Gone fishing
It's not a vacation. But it might as well be.
I’m off for two weeks or so. Not for a vacation, mind you. It’s work. But it’s work so pleasant I’m not sure I can call it that with a straight face. Details to come.
But I can share one detail now: I’m going to England — a phrase this Canadian Anglophile loves writing. And not just anywhere in England. I am going to a 900-year-old Norman castle. After that, a little sight-seeing in London, heavy on the history.
I will take photos and post occasional updates on Substack’s Notes. And maybe a bit on Twitter, though I am still determined to gradually forget that Twitter exists. So if you want to see the snapshots of my vacation — sorry, work — please do follow me, @dgardner, on Notes.
A few random thoughts.
First, thanks to everyone who responded when I asked about your favourite history podcasts. You offered some excellent suggestions, many of which I wasn’t familiar with. (I actually haven’t spent a lot of time exploring what’s available. I hope I wasn’t too harsh about the category in general.) I’ve had a chance to listen to one suggestion — “Empire” with William Dalrymple and Anita Anand — and I’m enjoying it thoroughly.
Then there’s this recently published paper. If you’re interested in the themes of this newsletter, I’m sure you’ll find it absolutely fascinating. Adam Mastroianni and Dan Gilbert have compiled extensive evidence of an “illusion of moral decline.” It’s the perception that people today are less generous, less honest, less decent than they were in the past. Which people seem to always believe. Now. In the past. In your country. In every country. It may be too much to say it’s universal but it certainly appears to be widespread and lasting. Mastroianni and Gilbert lay out the evidence and explore possible causes. If they’re right, it’s an important finding with practical implications for politicians, policymakers, journalists, and everyone in the business of judging the state of the present and what we should do about it.
Also note that Adam Mastroianni writes the excellent “Experimental History” newsletter here on Substack. If you read PastPresentFuture, you really should subscribe.
And one last recommendation.
That castle I’m going to is in northern Essex which, by coincidence, is the setting for a TV show I recently stumbled across and love, love, love. “The Detectorists” is about a handful of eccentrics, oddballs, and losers whose one great passion is ambling through farm fields while waving metal detectors and dreaming of unearthing the next Sutton Hoo. It’s one of those small-scale, low-stakes, gentle human dramas/comedies that only the British can make. The characters are lovely. There are long, lingering vistas of green fields, gnarled oaks, and flowers with bees buzzing about. And history. Lots and lots of history. The “detectorists” — it’s a running gag that nobody knows a “detector” is the instrument, a “detectorist” is the person holding it — are obsessed with buried relics of past centuries and millennia.
I completely understand that. If I lived in England, I’d spend all day, every day, digging. You’d never see me without a spade. How anyone can live there and not be obsessed with what’s below their feet is beyond me.
In my day dreams, the owner of some sprawling patch of England asks me to come be a detectorist and dig, my only compensation being lunches with beer and somewhere to sleep. I’d never return.
I loved the Detectorists and been trying to spread the word. It’s so charming, quirky, smart, funny and beautiful. I guess I want to marry it!
Enjoy your trip!
I read that article on the illusion of moral decline, but it leaves me somewhat less enthusiastic than it leaves you. Here's the comment (one of several, actually) that I submitted
PAUL NATHANSON
Jun 11
It's true that no period is a golden age, because every period is better in some ways than in others, better for some people than for others. No one has ever lived in utopia (which means "nowhere'), and no one ever will despite the rhetoric of utopian ideologies.
But you undermine your own premise (that we now live in a better world than earlier generations did) by assuming that the only important measure of moral decline or vigor is the condition of minorities. In that respect, it's true that minorities are better off now than they were in earlier times (although even that is questionable in some respects). Trouble is, society as a whole is now more polarized--explicitly and obviously--than it was in at least some earlier times. I refuse to ignore, much less to condone, current ideologies such as wokism that overtly promote hatred. And by "hatred," I refer not anger (a transient personal emotion) but to culturally propagated and institutionalized malice (thus confusing justice with revenge). This occurs on both sides of the political continuum, sure, but its most educated, most sophisticated and most influential promoters today, by far, are the wokers (who have absorbed earlier philosophies, methods and ideologies including postmodernism, feminism, racism and now added transgenderism).
Consider that in the context of democracy, which is at least in theory our explicit goal. For democracy to work effectively in promoting justice (and thus belief that life makes sense or even that conditions are improving), it must discourage not only tyrannies of the majority but also tyrannies of (allied) minorities.
In any case, I don't really care about public perceptions. Nor do I have confidence in the ability of social scientists to discern anything deeper than perceptions. I strongly suspect that Germans in the early 1930s believed that their world was getting better and better. They often said so in letters, diaries, memoirs, speeches and so on. For some of them, moreover, it really was getting better and better. For whatever reasons, many people were very idealistic about the New Order and would surely have told sociologists or psychologists that the level of personal morality was improving. This suggests to me that there's a huge gulf not only between personal morality and collective morality (assuming that we can agree on precisely what is moral or immoral) but also between public perceptions of morality and the reality of morality.