Accounting for change
On childbirth, hazy nostalgia, and the dangers of misremembering what things were really like thirty to eighty years ago
The pain of childbirth is not entirely forgotten, though the halo effect of holding a newborn often changes how the memory is storedfor the long term. This holds true for lots of other difficult experiences, too. It’s a good thing, at least on the individual level: If we’re going to remember anything about the past, it’s generally going to leave us happier overall if we can retain more of the good memories than the bad. But at a social level, this leaves us in a real bind.
■ When society glosses over the shortcomings of the past, we end up amplifying and over-emphasizing glossy nostalgia, forgetting that there were bad aspects, too. This arises quite chronically when people try to compare present living standards with those of the past, particularly when the past is just far enough away to be outside of living memory for more than half of the population.
■ That means we need to be doubly cautious about anything popularly “remembered” from about thirty to eighty years ago. Anything older than that, and few people have first-hand memories. But in that half-century window resides a peculiar combination of first-hand and second-hand memories, which often resist fact-checking and even more often resist reasonable contextualization.
■ A fair number of characters quite vocally argue that basic affordability of universal needs like food, housing, and health care has plunged since the 1980s. Some people fight back against this overblown nostalgia, but it’s a tough fight when they’re arguing with people who don’t even realize how much has changed.
■ Microwaveable bags of frozen vegetables were a huge culinary improvement over their canned counterparts, to name one of the most mundane possible examples. Who even thinks about them today, when 90% of American households have microwave ovens? But only 25% of American households had them in 1986. If you were eating steamed frozen peas rather than mushy canned ones when Ronald Reagan was President, then you were among the elite.
■ Housing wasn’t especially affordable then, and a lot of places still had lead paint on the walls and ashtrays on the tables. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still press for much more improvement in the policies that affect things like food and housing affordability, but it’s profoundly unhelpful to ignore that progress has been made. Progress isn’t always steady, nor even, nor fast enough, nor widely enough shared. But hanging on to romanticized hallucinations about the past is one of the surest ways to obstruct real advancements in the present.
■ Theodore Roosevelt said, “[W]e must face the facts as they are. We must neither surrender ourselves to foolish optimism, nor succumb to a timid and ignoble pessimism.” Those words, published in 1897, were good advice long before any of us were born. They remain sound recommendations today.