Reject Modernity, Embrace Tradition: Man’s Oldest Tradition
Trends in the view of the past being a way to combat our view of the present
I wrote this article for a school publication and I thought to also share it here so I can have something on my page
Wherever one looks in our current pop culture they will see allusions to the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Any current movie will have at least a reference or joke about some 90s movie, such as Avengers Endgame with its Big Lebowski joke; lots of popular shows and the like are set in these periods, such as the Netflix show Stranger Things. To an extent, this is a surface-level appeal to nostalgia, but there’s a hint at something deeper here. People have a deep discontent with the modern day and wish they could live in another era. Six in ten adults claim they were born in the wrong generation. One can also see this in the rise of conversions to the Eastern Orthodox Church. The entire idea of Eastern orthodoxy is to hold to tradition, which appeals to many current young people. In 2008 it was found that 51% of the Orthodox Church In America members were converted. This can also be seen in famous political slogans - the slogan is not Make America Great but Make America Great Again, calling back to an older supposedly great time to return to. But all this is not a modern development. From the Middle Ages to the “start of civilization,” people have been yearning for a “better time.”
For example, let’s look at love. I’m sure many of us have heard the phrase “Love isn’t like it used to be.” Men aren’t well-mannered enough anymore, they say. They aren’t chivalrous enough. The idea of chivalry calls back to the “better men” of the Middle Ages. I don’t want to bore you analyzing the nuanced conversation surrounding whether medieval men were actually chivalrous (many were not). But the cries that “chivalry is dead” were also heard in the Middle Ages. Proto-feminist scholar of the Middle Ages Christine de Pisan would constantly complain about how her contemporary men were not as well-mannered as the men of the past. The same complaint on women’s dating blogs today appears in the 14th century, a time far before what most wish to return to.
This idealization of the past was common all across the middle ages from everything from medical texts to hunting books. One might’ve seen the Ellen segment where she takes young folks from her crowd and sees if they know how to use a rotary phone, mocking them for being incompetent with those things. Gaston III of Foix in his The Livre De Chasse does a similar thing complaining that the kids didn’t know how to properly train hunting dogs. One can see a clear parallel here, of Gaston III saying that the current kids aren’t up to par with the past generations because they can’t properly hunt. Just as Ellen did with millennials and rotary phones
One further example of the reverence of the past in the Middle Ages comes from the opening of many medieval manuscripts. It is not uncommon for an author to open their book by claiming to have found this manuscript in some old Roman library written by some classical author. This was because the idea of some older author lent credibility to the text due to the reverence for the olden days.
The greatest and oldest example of this trend of revering older times comes in the Akkadian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the first book ever written. Firstly, the drafting of these tablets as a whole already shows an interest in and an idealized view of Gilgamesh, who to the people at the time of this book's publishing, was a past king (it’s debated amongst historians if Gilgamesh actually existed), displaying an interest in the past. The text itself reinforces this trend a lot. It’s said of Gilgamesh after the flood (Gilgamesh prologue):
He had carved his trials on stone tables,
Had restored the holy Eanna Temple and the massive wall of Uruk
One of Gilgamesh's admirable traits is that he restored past rites. Furthermore, when the Eanna temple is described, its age is emphasized above all else:
“Climb the stone stairs, more ancient than the mind can imagine."
One can see from all this that the desire to return to an imaginary better time goes way back to some of our oldest texts.
Now a clear question arises. Why does this happen? This likely requires more research however for now I’ll give two quick answers.
Firstly when it relates specifically to a time when the person in question was a child nostalgia is a key cause. Of course, life seemed better back then! You were 12 and had parents paying your bills.
Secondly, one can blame the view of the present as worse, in a special manner, as partially caused by recency bias. Recency bias is the tendency to overemphasize the importance of recent experiences. This effect leads to people viewing the past as substantially worse when compared to other periods.
These two effects together exacerbate the above phenomenon. Nostalgia causes us to view the past with rose-tinted glasses, and recency bias makes us view the present with fire-tinted ones.
What was the name of the publication ? Lol