When Were The Good Old Days?

 

886492_leave_it_to_beaverThe following conversation took place on Ricochet yesterday:

A: If you really want to live in a land with harsh laws against homosexuality, pornography (or even immodesty), and drugs (or even alcohol), where divorce is rare and challenges to the cultural and religious orthodoxy are not tolerated, then there are any number of Ayatollahs around the world who would be more than happy to accommodate you.   B: No, that used to be called 1950s America. Look it up.

A: Look it up where?  Reruns of Father Knows Best?  The 1950′s America that lives in your imagination is naive.  Too much Leave It To Beaver and not enough Cat On A Hot Tin Roof.

Arguments about how things ought to be often hinge on ideas of how they used to be.

Rev up the Richochet Time Machine! Take us back in time to the magic moment when even the most con of SoCons and Fi-cons and Neo-cons were happy as a pink zebra and America was the America any conservative would hope to conserve and bequeath to her children?

Conjure your inner Archie or Edith Bunker, and tell us when were the good old days? 

And let’s have actual dates here, not just “BSSM” and “Anno Damnation.”

 

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  1. Roberto Inactive
    Roberto
    @Roberto

    Last Saturday wasn’t too bad.

    • #1
  2. user_358258 Inactive
    user_358258
    @RandyWebster

    A link would be nice.  I don’t see the conversation you’re referring to.

    • #2
  3. Jason Rudert Inactive
    Jason Rudert
    @JasonRudert

    Here, Randy:
    http://ricochet.com/the-foolishness-of-libertarian-cultural-positions/comment-page-4/#comment-2832827
    It’s on one of the later pages

    • #3
  4. Jason Rudert Inactive
    Jason Rudert
    @JasonRudert

    Now, is my answer.

    • #4
  5. Ricochet Member
    Ricochet
    @GrannyDude

    Jason Rudert:Here, Randy:

    http://ricochet.com/the-foolishness-of-libertarian-cultural-positions/comment-page-4/#comment-2832827

    It’s on one of the later pages

    Thank you Jason—it wasn’t the whole conversion that I wanted to reference, just the question of what era  (’50s? 60s? 1800s?) we’d prefer.

    Unless someone persuades me otherwise, I think “now” looks okay too.

    • #5
  6. Ricochet Member
    Ricochet
    @

    In the 50’s you got big labor unions and bomb shelters. The 60’s gave you hippies and all the people who are now in charge of the government. The 70’s gave you Nixon, Ford and Carter. The 80’s gave you crappy music and the height of the Cold War. The 90’s gave you more crappy music and the real rev up to the PC police. And then you have now. I’m with you Kate. I’ll take “now” as well.

    • #6
  7. user_138562 Moderator
    user_138562
    @RandyWeivoda

    I wonder how middle-aged, middle-class Americans viewed the country in the 1950’s.  Did they think they were living in a golden era, or did they think that the culture was depraved, with Elvis Presley popularizing “jungle music”, motorcyclists in leather jackets, teenagers “making out”, and jazz musicians smoking marijuana?

    • #7
  8. Robert Lux Inactive
    Robert Lux
    @RobertLux

    “How things used to be” were better — certainly in the 1950s — if our arbiter of better is human happiness. I think a good barometer of that is the happiness of women and how women are treated in civilization (as some Founder said “it is civilization alone that replaces women in the enjoyment of their natural equality“- on his observing the beast-of-burden status of women in Native American society. The issue worthy of a separate Ricochet post: contemporary America is returning to certain permutation of tribalistic society, certainly at the lower economic strata. Women are doing all the work; men are off being philanderers and basically tribal chieftains, etc. In fine, feminism has forfeited women’s ability to moderate men and to moralize society).

    Our best, empirical data show conclusively (surprisingly, two feminist professors Wharton did the longitudinal studies) that women’s happiness has gradually declined since the advent of the 60s feminist movement. They are dramatically less happy today than they were 50 years ago.

