On Seeking a Cultural Model in the Past

Man is a historical and a cultural being. He is not merely a performer of functions, nor does he exist by chance in a fleeting and detached present. We human beings are grounded in history and culture, forming beliefs and values in part from our knowledge of the past. We live in a relationship to history whether we know it or not, and because an awareness of what has been and what is to come informs who we are now, historical “memory” is essential to our sense of identity. The past is never really past; we often find truth and wisdom in what has come before as well as a blueprint for what we may make of the future.

This is in part why various periods of history have consciously looked back to earlier times for inspiration and renewal. Classical Greco-Roman antiquity—with the addition of the Judeo-Christian religious heritage—informs all of Western culture, its image serving as a lodestar for many subsequent times. The period we call (for better or worse) the Renaissance got the trend started, with its adoration of the ancients. By contrast, the Romantic movement in the 19^th century took as its muse the Middle Ages, a period formerly scorned and abused. The Western Christian Reformations (both the Protestant one and its Catholic counterpart) saw in the early centuries of Christianity a guiding model.

In this way, past time periods become embedded in later ones, and history as a whole takes on the quality of a complex network of interrelations between past and present instead of a simple linear progression from A to B to C. Anything from the past can pop up again as an inspiring force, thanks to mankind’s remarkable consciousness of his history. And in any given period, there are remnants of the past and anticipations of the future, all coexisting and mingling together.

But although we as a civilization are constantly interacting with and reacting to the past, there is a basic question that is seldom asked: how do we access the past in the first place? The most obvious way is through memory, when it comes to a personally lived past, and collective memory—as expressed, for example, through oral traditions—when it comes to a more remote past. But any kind of memory can be deceptive, and as we all know the past can be represented in a distorted fashion. Mankind developed writing in part to keep records of past events and so keep alive memories and values. Thus, written literature serves as one of our main links with the past. So do other cultural products, notably the visible arts; not nearly enough is said about the value of painting, sculpture, and architecture as records of the story of mankind.

Such forms of communication and expression, however, are no more surefire and automatic guides to the past than memory is. They need to be interpreted, and to do this, one needs intelligence and knowledge of historical context. For example, it is often misguided to take a work of fiction as a literal record of how life was lived at a particular period. Since it is primarily a work of art, fiction may be shaped in a way so as to express a particular intention—moral, symbolic, or otherwise—on the part of the author, and this may outweigh any desire to portray things “realistically.” Thus, understanding authorial intention—as well as biases, preconceptions, and misconceptions that may color a writer’s work—is an important part of interpreting history.

Misunderstanding the past thus remains a constant danger for us. You will notice that all of the historical examples I cited above involved one generation of people rejecting the values of the immediate past in favor of a more remote past. The danger here is that while the immediate past is known as part of lived experience, more remote periods can be known only through artifacts, which require interpretation. Naturally, one can be mistaken and form false impressions this way, because the original context of such works has often been lost. All too often entirely cultural movements have been formed on the basis of an understanding of the past that was flawed. Many of humanity’s mistakes have been due precisely to misinterpretations of the past, and therefore we should never blithely assume that we know or can interpret the past perfectly at a glance.

Idolization, or idealization, of the past brings to mind the concept of nostalgia—a longing for places, things, or conditions belonging to the past. It is a universal human phenomenon and, I believe, a valid one. There is an also opposite to nostalgia which consists in a contempt for a particular period of the past, or the past in general. The attitude of rejecting the past as worthless strikes me as a serious mistake. Cutting oneself off from history is illogical, for we are all links in a chain connecting past and future. Nostalgia can often provide the connective awareness of the passage of time that we all need to find meaning in our present life.

Nostalgia, although often derided, seems to me legitimate insofar as past periods have an inner truth that may not come out until some time has passed and future generations are able to look at it with fresh eyes. Thus, far from being always and necessarily a falsification of the past, nostalgia may very well represent a truth about the past that we are able to discern now at our present distance and remove. As long as we are careful to stress that our admiration of the past pertains to culture and spiritual values, not material conditions, we are on safe ground. It gets a bit tiresome when people point out that we wouldn’t really have wanted to live in, say, the Middle Ages because they lacked decent dental care, etc. Naturally, material conditions and science are always improving, thank God, but material progress is not usually what we are talking about when we talk nostalgically about the past. Rather, we are talking primarily about culture in its myriad forms.

