14
The good old days. Were they the 1950’s? Or before any of us
were born? We tend to romanticise the
past if for no other reason than we were younger then. A very selective memory
also tends to create myths about the past.
The idea of a Golden Age buried somewhere in
the past is also part of the mythology and story-telling of almost every
national and cultural group. When we go back to the earliest recordings of
human history we find that the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks or
Hebrews all had their sacred stories of a golden age just as the Australian
Aborigines have their Dreamtime. In more recent history, national or cultural
groups have created their own golden age of noble beginnings.
If the present is not what it should be (and
it never is), there are always voices urging us to return to our noble past.
Radical environmentalism dreams of a return to a more primal way of life. It is
a kind of environmental romanticism or ecotopian
enthusiasm that creates a myth of “the noble savage” or of hunter-gatherer
societies that lived in simple harmony with nature.
Such reconstructions of the past are only
myths because they gloss over examples of ecological damage, including
extinction of species, caused by primitive cultures. Anthropologists tell us
primitive cultures spent almost their entire lives scrounging for enough to
eat. Knowing nothing of germs, they thought that all illness came from spooks,
spells and angry gods. Most people were ill-nourished and filthy. Infant
mortality was always atrociously high With the average human life span
around 25 – 30 years, life was “short
and brutish.” Some golden age!
What about the golden age of Early Modern
life before the onset of the industrial revolution? Films can easily give us
romantic images of beautiful people living in harmony with nature.
The almost total ignorance of both personal
and public hygiene meant that contaminated food and water was a constant
hazard. The result of these primitive sanitary conditions was constant
outbursts of bacterial stomach infections, the most fearful of all being
dysentery, which swept away many victims of both sexes and of all ages within a
few hours or days…The prevalence of intestinal worm were a slow, disgusting and
debilitating disease that caused a vast amount of misery and ill-health…Another
fact of Early Modern life which is easy to forget is that only a relatively
small proportion of the adult population at any given time was both healthy and
attractive, quite apart from the normal features of smell and dirt…Both sexes
must very often have had a bad breath from the rotting teeth and constant
stomach disorders which can be documented from many sources, while suppurating
ulcers, eczema, scabs, running sores and other nauseating skin diseases were
extremely common and often lasted for years.” (Cited by Bjorn Lomberg,
The Skeptical Environmentalist, p.53)
No wonder archivist Otto L. Bettman actually wrote a book called The Good Old
Days: They were Terrible.