    So women are more free today, and yet they are less happy.  Which…I would argue means they are less free.

    Moreover, I’ll just say (seeing how science vs. humanities has been something of a subject in these parts), there’s been NO progress in the last at least fifty years…unless one counts the humanly irrelevant sense of scientific progress.

    • #8
  9. Ricochet Member
    Ricochet
    @GrannyDude

    Robert Lux:“How things used to be” were better — certainly in the 1950s — if our arbiter of better is human happiness. I think a good barometer of that is the happiness of women and how women are treated in civilization.

    At the risk of sounding sexist or self-serving, I think the happiness of women might be a pretty good barometer. Did the Wharton ladies conclude that the decrease in female happiness was because “Women are doing all the work; men are off being philanderers and basically tribal chieftains, etc. In fine, feminism has forfeited women’s ability to moderate men and to moralize society)?

    So women are more free today, and yet they are less happy. Which…I would argue means they are less free.

    Anecdote is not data, but I know I am a whole lot happier being freer than I would have been (or, for that matter, was) before certain doors were opened to me. 

    And neither my first husband (of blessed memory) nor my second (of blessed presence in my life) seems notably unhappy. On the other hand, I do think we have a bit of a problem now figuring out what to do with boys and men…different subject, really, but I figure I might as well throw it in there to show that I’m not dismissing your comment out of hand!

    Moreover, I’ll just say (seeing how science vs. humanities has been something of a subject in these parts), there’s been NO progress in the last at least fifty years…unless one counts the humanly irrelevant sense of scientific progress.

    Well, I wouldn’t be here if not for progress in creating new antibiotics, since I was prone to kidney infections as a child and one was resistant to all but one that became available only as of 1967. My husband would be completely crippled and in constant pain at the age of 54 if not for astonishing recent advances in hip replacement…that’s not humanly irrelevant to me. In the absence of lithium, unavailable in the United States until the 1970s, a very beloved relative would be suffering in an institution (the good news, in the ’50s, is that those institutions would still exist!?! ) and plenty more including myself would be treating our PTSD with alcohol, cigarettes, tranquilizers, bad decisions and suicide instead of the new anti-anxiety/anti-depressants.

    Medical advances make this whole conversation slightly unfair. Want to take medicine off the table, and just talk morals or politics or whatever?

    • #9
  10. Robert Lux Inactive
    Robert Lux
    @RobertLux

    Kate Braestrup:

    Robert Lux:    humanly irrelevant sense of scientific progress.

    Well, I wouldn’t be here if not for progress in creating new antibiotics, since I was prone to kidney infections as a child and one was resistant to all but one that became available only as of 1967. My husband would be completely crippled and in constant pain at the age of 54 if not for astonishing recent advances in hip replacement…that’s not humanly irrelevant to me. In the absence of lithium, unavailable in the United States until the 1970s, a very beloved relative would be suffering in an institution (the good news, in the ’50s, is that those institutions would still exist!?! ) and plenty more including myself would be treating our PTSD with alcohol, cigarettes, tranquilizers, bad decisions and suicide instead of the new anti-anxiety/anti-depressants.

    Medical advances make this whole conversation slightly unfair. Want to take medicine off the table, and just talk morals or politics or whatever?

    Kate- points well taken. I’ve been off of Ricochet much of the last 7 months and if not for medical technology I’d surely have offed myself owing to the stomach disease I’ve been suffering the pain has been so bad. I mean science in a more comprehensive sense; it is striking that science cannot prove that it’s good scientifically and so I don’t think it can improve mankind morally — about which I want to speak in a separate post sometime.

    • #10
  11. Ricochet Member
    Ricochet
    @GrannyDude

    Chronic pain is horrible—it soaks up all your energy just to meet it. I’m glad you feel well enough to toy with ideas again!

    • #11
  12. The King Prawn Inactive
    The King Prawn
    @TheKingPrawn

    I’m reminded of an old Navy adage: no duty station is as bad as the one you’re at, and none is as good as the one you just left.