Indeed, our primary means of knowing the historical past is through works of culture and art. Man is historically aware primarily thanks to literacy and the preservation of literature and artifacts, without which knowledge of remote periods of history is impossible. Properly used and understood, such things allow us to see the past in continuity and proper perspective, and it’s a mark of a mature mind to see historical periods within the total flow of time.

We have today a historical heritage that is still close to us—within living memory—and that we can well draw on for inspiration. That is the mid-20^th century. I will not attempt to define the mid-20^th century strictly, as I believe it could be delimited differently in different contexts. I think we could all agree that it contains at minimum the 1940s, ’50s, and ‘60s. Now, it seems to me that a person’s consciousness of the recent past can be defined as a complex of his own life experiences along with those of his parents and grandparents and older siblings. Thanks largely to the way I was raised and family traditions that were imparted to me, I grew up with a pretty clear sense of the timeline of my family’s past, how they fit into history at large, and where I fit into this scheme. In my case this amounted to a consciousness of roughly the 1920s to the end of the 20^th century, including an awareness of how my family fit in with the story of the century. I knew, for example, of my grandparents’ upbringing during the 1920s through the Great Depression. I knew of their participation in World War II. And I knew of their life after the war which included their formation of the family that included my parents and uncles and aunts, gradually merging into the postwar decades and leading to my own lifetime.

More specifically, I knew of how my paternal grandparents had grown up in Italy in the Mussolini era, with my grandfather emigrating to the U.S. as a teenager and serving in the U.S. Army in World War II; of how, after marrying, he and my grandmother settled for good in the United States in 1950. I knew that my other, American-born grandfather had served as a physician to wounded soldiers, not least during the Allied bombing of the abbey of Monte Cassino in Italy (an experience he never talked about).

The central kernel of this history—the years and decades of the middle of the century, let’s say—formed a definite impression on my mind, became part of my imagination and inner being in a way I can’t quite explain. I always felt that this history was my possession, as it was of my grandparents and parents who lived through it. Certainly, much of the popular culture of the mid-20^th century formed an important part of my childhood, such as the films noirs of the ‘40s and ‘50s and the familial sitcoms of the ‘50s and ‘60s. Always my sense of the history, and of the part my family may have played in it, was felt in terms of images, of black-and-white photographs and films and the sounds of the voices from those years. While the remote past cannot really be recreated, the more recent past can at least be experienced in a more vivid and immediate way through the technological wonders of photographs, film, recorded music, and other media.

Thus, in many ways the 20^th century still lives in us. And I would hold that the world of the mid-20^th century is a world that imparts to us definite moral, ethical, and aesthetic values that are fundamental and timeless. The period was certainly foundational to me, giving me a sense of inner being, value, and order that lasts to this day.

What defined that period to a large degree, and has defined the entire history of society and civilization for some time now, is the rapid growth of technology and its presence in every aspect of human life. This was a subject with which people of the midcentury were particularly aware, coming as they had out of a world war in which technology had given rise to destructiveness on a huge scale, culminating in the creation of the atomic bomb. In many ways, technology had reached its menacing peak in the closing years of World War II. And the dangers of overwhelming technology, its dehumanizing effects and the intrusive presence of “the machine” in everyday life, was a key theme in much midcentury thought and literature, from the science-fiction and dystopian novels of C.S. Lewis and Ray Bradbury to the televisual parables presented on Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World Revisited (1958), an essayistic reflection on his novel, provides a guide to the many modern themes that concerned serious thinkers at midcentury, and that still endure today in ever more pressing forms.

Please take special note of this last point, because it is important to what I am attempting to say here. The forces that affected people and the themes that engaged the great minds of the midcentury are still affecting and engaging us, in an ever more extravagant degree. And that is why the thought and culture of the mid-20^th century remain vital and indispensable.

Huxley in his book identified several of the most troubling developments in modern life: social over-organization, propaganda through advertising and politics, the dominance of mass media, the loss of individual freedom. These were issues that affected the democratic as well as the totalitarian world. Indeed, the idea that Russia and the West were in many respects merely reverse images of each other, merely two sides of the same coin, was commonplace at the time. Reading moral and social philosophers of the midcentury, one sees that many minds feared a sort of inner victory for totalitarianism. Even if an outward victory against the Nazis and the Communists was achieved, totalitarian values could still become imperceptibly embedded in our souls and thenceforth into society—in a “soft” instead of brutal form—in the forms of bureaucracy, conformity, and the mechanization of life.

