The Good Old Days

Everyone knows that conservatives are just misguided by longing for the "good old days" of their youth--which weren't actually all that good. (Ah, the 50s. If you were white and male and Protestant and rich and didn't know any leftists and didn't have teenage sons to get into rumbles with knives and chains and/or get sent to Korea....)

But romantic liberals who long for the good old days of mankind's* youth are even more misguided.

Surely the ancient peoples were more peaceful, honorable, spiritual, and in touch with the earth than modern Christian/scientific/materialist/whatever society, right?

• The Celts liked to decorate in human skulls.
• The Norse idea of heaven was a place where they could hack each others' limbs off all day, drink all night, and wake up ready to do it all over again? (Didn't Dante give the wrathful a circle of Hell that was pretty much the same thing?)
• The Egyptians worked thousands of slaves to death to build the pyramids.
• The Caucasus mountains are full of peoples who finally accepted civilization only after the Russians showed them that modern weapons are even more neato than rolling boulders down the hill at strangers (although some of them still required Peter to wrestle lions first).

Oh, but those are all part of Western culture, if you stretch "Western" to include part of Asia. What about the wise and mystical east?

I could point out that, long before western culture invented 8 buns to 12 hot dogs, the Chinese invented 16 pounds of mu-shu pork to 4 mu-shu pancakes. How wise and mystical is that? But let's stick to ancient times.

• I'm guessing you've heard of Genghis Khan, and maybe Tamerlane and Beber? A "Horde" is generally not a friendly gathering.
  
• Then there's the Japanese, who, centuries before making salted cuttlefish snacks labeled "For great taste of healthy Fun!" used to intentionally starve most of their people just to make sure they couldn't revolt. Not to mention slaughtering the Ainu for sport.
  
• The Polynesians practiced cannibalism until the 19th century.
  
• Chinese warlords put entire populations to the sword to make sure there was nobody to breed with their women while they were out plundering.

Ah, but those peaceful Native Americans, they knew and loved Mother Earth.

• The Lakota drove entire herds of buffalo over cliffs so they could skim a few off the top.
  
• The Aztecs--this one's just too easy. Yeah, just about every culture on earth had some kind of human sacrifice, often involving babies, but nobody took it to quite the level of these guys.
  
• There are Amazon tribes still alive today who won't let you get laid or take drugs until you can prove you've killed someone--which goes back to the ancient human tradition that the best way to get laid is to kill someone and then rape his wives.
  
• The Apaches, they were nice guys too....

Maybe we're not going back far enough? Maybe it's agriculture or civilization itself that spelled the beginning of the end? Well, whoever the first modern humans in Europe were, they drove the mammoth and so many other species into extinction so quickly that they had to abandon northern Europe thousands of years before the glaciers forced them to. I think that says it all.

If not, look through the early human bones we've found and count up what percentage show clear signs of being attacked--and often butchered after death--with stone axes.

The fact is, through most of human history, the strongest and most bloodthirsty ruled. There were no Ghandis or MLKs until the 20th century. Pining for the peaceful state of nature in edenic prehistory is just stupid.

The good old days were pretty horrible, and as bad as W is, any randomly-chosen leader of Assyria would make him look like a saint.

Now, that's not to say that today's status quo is good. But instead of looking to a mystical past that never existed, look to the future. Figure out what's wrong with the world and find a better way to live that nobody's ever tried. It could be a lot better than today--and it can't be a lot worse than a few millenia ago in the "good old days."

Footnotes:

* If you want to call me a sexist for not saying "humankind," go ahead. But men pretty much ruled the early days of the species, so women don't deserve as much of the blame.