    I’m not entirely certain we can pin down an era or time frame to idolize. Each had its own pluses and minuses. I generally think of specific details of periods which need to be preserved. Right after the founding there was immense individual liberty, so much so that we nipped that in the bud with some terrible legislation. After WWI there was a great time of celebration followed by the tremendous hangover of the depression. After WWII there was such stunning joy and growth (the birth rate among other aspects of it…) that we often look to those calm Eisenhower years as perhaps our lost Utopia. We forget, however, that we’d just nuked an enemy and started the Cold War while divvying up the carcass of Europe. So, I can’t really say “that year, that’s the one I’d like to relive forever.”

    I can, however, point to something I think is the watershed moment: when men stopped wearing hats. Yes, it’s all JFK’s fault, the left, and the hippies. More specifically, I peg that as when civility and social expectations began their erosion. We departed from an ordered liberty. The result, sadly, is Baltimore this last week. Try to imagine throwing bricks at cops while wearing a fedora.

    • #12
  13. Instugator Thatcher
    Instugator
    @Instugator

    Robert Lux:

    I’ve been off of Ricochet much of the last 7 months and if not for medical technology I’d surely have offed myself owing to the stomach disease I’ve been suffering the pain has been so bad.

    Sorry to hear it Robert – welcome back and I hope you are feeling better.

    Stew

    • #13
  14. Ricochet Member
    Ricochet
    @

    My personal good old days were the mid-to-late ’80s. Kids were free to play outside, riding their bikes and walking all over town. Most adults still expected to be (and were) treated with respect. You could actually understand the lyrics to the songs, and most of them you could sing in front of your parents. Friday night football was the center of everybody’s weekend. Our president was kicking-butt and bringing down the Wall. When “those darn kids” were up to their worst, it meant they’d been caught sneaking a beer out by the water tower or playing spin-the-bottle. Our hair was big, and our plans were bigger.

    At least that’s how I remember it. (For perspective, I was about 16 when the Berlin Wall came down.)

    • #14
  15. blank generation member Inactive
    blank generation member
    @blankgenerationmember

    Tonya M.:My personal good old days were the mid-to-late ’80s. Kids were free to play outside, riding their bikes and walking all over town. Most adults still expected to be (and were) treated with respect. You could actually understand the lyrics to the songs, and most of them you could sing in front of your parents. Friday night football was the center of everybody’s weekend. Our president was kicking-butt and bringing down the Wall. When “those darn kids” were up to their worst, it meant they’d been caught sneaking a beer out by the water tower or playing spin-the-bottle. Our hair was big, and our plans were bigger.

    At least that’s how I remember it. (For perspective, I was about 16 when the Berlin Wall came down.)

    I was thinking something about that too.  There was a time when you were a kid you could run around for hours without adult supervision and “Get home in time for dinner!”  Has that disappeared completely?

    • #15
  16. The Reticulator Member
    The Reticulator
    @TheReticulator

    Kate Braestrup:Medical advances make this whole conversation slightly unfair. Want to take medicine off the table, and just talk morals or politics or whatever?

    No, because personal relationships were more intense back before there was a cure for so many things.   They are not really separate matters.

    • #16
  17. The King Prawn Inactive
    The King Prawn
    @TheKingPrawn

    I would say the ’70’s were awesome, but I had to dress like this:

    D_D5

    • #17
  18. The Reticulator Member
    The Reticulator
    @TheReticulator

    The good old days were back in the 50s and early 60s when I was growing up.  I can get very nostalgic about those times.  But I am bothered and annoyed by people who want to go back to those days.  I do not cooperate with their efforts to return (e.g. in our church).  For one thing, the 50s gave us the 60s, which gave us the 70s, etc. Who wants that again?

