The danger of nostalgic politics - Ivo Vegter

Key topics:The illusion and bias of nostalgia in personal and public lifeWhy longing for past “golden ages” distorts political decisionsHow real progress comes from innovation, not looking backward.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Ivo Vegter*Most of us suffer from a nostalgia bias. Basing political policy on this bias is dangerously short-sighted, and yet a lot of people tend to do so.The Romans had a phrase for it: memoria praeteritorum bonorum. Remembrances of good things past. Or as we more often phrase it today, the good old days.Most of us are very familiar with this feeling. In our personal lives, we often feel nostalgia for our carefree childhoods, even if sober reflection might make us realise that the past we conjure up in our daydreams was not really as homogeneously rosy as we imagine them to have been.We still play the pop music we grew up with at parties, though a critical ear might suggest that there’s nothing about our particular era that made its pop music any more consonant than pop music from any other era.I gladly listen to the 1980s pop music that accompanied my teen years. It brings back memories of my first racing bicycle, my first computer program, my first house party, my first kiss, my first cigarette … oh, the nostalgia!Upon reflection, however, it was in 1986 that the ghastly formulaic mindlessness produced by Stock, Aitken and Waterman – think Rick Astley, Belinda Carlisle, Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan – turned my musical interest to the psychedelic rock, blues rock and progressive rock of the 1960s and 1970s. This wasn’t quite my parent’s era, since they were teenagers in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but it was certainly not what most teenagers were listening to in the mid-1980s.We tend to remember the good things of the past, and psychologically repress the bad things. We love the good songs, and forget the bad ones. We gloss over material wants, abuse, grief, loneliness, bullying, or frustration when we wallow in nostalgia for our lost childhood, and remember mostly the happy times of friends, family, games, exploration, and summer weekends by the pool.What we reminisce about is an illusion. It is biased. It is not reality..Good old timesWe also tend to wax nostalgic for times that predate our own lives. We imagine them to have been simpler times, with fewer of the stresses and complications of modern life.This, too, is a universal sentiment. People have always thought like that.“’The good old times, the grand old times, the great old times! Those were the times for a bold peasantry, and all that sort of thing. Those were the times for every sort of thing, in fact. There’s nothing now-a-days. Ah!’ sighed the red-faced gentleman” in Charles Dickens’s novella, The Chimes.For well over a century, an apocryphal quotation, attributed to various sages of antiquity, has circulated: “Our Earth is degenerate in these later days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book and the end of the world is evidently approaching.”Ever since that quotation was invented, ca. 1908, its various incarnations have struck people as a perceptive description of their present..Golden AgeIn the US, the 1950s are commonly seen as a sort of golden age, where everyone was gainfully employed, a single wage could support a family of four or five, with a home, a stylish car, full insurance, and a lifestyle of ice cream, soda fountains, road houses and harmonious suburban bliss.A mere 20 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, books were being published explaining “why it is that so many Eastern Europeans are nostalgic for the communist past”.Similar nostalgia exists for the French belle époque, the Pax Romana, the Arcadia of Ancient Greece, “Cockaigne” and “Merrie England”, the Islamic Golden Age from the 8th to 13th century, the Dutch Golden Age in the late 16th and most of the 17th century, and multiple golden ages of China.Moral crusades and temperance movements have also been a frequent fixture of history. The belief that present-day society is morally corrupt and ripe with excess is almost universal, both within and outside religions. The usual prescription is a rigorous dose of state-led or church-led morality, and a return to chastity, austerity, abstemiousness, restraint, self-discipline and self-denial..Back to naturePastoralist, back-to-nature and simplicity movements have flourished throughout the ages, from Diogenes, to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to Henry David Thoreau, to Leo Tolstoy, to Rudolf Steiner, to E.F. Schumacher, to the Unabomber, Ted Kazcynski.They have been popular not only on the left of the political spectrum, but also in ideas such as “green conservatism” and “crunchy cons” on the right.Read more:.Blame, boasts & bogus economists - Ivo Vegter.Some are rooted in a misguided appeal to the nobility of nature, as contrasted with anything artificial, chemical or manufactured. Some are rooted in a fear of new-fangled technology. Some originate in the worry that machines would make certain jobs obsolete. Some