The Past Isn't What It Used To Be ...

Dolan Cummings's essay,"A Fool's 'Golden Age'" at England's Spiked-Online, suggests that the tropes of both declensionism and utopianism may be more useful ways of understanding our place in time than realists allow. Looking, in particular, at discussions of British television and higher education, both the critique of the idea of a"golden age" in the past and the"progressive" notion that what is now is, by reason of that fact, necessarily better than what was before seductively endorse what is, because there is no turning back and the idea of progress embraces current conditions uncritically."For all the talk of how much the world is being changed by technology," he writes,

it is testament to the lack of dynamism in contemporary society that we find it hard to imagine that things really were different in the past. And the more damaging corrollary of this is an inability to imagine a better future. That irritating phrase 'twas ever thus' invariably carries the additional meaning that 'twill be ever so'. Rejecting nostalgia for the past along with utopianism about the future in the name of 'realism' too easily leads to world-weary and complacent posturing, such as the observation that 'the poor are always with us'.

Historians should be peculiarly well-equipped to challenge the complacency implicit in the repudiation of both"golden-ageism" and"utopianism."