Member-only story
Are they wise?
Many of us with light-colored skin and raised in comfortable economic circumstances have nostalgia for “the good old days” when life seemed simpler, slower, and more enjoyable. A lot of so-called “conservative” decision-making these days seems to be based on such nostalgia, as exemplified by the MAGA slogan.
Yet for many people “the good old days” weren’t so good, and evoking memories of those times can be painful. Furthermore, the extent to which we could or should revert to cultural practices of earlier days is questionable. Circumstances have changed.
First, the population on earth has increased vastly in recent decades, and our impacts on our environment have grown accordingly. We face serious problems of resource distribution and impacts of climate change that can’t be solved by simplistic nostalgic solutions.
Second, scientists who have studied our universe, including our human selves, from the smallest to the largest scales of space and time know more about how everything works in interrelated ways than we used to know. Old binary concepts of race and gender, for example, are no longer useful for explaining human differences, and the old binary distinction between people and other animals is likewise obsolete.