are based on the mistaken view that economic growth and human flourishing are incompatible with ecological sustainability and the protection of natural resources..DeclinismLikewise, the view that present society is on the decline has been a historical constant. Its roots lie in religious apocalypticism, but its modern incarnation can probably best be attributed to Edward Gibbon’s late 18th century magnum opus, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.Though it is a laborious read, it made the decline and fall of Western Civilisation an essential subject for conversation at dinner parties.Throughout the 80 post-war years of roaring success, the US has faced multiple waves of “declinism”, a term coined in 1918 by Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West.By one count, the United States has faced five previous waves of declinism. The first was triggered by the Sputnik Shock of 1957, when the USSR was about to overwhelm the USA. The second by the quagmire in Vietnam, which surely presaged the fall of all of south-east Asia to communism. The third involved Carter-era stagflation, when Japan was on an alarming trajectory that promised to exact commercial revenge for its military defeat. (The de-industrialisation of America is hardly a new concern.) The next was occasioned by the meteoric rise of China, which soon replaced the “Yellow Peril” in the public imagination. Another bout of declinism occurred in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis.In each case, the fear of imminent decline was overwrought, and ultimately mistaken..Cultural pessimismIn his 1997 book, The Idea of Decline in Western History, Arthur Herman, a popular historian and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, writes: “I would point out that while intellectuals have been predicting the imminent collapse of Western civilization for more than one hundred and fifty years, its influence has grown faster during that period than at any time in history. Western cultural ideals and institutions enjoy more prestige now than they did during the heyday of European colonization and empire. The West’s essential contributions to our contemporary world include the role that science and technology play in enhancing material life, our belief in democracy, the rights of the individual, and the rule of law, as well as the liberating effects of free market capitalism and private ownership of property. As we now approach the twenty-first century, these beliefs seem to be more and more the unshakable pillars of the modern global outlook.”Herman continues: “Yet when I point this out as evidence that, to paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the demise of the West might be greatly exaggerated, I usually meet with strong skepticism. … We live in an era in which pessimism has become the norm, rather than the exception.”The name of Charles Dickens might conjure visions of 19th century industrial dystopia, but he often criticised the rose-coloured lenses through which people tend to view the past. In The Chimes, the red-faced gentleman gets an answer:“‘He hadn’t, in his very best circumstances, a shirt to his back, or a stocking to his foot; and there was scarcely a vegetable in all England for him to put into his mouth,’ said Mr. Filer. ‘I can prove it, by tables.’ / But still the red-faced gentleman extolled the good old times, the grand old times, the great old times.”.MisguidedThese ideas of a past golden age and a present dystopia are all, in some way or another, mistaken.They often contain kernels of truth, but the broader conclusions – that the present is worse than the past, or that politics ought to return us to some former age of glory – are simply wrong.For example, the 1950s were unusually good in American history. They weren’t better than today, but they were certainly good times, especially relative to their own recent past and relative to the rest of the world.Yet that was only because the rest of the developed world had been bombed to oblivion, while the US emerged from the Second World War not only largely unscathed, but also as the sole remaining industrial power and the world’s largest creditor. Even an imbecile could lead it to becoming the greatest world power, under the circumstances (and arguably, several imbeciles did).The notion that it is even remotely possible to return to such a state of affairs is sorely mistaken, however, and even if it were possible, it wouldn’t be desirable..The real 1950sIn the real 1950s, if you were white, male, religious, socially conformist, heterosexual, physically and mentally healthy, and had a white-collar job, you’d be fine. If you failed to check any of those boxes, your life could range from fairly okay to wildly intolerable.There was no reliable contraception, and unintended pregnancies could result in a lifetime of shame and unhappiness. Women were discriminated against in the job market, and paid less for the same work than a man. Women were often not allowed to conduct their own finances. They had few legal options for escaping abusive marriages, and those options dwindled with age.If you were not white, you had it far