I
s today better or worse than the past? I think there are few people who will not say that in some ways the past was better than the present. However, we've all come to take such sayings with a grain of salt, as it is very easy to long for that which is not-here, which cannot be directly compared. We pine for the past of our memories—and we pine for the past that we never experienced at all, whose contours we can only guess at, as we attempt to reconstruct what it must have "been like" to live in a time we know only through the writings of the lettered elites and the leftover baubels unearthed from the living clay.
We all know that things were harder in the past—for people "like us", that is. There are a great many people today whose lives are every bit as hard as human life has ever been. We know that the average person is wealthier, life expectancies are longer, comforts more easy to come by, medicine greatly advanced, information more readily available now than during the vast majority of human history (even if the last few years may have suffered some hits to real wages).
So what are we complaining about? What is it that we're missing? A few subjects float to the surface in these dreams over and over again: an undespoiled earth, and an active relationship with it; a deep sense of community and identity; skill in handcrafts; the existence of cultural beauty and accomplishments in which one could take pride; a high degree of personal control of one's immediate environ (certain peasants may not have "owned" their land, but they could certainly do whatever they pleased with their homes in a way that our city renters can only dream of); a sense of place in an order of the world, and participation in it; an intense sense of the importance of one's body; perhaps even things like the ability to participate in bloody combat, depending on one's predilections.
How do we compare what has been lost with what has been gained? Especially in light of the fact that happiness seems to have more to do with expectations-being-met than having-more-things?