    I also get nostalgic about 1960s Russia, as portrayed in movies by Marlen Khutsiev.  Even though I never lived there I feel more at home in that world than in the USA of the 2010s.   Maybe nobody lived there.  I’ve heard people mumble about his films being an idealized portrayal of life in the USSR; but his portrayal also got Khutsiev in enough trouble with the Soviet leadership that he had to quit film-making. Part of what makes his films so intense is that he foresaw what the 60s generation was coming to, some of which applies to us as well.

    • #18
  19. EJHill Podcaster
    EJHill
    @EJHill

    There is no Utopia. Tragedy and hardship are not just ever present, but the engine of human creativity.

    George Gershwin wrote wonderful music, some of which was based on the misery of others. Without the legacy of slavery there is no Summertime, no Bess, You is My Woman. Nor does Jerome Kern pen Old Man River.

    Without the Great Depression there is no Brother, Can You Spare a Dime or the glories of the Astaire-Rogers musicals.

    There are no golden times, just good times we are blessed to have on occasion.

    • #19
  20. Ricochet Member
    Ricochet
    @

    blank generation member:

    I was thinking something about that too. There was a time when you were a kid you could run around for hours without adult supervision and “Get home in time for dinner!” Has that disappeared completely?

    I don’t know. It seems like it has. I was just telling my husband that I feel bad for our daughter (11) because she doesn’t have the carefree childhood that I remember having–playing outside, taking off with friends on our bikes for hours at a time, shooting hoops in driveways, walking across town to the penny candy store or the park, going to night swims at the town pool.

    My husband pointed out that he didn’t have the childhood I remember having, either. (We’re only a year apart in age and grew up in the same county though we didn’t know each other then.)

    Don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t go back to high school for all of the money Hillary’s hiding, but I had a fairly idyllic childhood.

    • #20
  21. The Reticulator Member
    The Reticulator
    @TheReticulator

    This topic reminded me of a quote from C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, which you can read in context here.

    If, on the other hand, the middle years prove prosperous, our position is even stronger. Prosperity knits a man to the World. He feels that he is ‘finding his place in it’, while really it is finding its place in him.

    That’s Satan talking, of course.  But the point is, maybe it’s best not to be re-creating a world in which we’re comfortable.

    • #21
  22. blank generation member Inactive
    blank generation member
    @blankgenerationmember

    Tonya M.:

    blank generation member:

    I was thinking something about that too. There was a time when you were a kid you could run around for hours without adult supervision and “Get home in time for dinner!” Has that disappeared completely?

    I don’t know. It seems like it has. I was just telling my husband that I feel bad for our daughter (11) because she doesn’t have the carefree childhood that I remember having–playing outside, taking off with friends on our bikes for hours at a time, shooting hoops in driveways, walking across town to the penny candy store or the park, going to night swims at the town pool.

    My husband pointed out that he didn’t have the childhood I remember having, either. (We’re only a year apart in age and grew up in the same county though we didn’t know each other then.)

    Don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t go back to high school for all of the money Hillary’s hiding, but I had a fairly idyllic childhood.

    I’ll have to admit there’s rose tinted glasses looking back upon the idyllic times, at least on my part.  Now if someone could just figure out how to ban the teenage years.  Although some would look at that as their glorious letter years.

    • #22
  23. The Reticulator Member
    The Reticulator
    @TheReticulator

    Robert Lux:some Founder said “it is civilization alone that replaces women in the enjoyment of their natural equality“- on his observing the beast-of-burden status of women in Native American society. The issue worthy of a separate Ricochet post:

    I wouldn’t let Jefferson be the last word on this subject.   For one thing, Sally Hemmings didn’t get to enjoy her natural equality.  For another, Jefferson was a scheming hypocrite who was trying to take over the land of Native Americans by getting them in debt.