It would be impossible to name all the works of fiction of this period that protested against the loss of human identity, personality, and freedom under the crushing conformity of modern society. Such themes form the core of Brave New World, 1984, and Fahrenheit 451, among countless others. It would be worthwhile to ask ourselves whether these themes have lost an ounce of relevance. Someone who remembered the early 1960s once wrote to me that those years had a pervasive eerie, apocalyptic quality connected with the Cold War, and particularly the fear of mass destruction caused by the bomb—a feeling that was palpable throughout literature and popular culture and, I am sure, everyday life itself. It seems to me that such an intuition of the end of things, a curative to feelings of hubris and excessive faith in progress, has definite value, especially for us.

Fiction-writers and philosophers alike in this era emphasized the dignity and freedom of the human being, constituting a distinctively mid-20^th-century style of humanism. One could mention the work of theologians like Romano Guardini and Joseph Ratzinger, with their profoundly humane analysis of the problems of the modern world in the light of faith. Christian humanism came to the fore in this period, along with the revival of virtue ethics and of classical education. The mid-20^th-century reaction to modernity led to a return to the sources of Western civilization, and this is another reason why this period is extremely valuable to us.

We should remember that many thinkers of the mid-20^th century, like Lewis and Huxley, were born in the 19^th century, and so experienced modernity as people who still had a connection to earlier times and ways. This is an advantage they have over us, since they were not desensitized to the depersonalizing conditions of modern times, as we tend to be now. That is why their productions were full of satire of modern life, as we can see in the great dystopian tales. Artists, poets, and others imbued with a deep historical and philosophical perspective were sharply aware of what was going on around them, and what they wrote and produced in protest and warning has timeless value. Read C.S. Lewis’s essay about “Old Western Man” or his great book The Abolition of Man to see how a scholar of the old school reacted to developments in modern thought from the vantage point of the classical tradition. For Lewis, the pressing questions of the day were: Who is the master—man or the machine? Nature or artifice? Shall we have a science that disfigures humanity or one that cooperates with nature and aids human values such as “truth, mercy, and beauty”? And underlining it all, the essential question: What is man? Is he a creature with an eternal soul and godly dignity, or merely a “trousered ape”?

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A subsidiary point: In every era, there are events and counter-events, movements and counter-movements, actions and reactions. A period of history is like a tapestry woven of many threads and sometimes clashing colors. So just as one must acknowledge the various forces of modernity, both good and bad, one must also acknowledge and take into one’s view the way that these questions were explored and dealt with by the greatest minds of literature and culture; their responses in turn form part of the entire picture of the period.

Thus, it simply won’t do to say of a given era “those times were terrible, and we’ve moved so far beyond them,” for that is chronological snobbery and blind complacency. Rather, one must recognize the enduring problems and themes that affect (and afflict) humanity in every age and the distinctive ethical, moral, and cultural responses given to them by a particular age.

An attitude that disdains the past without nuance or qualification is unsatisfactory because it is simplistic and one-sided, showing no depth of perspective. It is also inadequate in that it gives us no idea of how we are to exist in relation to the period in question. Such an attitude is irresponsible toward the past and fails to come to terms with how it informs the present. For the mid-20^th century, to take just one example, is still part of us. We can’t shuffle it off or ignore it. The question is not whether we pay attention to the past, but how we relate to it.

Sometimes, we can relate to the immediate past with a perspective that recognizes both sameness and difference in it. The negative effects of technology had progressed to an enormous degree by the mid-20^th century—a degree that was alarming to observers at the time—yet from our perspective today the mid-20^th century looks like a period in which the everyday experience of technology was sane and well-balanced. There were the telephone and the automobile. There was radio and then television, both typically used with moderation. One could argue that these media forms brought people together and provided common cultural touchstones (of numerous examples, think of the popularity of Bishop Fulton J. Sheen as a spiritual commentator on 1950s and ‘60s television). All these devices served man without dominating over him, at least from our vantage point of a more technology-saturated existence. The machine, or so it appears to us, had not yet totally disfigured the entire human landscape then.

In fact, one popular impression nowadays of the mid-20^th century—or perhaps more narrowly “the 1950s”—is that life then was simpler, more innocent, more relaxed, less dangerous, etc. What’s remarkable is that this is precisely the opposite of how social commentators of the time described their time and, probably, how many people experienced it.

