ALAN writes:

Apropos your recent discussion of “turning the clock back:” 

In a moral or cultural sense, people would not talk about “turning the clock back” if they had not abandoned the moral fiber and cultural standards that once made America a better and stronger nation than it is today. A restoration of those things is still possible, but only if people have the will to do it. Unfortunately that excludes most modern Americans, who are soft, unprincipled, and adolescent-witted. What Americans now have in technology, toys, and entertainment, they lack in self-discipline, moral fiber, and common sense. Many of them do not have the sense God gave to horses. 

The greatest conceit of modernists is their belief that they are the culmination of everything good and desirable – that this moment, this day is the pinnacle of all history – that now is better than then – that new is better than old – that novelty is better than tradition – that the young are better than their elders, because the young are hip, cool, and healthy, and their elders are old-fashioned, uncool, and weak – and that cool, trendy modernists are beyond a doubt so much “better-informed” and wiser than the generations who have gone before them. 

People who believe such things are self-deluded fools. Today’s feminized boy-men and girl-women are not half the men and women that my grandparents and their generation were. 

When they used a telephone in a telephone booth in a public or semi-public place, my grandparents had enough sense to practice good manners. Are the manners of modern, “cool” Americans who use cell phones better, or even as good? Don’t make me laugh. 

My grandparents did not have advanced automobiles, monster vehicles, designer clothing, multiple radios and televisions, color TV, cable TV, wide-screen TV, “reality TV”, music CDs, rock “music”, portable telephones, multiple telephones, gambling casinos, computer technology, or an “information superhighway”. 

Nor did they have the arrogance to imagine that they or their generation were better or wiser than those who preceded them. 

What they did have was the knowledge of how to live, how to act, how to speak, how to dress, and how to work – and how not to do those things and why. What they did have was an understanding of manners, morality, responsibility, restraint, proportion, perspective, and honor – an understanding that is now all but vanished from American life. 

Modern “cool” Americans have a long way to go before they match those qualities. To do that would be, in a sense, to “turn the clock back” to a better and stronger nation. But to do that would also be hard, and modern “cool” Americans are soft. They will sooner surrender this nation and its heritage.

Daniel Mitsui

                                               — Comments —

 Lydia Sherman writes:

Modernists are frightened of living any experiences of the past. Yet, teaching the next generation what we know, and observing memorials can bless them and connect them to the past. I noticed in the recent Royal Wedding that William and Kate, though fully modernized in every way, still honored the tradition of riding in a carriage just as Queen Victoria did. As they passed many war memorials and historical markers, including that of Queen Victoria, the groom saluted, and the bride bowed her head in respect each time. These are symbols of the past that the young couple honored. I can’t help wondering how they will be blessed in some way for behaving so respectfully. 

Moderns cannot live one single day without some connection to the past history that many of them so hate. A host of these mockers of the past are students who ride bicycles to school. The bicycle was invented in 1885, from previous models dating even further back. If you ride a bicycle, you are, in a sense, living in the past. If you hate the past, you hate your own great or great-great grandparents. I wonder how they would have felt if they had known how hatefully this generation would throw off the manners and customs that made life bearable and beautiful, or knowing how the 21st century moderns would despise them as a society. 

If you talk on the telephone (invented in the 1870’s), turn on a light (invented in 1879), drive a car (invented in 1885 from earlier experiments), or turn on the faucet (running water systems and flushing toilets have been traced back to the 1500’s) you are in a sense participating in the successes of another era. Hardly anyone these days has to hand sew their clothing, stitch by stitch with a needle and thread. Machinery was invented in the 1800’s to manufacture clothing, and those who prefer to sew their own can use sewing machines made for home-use. Other useful things created in the past include the toothbrush, soap, and the sandwich. No one can live a full day without touching or doing something that was done in the past. Some of the things that were invented were created to help the less fortunate, such as the deaf or the blind of that day. 

We live in a wonderful era because we can glean all the useful things we like, taking the good and leaving the undesirable for our lives today. We can turn back the clock by learning the purpose of manners and how they were developed over time. Being polite and well-mannered is not snobbish, and dressing with regard to being inoffensive to others is just good sense. We have today a pack of people who are bent on dismantling the customs of the past, calling them superficial and affected. We have those who claim, as one prominent person, put it, “We are the generation we have been waiting for.” With little knowledge of ancient and old-world history—or even new-world history – and no appreciation for the past, this bunch presumes to lead us. This arrogance is rewarded with failure in marriage, home and family, the things that glue society together. When I think more carefully on it, the era of invention came to the right generation. These people were already well-schooled in the art of polite living. Imagine using a telephone without previous knowledge of keeping a civil tongue. Imagine use of any of these inventions had the society been more crude.  

Kendra writes:

“No one can live a full day without touching or doing something that was done in the past.” 

It is very possible to live in the past, and slightly off-grid, and it can bring great fun and joy to a family with small children. I live in a large urban neighborhood in the Midwest. I left the workforce once I became a mother, and wanted to become advanced in the skills of homemaking and homeschooling. As a new wife, I had to find creative ways to stretch my husbands fluctuating salary. As I poured through voluntary simplicity books, frugal living, breast feeding and home gardening books, books about cloth diapering, country living, survival, and attachment parenting, I learned that I needed to slow the pace of my life and focus on quality and time well spent.