    Americans who were eagerly looking for justification for their displacing the Native Americans from their land often remarked on the so-called beast-of-burden status of Native women.  Yet there were many white European woman who were captured by Native Americans, who, after living among them for some years, did not want to return to “civilized” life.  Some did, but there were many who did not.  There are zero cases of that happening in the reverse direction.  (Ben Franklin was one who remarked on this phenomenon.)  I don’t think it was the opportunities for “beast of burden” status that made this happen.

    (BTW, Jefferson did have his good points in that he thwarted Alexander Hamilton.)

    • #23
  24. kylez Member
    kylez
    @kylez

    1946-1963

    • #24
  25. kylez Member
    kylez
    @kylez

    kylez:1946-1963

    perhaps excepting the Korean war.

    • #25
  26. Ricochet Member
    Ricochet
    @GrannyDude

    I wouldn’t let Jefferson be the last word on this subject.   For one thing, Sally Hemmings didn’t get to enjoy her natural equality.

    Thank you, Reticulator.

    • #26
  27. Ricochet Member
    Ricochet
    @GrannyDude

    kylez:

    kylez:1946-1963

    perhaps excepting the Korean war.

    Yeah. My Dad got blown up in that one. Not so good.

    I’m weirdly drawn to England between-the-wars, but as my husband points out, this is entirely down to reading a lot of between-the-wars British mysteries in which I imagine myself being Lord Peter Wimsey’s Harriet Vane, rather than, say, the maid. Let alone the dead guy.

    Still, it’s interesting to read between the lines of a Dorothy Sayers, and discover things that we imagine are newly minted: war veterans with PTSD, lesbians, birth control, women trying to juggle family and career, atheism, single-parent families…

    • #27
  28. MarciN Member
    MarciN
    @MarciN

    I think some things were better.

    I think we have regulated businesses insanely.

    I think taxes are too high relative to how much they help individuals get a start or a leg up in life.

    I think we are looking at best at a pre-divorce relationship between the liberals and the conservatives in this country. No one is listening because each person thinks he or she knows what the other is going to say. Tempers flare. The result is financial chaos or overspending, not shared goals. When communication breaks down, maintenance falls apart and debt grows. Just disorganized living, with neither a schedule nor a budget.

    There are 350,000 children in foster care at any given moment in this country. In the Boston area alone, in 2012, there were 6,000 homeless teenagers trying to finish high school.

    Incarceration rates are ridiculous. The cruelty of the supermax prisons is something we would not have considered thirty years ago. I can see it for Timothy McVeigh, but short of that, it is totally inhumane. Or: if we need these facilities, why all of a sudden are we producing such evil in this country? Which is it? We need answers.

    There’s a lot of alienation between kids and their parents or guardians. Too many kids on Ritalin.

    We seem to accept a level of poverty that we did not accept in the fifties.

    We believed people could be uplifted by education. That’s what we were working on.

    • #28
  29. Zafar Member
    Zafar
    @Zafar

    I’m tempted to say ‘back when I had hair on my head’, but that would be shallow, even for me…

    • #29
  30. Midget Faded Rattlesnake Member
    Midget Faded Rattlesnake
    @Midge

    The Reticulator:This topic reminded me of a quote from C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, which you can read in context here.

    If, on the other hand, the middle years prove prosperous, our position is even stronger. Prosperity knits a man to the World. He feels that he is ‘finding his place in it’, while really it is finding its place in him.

    That’s Satan talking, of course. But the point is, maybe it’s best not to be re-creating a world in which we’re comfortable.

    Romanticizing discomfort bothers me. I used to do it. I even managed to do it for a few years in the face of real discomfort. But eventually, the romance breaks down.

    There’s nothing particularly ennobling about discomfort. That is, it’s neither more nor less ennobling than any other state. Now, uncomfortable sacrifices made in pursuit of something good are ennobling, but they are ennobled because they pursue good, not because of the discomfort itself.

    Discomfort not taken on in the spirit of sacrifice, but discomfort that simply is, day after day, without hope of explanation or cure, may not so much edify as simply demoralize. It can serve as temptation to the worst sin of all: despair.

    • #30
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