There could be no better example of how history is a matter of perception and perspective. For the midcentury seems idyllic only in hindsight, in comparison to how forces from that time have burgeoned into ever more distressing forms since then. So much of the literature written in the midcentury describes an era devolving into chaos and confusion; of the hive-world of repetitive labor; of the loss of the individual in the midst of the collective; of the reduction of human beings to “cogs in the machine”; of noise and busyness crowding out contemplation and the interior life; of the loss of the traditional sense of the festive and its replacement by empty social conventions. Again, we must ask ourselves whether these themes have lost any relevance for us.

Locating goodness at some point in the past seems a universal human tendency, and every period seems to have a period in the past that it makes the center of nostalgic feeling. While nostalgia in our day often centers on the mid-20^th century, the mid-20^th century itself longed for the peaceful period before World War I; perhaps turn-of-the-century people in turn idealized life before the Industrial Revolution. One could go on and on back through time. Dissatisfied with the present, human beings continually seek escape through their ideas and conceptions of the past.

In fact, there has probably been no time period since Eden of which the participants said “these are idyllic times.” The present is always troubled and seems marked by corruption and decay. Nevertheless, enlightened hindsight and the historical imagination can see truths about the past that perhaps those who were involved in it couldn’t see. In the whirl and afflictions of daily living, one is liable to miss the distinctive qualities or blessings of the age in which one lives.

That the midcentury period had certain benefits now lacking is unquestionable. It is also unquestionable, to me anyway, that some of the putatively awful things ascribed to the midcentury period are simply the product of poor historical perspective and insight. Let’s consider one physical fact of the period, the prevalence of smoking. Smoking was a centuries-long habit which, social historians tell us, reached its zenith in the early-to-mid-20^th century. What I find interesting about the smoking phenomenon, ethically considered, is the things it reveals about modernity in general: about man’s reliance on and addiction to physical stimulants to deal with the stress and pressures of modern life, his manipulation by propaganda and advertising, and more. If we were wise, this fact about the 20^th century could in turn shed light on our own pathologies and addictions. Instead, some are inclined simply to scoff at the era as being “less enlightened” in the matter of health and continue on satisfied with their own superior knowledge. But the purpose of learning about history is not to confirm our own high opinion of ourselves; it is to draw lessons about timeless truths and perennial problems. Instead of sitting in judgment on the past, it is far better to ask what the past reveals about human nature or truth in general.

Unfortunately, I am not sure whether many of us (I am speaking generally) care much about cultural identity and meaning. We trust in our machines and technical processes to see us through the day, thus unthinkingly fulfilling the predictions of the social prophets of the mid-20^th century without reflecting upon where we stand in relation to them or their era. We have absorbed a foolish progressivism that regards the past as something to be gotten away from instead of a root from which we have grown and a common reference point for our lives.

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We must acknowledge, then, the need for every individual to maintain a positive and fruitful relationship with the past. To be sure, there are any number of historical periods that an imaginative conservative could admire or choose as a model in various respects. There is the Middle Ages, with its integration of the spiritual and bodily realms of life. There is the Renaissance with its exaltation of human potential and of depth of learning. There is the 18^th-century Enlightenment, or the 19^th century with its mix of science and Romanticism. All have points in their favor.

I would propose, however, that the mid-20^th century is our most immediate cultural model and source of identity. It is, so I believe, the most recent period of history that could be said to have had a coherent culture and viewpoint. Coming out of two world wars, people in the West were newly aware of the body- and soul-killing power of a technology disoriented from morality and the human good. Still with roots in and memories of an older tradition, the best minds of the time articulated timeless human themes in a way that spoke to new situations and problems. By the mid-20^th century, Western civilization’s descent into self-forgetfulness was well underway, but it had by no means reached rock bottom, despite the occurrence of two destructive world wars. Many traditions and values were still alive in the free world, and religion was having a resurgence in the wake of World War II.

This midcentury period is reflected in everything that came after and conditions our lives in important ways. Postmodernity has left us adrift and grappling for some source of identity. I think this can and must be anchored in the moral and intellectual culture of the mid-20^th century.

What I am trying to articulate is not, of course, “rose-colored-glasses” nostalgia. I am not saying we should take refuge in a certain historical era and let it shape our thoughts and sensibilities simply because it is our favorite era. What I am saying is that the mid-20^th century is in a sense still now, still a part of us. At the same time, while reflecting challenges that still affect us, the mid-20^th century is also different enough from the present so as to embody contrasting values which will also be refreshing and salutary.

