Ari Kaufman of The Lid says no, and that those who think so are just being nostalgic:
Americans have always longed for the “good old days.” The problem is that most can’t define when or what constitutes those good old days. Most often, it seems to be about five decades earlier than the current day…
With nostalgia being such a powerful human emotion, politicians happily utilize it. Yet I would wager that many people confuse their own hazy personal memories with a narcissistic indictment of today.
When Americans say things were better 50 years ago, do they mean stagflation? Gas lines? Vietnam? Watergate?
We hear a lot about soaring crime these days. It’s surely an important issue, but are we nostalgic for the 1970s because we’ve memory-holed that violent crime exploded then and has been chiefly trending downward since 1993.
The essayist adds that we are richer today, live longer, have more free time, and travel more, with bigger homes and safer cars as well as better air quality.
I don’t argue with any of that. But I was around back then, and I say that nevertheless things were better. It just depends what things we’re talking about, and perhaps the biggest ones have to do with human relationships as well as basic agreement on societal values.
I am not just being nostalgic when I remember the 70s – or the 50s and 60s, or even the 80s or 90s. Yes, there were big problems. Crime was sometimes up, we had to wait in 70s gas lines, and Americans were dying in Vietnam (more during the late 60s than the 70s, when “Vietnamization” was being implemented; you can see an informative year-by-year chart here). Racial discrimination and discrimination against women were still real in the 70s, but both were waning. There were race riots then, but the general feeling was that things were getting better in that regard and that these were growing pains.
Just to take one small quality of life example, my parents – who were solidly middle class or even upper middle class – didn’t have a clothes dryer until I was in college. Sounds like that would mean a lower quality of life, right? But I never perceived it quite that way. It meant that we used to hang clothes on a clothesline, which was sort of fun (I held the clothespin bag as a little child, and handed the clothespins off to the adult). The clean clothes smelled of air and wind. And you had to plan ahead if you wanted to wear something that was dirty, because it took a full day to dry.
Big deal, though. In other words, it didn’t feel like a big deal even when I was a teenager. It was just something you planned for. And I knew what had preceded it, because my next-door-neighbors had an old-fashioned washboard and a clothes wringer in their basement, both of them no longer used. We used to play with them. Clotheslines were just normal, and we didn’t even think about the alternatives until clothes dryers became common. When we got one it made life easier, but not necessarily better. It just wasn’t that important in the larger scheme of things.
But what I think was most important in people’s perceptions and pleasant memories was that there was a lot of in-person socializing. Life was more fun, and not just because I was younger. I had plenty of personal problems, but there were more get-togethers, more phone calls, and even going to the movies was a treat (and the movies were actually good, for the most part). The human element in life was warmer and more interactive. The internet didn’t exist. People rarely screened their calls and it was okay to talk on the phone with a friend. When you called customer service you got a real human being whose speech you could understand, and you got actual real live service. There were fewer choices in things like tennis shoes (or as we New Yorkers used to call them, sneakers), but that meant we didn’t spend 100 hours researching something before we bought it. We just made the purchase and went on with our lives.
Theater was better. Ballet was a lot better. Art hadn’t been utterly taken over by woke politics – nor had anything, really. Humor was still funny. Fewer children killed themselves. There were no pandemic lockdowns. There were no Twitter meltdowns over using the wrong term for something. There was no widespread cancel culture. And Watergate was a refreshing walk in the park compared to today’s corruption and use of the government to make clandestine war on the opposition.
We had more liberty and we had more in-person social contact – neither of which is easily measured, but both of which are very important.