worse.Diseases that are now routinely preventable or easily treatable in the 1950s killed or crippled many people, especially children. Life expectancy was 15 years less than today.Houses were affordable, but they were not large, were poorly insulated, were less safe, and didn’t come with airconditioning or many other mod cons that are standard today. Today, you pay more, but you also get much more for your money.Food and clothes were far more expensive, and you’d have far less choice. Dining out was a rare luxury. Cars were death traps, with virtually no safety features. Job sites were hazardous, and employers a law unto themselves. Information, communication, travel and entertainment were all limited, inconvenient and expensive..Farming and agricultureThe same goes for much of the idealistic back-to-nature movement. Moving to the country and living on a smallholding is great if you are already fairly prosperous. The notion that ordinary people can scratch out a living from the plot behind their house is simply awful.Unless you’re rich, living at small scale, close to nature means barely surviving, always at the mercy of weather cycles, crop diseases and natural disasters. It means living with limited medical care. It means living with very few chances of ever moving up in the world.There’s a reason societies develop technologies to relieve people of the back-breaking manual labour of agriculture.There is an inverse relationship between GDP per capita, on one hand, and on the other, the share of GDP earned through agriculture and the percentage of the population employed in agriculture. A similar relationship exists for mining, forestry and other primary sector jobs.A prospering society employs as few people as possible to produce the necessary food and raw materials to sustain it. The richer a country gets, the fewer people it should be employing in primary resource production..IndustryThe same argument goes for industry, or the so-called secondary sector of the economy. As a society grows more prosperous, it seeks to free people from the mundane, low-value manufacturing work that they once did, so their creative talents can be more productively employed at higher-value pursuits.If you’re a rich country, at peace, de-industrialisation is a good thing. (If you anticipate war, this claim comes with some caveats, but preparing for war is not exactly a desirable state of affairs.)This is why globally, the share of people employed in agriculture is steadily declining as countries become more prosperous. The share of people employed in industry remains stable, because as poor countries become industrialised, richer countries move on from manufacturing. And the share of people employed in the tertiary and quaternary sectors of the economy – services and the high-tech knowledge economy – keeps growing as more countries reach highly developed status and their people seek more flexible and remunerative alternatives to manual labour..NostalgiaThe notion that the past was better than the present is not true, in general terms.Sure, there are specific instances where one might argue things have become worse. South Africans know all about that, of course, given two decades of growing corruption, out-of-control crime, and unmaintained infrastructure.Even then, however, pining for the “good old days” brings with it substantial risks – most notably that this country once worked better only for a small subset of a racially defined elite, and even for that racial elite, the “good old days” came with serious downsides, such as limited personal freedoms, oppressive morality, state censorship and international sanctions.More generally, the past is almost always worse, both in material terms, and in moral terms. There is no bucolic agrarian golden age in which everyone was healthy and happy. Even the aristocratic elites of pre-industrial times in many ways lived less healthy lives than the majority do today, and the majority of people back then lived in grinding poverty, with death, disease, and destitution always looming over them..ProgressThe factors that have universally proven to improve living standards, not only for the elite but also for the general population, are scientific inquiry, technological advances, private property, free markets, free global trade, secularism, the rule of law, equality under the law, and individual freedom.In short, freedom and progress improve societies.None of the so-called golden ages of history come without significant drawbacks that, for the majority of people, would negate the apparent benefits.For that matter, none of the golden ages of history can be restored in the present context of far larger, far more urbanised, far more educated, far better informed, and far wealthier populations.Political policy can make a society great, or make it decline and fall. What it cannot do is make a country “great again”. .*Ivo Vegter is a freelance journalist, columnist and speaker who loves debunking myths and misconceptions, and addresses topics from the perspective of individual liberty and free markets..This article was first published by the Dailyfriend and is republished with permission