What I am proposing, more generally, is an appreciation of the past as the source of a cultural outlook. This is not a nostalgia based on kitsch or sentimentality but rather a nostalgic recollection based on serious ideas and aesthetic values. I am suggesting seeing the mid-20^th century in its proper context, like any historical period, in relation to its past and in relation to our present. The cultural outlook I am speaking of is not coextensive with a shallow pop-culture notion of “the 1950s,” but rather of a broader sense of modernity and the reaction to it that marked the middle part of the last century.

In attempting to appreciate the past, there are two tendencies I believe we should put behind us and two corresponding rules of thumb we should follow. We must, first, resist the tendency toward “decades-thinking.” As the eminent cultural historian Jacques Barzun pointed out, it’s a fallacy to assume that “civilization changes its costume every ten years.” A more sophisticated view of history is able to discern the past in larger time spans than that of the decade, and thus sense its broader sweep. That is partly why I choose to speak of “the mid-20^th century” instead of “the 1950s,” “the 1960s,” etc.

The second tendency we must resist is, as mentioned earlier, the tendency to interpret the past in terms of the present; rather, we should always interpret the past in terms of its own past, with the understanding that history is deeply embedded and layered. In doing so, we will come close to the context in which people actually lived in a particular period and thus understand human problems and motivations. The past will cease to be so much of a “foreign country,” and we will see its actors as human beings like us, imperfect and time-bound but capable of greatness and transcendence.

Putting chronological snobbery behind, we learn to appreciate the past on its own terms, to love certain of its cultural and artistic products, and to let its concerns and outlook shape one’s own life. I think quite often about the question of how one can feel affection or solidarity toward a period which one did not experience, and the even more difficult question of whether one can spiritually “live in the past.” I happen to be one who has decided to devote his life solely to the recollection of the past. I recognize that most people are more invested in the present and future than I am. Nevertheless, we must all orient ourselves toward the past, and in the proper way. In the words of the historian Richard Weaver, a person’s “very reality depends upon his carrying the past into the present through the power of memory.”

But how, and to what extent, can one live spiritually in a past epoch—particularly one that one did not directly experience? I would argue that through culture and the imagination, it is altogether possible. Let us remember that we do not live only in our external material and social circumstances; there is a life of the mind and spirit and imagination which, considered in the light of Platonic thought, are the true life. And these spiritual faculties are formed by culture and art and learning. One can very well so identify with a period of history that it becomes part of one’s inner being. Critics of nostalgia claim that it is phony and a misrepresentation of the past; I answer that it is not necessarily so, not when the historical period is well understood in context and accessed through firsthand sources.

As we think about the problems of modernity, let us recognize what the great mid-20^th-century artists and thinkers achieved and immerse ourselves in their works. Not all of us enjoy modern abstract art, but who can look at the realistic paintings of Edward Hopper and not gain an insight into the loneliness and isolation of the modern landscape? As I got to know the art music of the 20^th century more deeply, I came to see how much of it expresses in a unique way the moral concerns and distinctive emotions of the age too. As for midcentury prose, it is a timeless inspiration to readers and writers alike. You can’t beat the clarity, simplicity, and precision of a C.S. Lewis, a George Orwell, an E.B. White. This was an era when the use of the English language, at high levels of literature but also in everyday speech, had not yet been overrun by jargon and vagueness—even if an observer such as Orwell was already sounding the warning bell that a serious corruption of language was underway (see “Politics and the English Language”). On the whole, though, this period can be seen as the last in which a literate culture still existed, before the widespread debasement and vulgarization of taste that followed. The same thing goes for many of the arts and for much of popular culture. It was a time when the Western tradition was in many places still alive, appreciated, taught, and understood.

I believe that if we ignore this historical heritage, we become cultureless nobodies, much like the mechanized nonentities envisioned in the unsettling dystopian literature of those times. If we neglect the mid-20^th century, if we do not ground ourselves in its lessons and themes, I believe we are left with no firm ground on which to stand. While it is a good thing to react against modern times with the conscience of a conservative, let us do so fully aware of our roots in this most modern period of our cultural past.

*This essay was originally published at The Imaginative Conservative and is republished here with gracious permission.

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