I cut and sewed my babies’ diapers from recycled flannel sheets, and made cloth diaper covers from old wool army blankets. I sewed my own nursing dresses and blouses, sewed aprons for my girls, and made curtains for our new home. I made two huge patch quilts from felted wool sweaters. We still use these on cold nights and I hope they last forever. I learned to season and cook with my grandmother’s cast iron skillets and dutch ovens. I tilled our yard and planted vegetables, garlic, and herbs, and built a compost pile. My husband built a rain barrel to catch water, strung a clothesline in the yard and in our unused attic, and occasionally splits wood logs with an axe for exercise and firewood.

I joined my local chapter of the Weston A. Price Foundation and learned to ferment sauerkraut, culture yogurt, and make sourdough bread from my mother’s 30-year-old starter. Traditional food preparation has brought good health to my family. We have not visited a doctor in years which means that we can reduce our dependence on health insurance. We try to use fans in the summer instead of air-conditioning, and carry gray water from the house to the garden. I brew homemade herbal tinctures such as echinacea in my kitchen. My children and I played and sang, washing clothes together in the back yard in a big old galvanized laundry tub (with my great-grandmother’s glass laundry scrubber board” and hanging them on the line to dry with wooden clothespins. We watch thunderstorms roll in from our big front porch. We stay home and politely decline invitations. My daughters knit and sew and play string instruments, and my son has learned to whittle small figures and perform card magic. They find amusement and motivation to learn in the small things, nature walks, reading, and long stretches of boredom. 

I think that I have traveled back in time in the past 10 years. My family and I have mastered these important life skills together, and we feel good at the end of a long day of busy, useful work and a delicious home-cooked dinner. We have learned that we can live on very little and still have quite enough. We have learned the skills of cooperation and teamwork, and that we do not have to subscribe to a hectic “modern” life. We all joke that we should always look for the most difficult way to complete each new task. My daughter says that it builds character in a person if they suffer a little and get their hands dirty.

Laura writes:

Wonderful.

All these skills Kendra has learned build over time and become even more economical. It would be great to see more Americans turn back the clock on car dependence, one of the greatest drains on family income and community when it takes two cars to keep a family running. It requires innovation to recover the past.

Hurricane Betsy writes:

Thank you to Alan, Lydia and Kendra for their contributions to this subject. Your short articles made great reading. Kendra – there are people who will say that you “don’t work.” Ha! Ha!

One of my favourite sayings is, “Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up in the first place.” I believe this is from Robert Frost.

Mrs. H. writes:

Your recent posts about “turning the clocks back” reminded me of a piece over at Front Porch Republic. Two comments on that piece especially struck me.

One from Claire:

“This lovely piece speaks to me about the lost art of knowing each other. The grandmother knew the grandfather’s tendency to fret and grumble, he knew better than to subject her to it, the grandfather knew his horses’ capabilities and limitations, the child knew his cue to hop up into the truck. We no longer have the hours and days with each other that we used to spend together, where we could learn our friends and our relatives and receive in return the kind of intimacy and familiarity that are borne of long periods of exposure to one another.”

And one from Joshua Lore (emphasis mine):

“I wish we could tell such stories to those dear friends, so skeptical of the past, who recoil to hear them without the rote charges of nostalgia they invariably invoke. The abstract arguments about how such a world, no matter how right, is impossible today, followed by an indecipherable torrent of economic justifications for the position. ‘Better to dive headlong into oblivion with smart phones and internet-everywhere than to give up those things and live life, smaller creatures, with dirt under our nails.’ Then again, nostalgia – ‘love of home’ – is really not such a bad thing, and we are undeniably far from such a place. Thank you.”

At the same time, those of us who are (slowly) working toward a simpler lifestyle should learn a lesson from Tasha Tudor, the children’s book illustrator who lived a romantic semi-1830’s lifestyle, but couldn’t keep a husband and tore apart her family when she died. Relatives and neighbors will think you’re weird for everything from eating raw dairy products to homeschooling (I would argue that sewing your own clothes and a little gardening and canning wasn’t strange as recently as the 1980’s!). But be hospitable and friendly and open anyway. Have people who don’t live as you do–but are connected to you by blood or place–over often. I remind myself often that what I am doing is nothing special–that women for millennia have been doing what I do, and no one patted them on the back for it.

Laura writes:

Have people who don’t live as you do–but are connected to you by blood or place–over often.

Yes.

I disagree that women weren’t honored for what they did. Marriage and home were considered so important they were worthy of advanced preparation and it was considered shameful to have a poorly-run home or fail to have children. A woman spent time making her trousseau before she even knew who she was marrying.  A young girl was taught to view her future with excitement and not constantly reminded that she should become anything she wants, which is really a clever way of romanticizing her future as an office drudge who comes home to five hours of housework. Nor was a woman encouraged to despise homemaking once she became a mother by being constantly asked whether she was “working” and, if not, when she would be returning to “work.”  A woman is patted on the back for making a home when she sees the culture at large take it seriously, including First Ladies and college professors and women writers, and when she is not infantilized as a “stay-at-home” or a “soccer” mom. 

I agree that one should not look for praise or depend upon it, but what you are doing is something special even if the individual tasks are not. Unfortunately, pride works hand in hand with shame. A culture does not induce pride in any accomplisment unless it imposes shame on its opposite. Today, the shame is entirely imposed on those who are not masters of all things at once. The world would rave about what you do at home if you were also running your own company. 

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