960s were often made by old people who were born into a world where life expectancy was below 50.
I recently traveled to the southwest on vacation, and came across a crude log cabin in Utah that was occupied back in 1905 by a pioneer family of six—all in one room. Obviously no indoor plumbing or electricity or furnace, and just a dirt floor. Recall that this is 40 years after slavery was abolished—so I imagine these people understood that slavery was evil. But I bet they didn’t think it was as evil as we think slavery was, because their living standards were so low that the conditions of slaves would have seemed less appalling to them than it does to us today.
The Holocaust is another good example. Back in the 1960s, the vast majority of films about the WWII-era were about American troops fighting the Germans (or Japanese.) As each decade went by, the proportion shifted, until films about the Holocaust became more common than those about battles between opposing armies.
It’s as if society had a delayed reaction to the whole situation. Almost everyone suffered during the war. Perhaps that made people less aware of the suffering of others. It took the perspective of time for most people to understand that the Holocaust was a extraordinary event, not just a run-of-the-mill war crime. Even though 1965 was just 20 years after WWII, I feel the Holocaust looms larger in our minds today than it did back then.
[But it cuts both ways. Voters of the 1960s had more immunity to raging demagogic nationalists who continually spouted the big lie, losers who complained of being stabbed in the back. They remembered.]
Double vision also helps me to understand the reactionary impulse in the old. My father was a Roosevelt liberal, and remained basically liberal his entire life (he died in 1990.) But late in his life he’d occasionally say things that sounded a bit reactionary, in response to society getting softer and more “woke”. You’ve probably heard similar things from parents or grandparents. You might have some condescending thoughts when you hear old people talk this way. But never forget than the next generation will eventually look at you this way. Perhaps your grandchildren will say, “Can you believe that grandpa used to eat farm animals cruelly confined to tiny cages. What was he thinking?” Or maybe it will be some other social change that we cannot even anticipate today. (For me, gay marriage was the one that came out of the blue.)
I have no interest in pontificating about how much we should or should not condemn the retrograde attitudes of people of the past. Rather I’m trying to understand how they felt. I’ll never understand how it felt to live in the 1890s, but by the process of analogy I can see that it probably felt much more normal and acceptable than it seems to us today. When I see young people today who cannot imagine some of the practices of the 1960s or 1970s, practices which at the time seemed perfectly normal to me, it helps me to be more generous to people who lived even further in the past.
PS. There’s much more that could be said on this general topic–including aesthetics. For instance, I can recall when the guitar based rock of the late 1960s and early 1970s was powerful and exciting. But I can also see it from the perspective of today, when most of it seems kind of bland and boring. Over at Econlog, I have a post on modernism, a style which seems very different today than it did in the mid-1960s
PPS. Because I’m almost 2 generations out of date, I’ve probably missed some good examples. For instance, by 1995 gay jokes were frowned on, but trans jokes were still OK. Now both are frowned on. Society is always changing, and will always continue to change.
PPPS. Things that make me cringe: Being 68 years old and reading a tweet by a 48-year old explaining to 28-year olds how things used to be in the “old days” of the 1990s. I grew up when novels with titles like “1984” and “2001” sounding very futuristic.
PPPPS. This post mostly focused on areas where things used to be worse. But there are lots of examples in the other direction. The news media consumed by the average American during the 1960s was far better than today (even if the peak levels were lower.) Politics was smarter. The world had a lot less annoying bureaucracy than it does today. You could jump on an airplane like getting on a bus. Customer service over the phone was 10 times better. Things were less crowded—far fewer “reservations” were needed for restaurants and other events. You just showed up. In the mid-1970s, music was played on systems with better sound quality (but TVs sucked.)
BTW, The Utah family of 6 lived in this:
