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July 28, 2008

Don’t Romanticize the ‘Good Old Days’

Dr. Laina Farhat-Holzman

Human beings throughout history have preferred the devil they know to the devil they don’t. To our ancestors, change generally meant change for the worst.

The U.S., however, has been an anomaly in history. From our beginnings, we considered change a positive thing. What else projected our pioneer ancestors into a very scary wilderness? We also demonstrate periodic electoral restlessness, such as today, when the promoter of change captures the public fancy. But the supporters of tradition are still with us - and are still suspicious of change.

Conservatives notoriously complain that our schools, medical care, and politicians are more clueless and incompetent than the giants of the past. But ultra-Leftists are caught in this web too, desperately missing the 1960s with its heady activism against all prior traditions and all “bourgeois” values. In Santa Cruz, one sees hippies very long in the tooth still dreaming of the good old days.

However, the good old days were not all that good! The conservatives forget that in the past, not as many people were in school; nor were Blacks or women part of the system. Doctors in the past may have made more house calls, but more of us are alive and thriving at ages that would not have been possible then. And the Leftist activists remember the headiness of demonstrations that shut down universities and the delights of sex and drugs from that Summer of Love - but forget that these behaviors gave rise to old diseases that free clinic doctors had never expected to see again - and new ones such as AIDS. 

But our romance with the past is just a small part of our culture; in China, this is a very big issue. The Chinese have always had a traditional culture in which change was emphatically not good news.  Change meant the fall of dynasties; the arrival of barbarians; and the horrors of plague, flood, drought, and warfare. For them, the changes of the past century have been monumental, and it is a tribute to Chinese sanity that they have taken it without the expected uproar.

The latest change is that of Beijing, getting ready to host the Olympic Games - a global debut of sorts. The Chinese government has spared no expense; they have created stadiums, subways, and dismantled old neighborhoods, replacing them with modern apartment blocks. These are clean and modern, but do not have the community closeness of the old slums. Tradeoffs are always painful.

These are but the most recent changes in China, where childrearing has gone from patriarchal many-generational families to the one-child policy. The rivers that have supported China for 5,000 years are now dammed, diverted, and in danger of drying up - not to mention unimaginably polluted. And, of course, the Marxist government has launched head-long into Capitalism, as Ted Koppel calls his recent documentary: The People’s Republic of Capitalism.

The romanticists of the past are wringing their hands over the destruction of the old neighborhoods. But they should remember that these colorful old neighborhoods were full of rats, congestion, and one toilet for hundreds of people. I remember the hand-wringing in Paris when the ancient marketplace, Les Halles, was replaced by the Pompidou Centre. They remembered only the onion soup and forgot the rats and roaches.

One thing about change that we should worry about is that with tradition, you do not have any surprises. With change, almost invariably there are unforeseen consequences. The one-child policy in China, while good for their demographics, is not good for childrearing. Children have no siblings and too many doting relatives, which creates great social change in Chinese society that they haven’t figured out yet.

Damming great rivers, as we have learned in the U.S., has consequences that may even cancel out the benefits. The Chinese Three Gorges project may turn out to be as ecologically stupid as the Aswan Dam project in Egypt.

Change can be good - but can also be bad.  Don’t romanticize, but don’t hype either.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Dr. Laina Farhat-Holzman is an historian, lecturer, and author who also writes for the Santa Cruz Sentinel. You may contact her at Lfarhat102@aol.com or http://www.globalthink.net/.

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