Digging a deeper hole: Don’t forget the unpleasant realities of the past

My generation is blamed for the decline of morality and the tainting of “a simpler time.” We’ve seen the wholesome black-and-white footage of white college students doing the Jitterbug, read countless op-eds lamenting the trend of premarital cohabitation and have been brainwashed into believing that “Leave It to Beaver” was, more or less, reality TV-esque footage of a day in the life of the average mid-20th century American family. For these older generations, an action or image is only immoral if it challenges the status quo.

But the baby boomers aren’t the only ones guilty of deifying the past. Millennials also perpetuate the stereotype with “I was born in the wrong era,” or that ubiquitous photo shared on virtually every social media platform: “When did this (bikini photos of emaciated modern celebrities like Keira Knightley and Nicole Richie) become more attractive than this (close-up photos of full-figured, anomaly ’50s celebrities such as Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe)?”  

And sure, World War II caused a few moral blips, such as the genocide of six million Jews and hundreds of thousands of Japanese casualty deaths from our atom bombs, but look at this old black-and-white photo of the white nuclear family gathered around the radio — simpler times. Admittedly, my generation isn’t much better as far as war is concerned, but for what it’s worth, we have yet to break World War II’s record for highest death toll. Still, the point is that this isn’t even included in mainstream moral analyses.

What’s wrong with this — aside from it being empirically wrong — is that this mindset reveals how we prioritize our morals in the United States. Just take a look at movie ratings. A film in which a woman is brutally dismembered by a chainsaw (“The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”) is rated R, but a film where a woman is receiving consensual oral pleasure (“Blue Valentine”) has to fight to overturn an NC-17 rating. How did the United States become so puritanical and backwards that moral police like the Motion Picture Association of America will immediately slap a warning label on movies with nudity and “sexual content,” but hardly blink at bloody war scenes? It’s often said that American culture glorifies violence, when actually we’re just indifferent to it. It’s just background noise, a useful plot device for video games.

What lies at the heart of this willful blindness and glorification of the past is the fear of change. And it’s this phenomenon that makes intuitive immorality (specifically, violence) fade into the background. We never had to answer those moral questions because they were never questions to begin with. War just simply was and is.

It’s existed since the dawning of civilization, and it’s frequently sanctified in religious texts (see: holy war) — in which many claim to base their moral beliefs. Unsurprisingly, these same texts rank sexual immorality as a sin worthy of death and damnation. Given this cultural context, it’s not all that surprising that violence is less alarming and less newsworthy, partly because it’s nothing new and partly because the United States rarely has to witness it firsthand. 

But even aside from the moral complexities of war, what we know about the wholesomeness of the past and the decay of the future is an illusion. We’re given a filtered history from the still-accessible media of the past and selective accounts of history, followed by a future made up of paranoid guesses (see: Glenn Beck’s The Overton Window). 

On a psychological level, what is it that makes us so reflexively build shrines of the past and feel indifferent or even disgusted with the present? It’s a kind of generational nostalgia — a longing for the past not because it was actually better or happier, but because it’s been embalmed with that evasive dream drool that only lets you see the good things. Or maybe it’s just because retrospect is always a more comfortable viewpoint. Or maybe it’s some psychological coping mechanism of not consciously acknowledging unpleasant realities of the past — like the reason you always miss your crazy ex. 

Or maybe it’s as Spike Jonze says: “The past is a story we tell ourselves.” And maybe disappearing into a fantasy-filled past is a kind of cowardly escapism to avoid the very real and complicated questions that are actually relevant to our lives.

The question to ask is whether or not the fractional possibility of a utopian dream future is worth the discomfort of facing today.

Write to Natalie at natalie.russell8@gmail.com.