Nostalgia ain't what it used to be

During my graduate school days, I worked as an intern at a transportation planning agency in Los Angeles.  One day, during a conversation on some planning issue, my supervisor, Debra, commented that I seemed to enjoy being a contrarian.  I tried explaining to her that I wasn't contradicting her for the sake of arguing, but that those were serious issues we had to think about.

I knew what she meant though.  In a planning agency, one is expected to follow a certain bottom-line set of ideas.  I, with my free-thinking, either didn't always go along with them or sometimes even explicitly questioned them.  Such a trait has been a constant in my life, perhaps working against my professional advancements, but the free-thinking has been one immensely rewarding intellectual life.  And enriching in my personal life too.

Thus, even now, when I opine in favor of nuclear energy or genetically modified rice, or criticize higher education, but at the same time champion a whole lot of left-of-center values, I am more easily tagged a contrarian than otherwise. Even worse is the contrarian label if I happened to change my mind on issues after years of reflecting on them, even though revising our thesis based on compelling evidence is what the scientific method is all about!

The "contrarian" streak is very much alive when it comes to food and diet.  When academics praise organic foods and advocate for them, I point out that almost always the poorest of poor in the villages of Asia and Africa eat nothing but organic food.  And that organic food hasn't gotten them very far.  Not that I want strange chemicals in my food, but I want to be realistic about "organic."

When people talk about going on diets, I keep quiet mostly because as a thinly built fellow my contrarian comments can be misconstrued in many ways.  But, I would always want to tell them that a diet by itself is not the problem or the solution. Especially when they fondly talk about the food and diet of the old days; because, I then have the urge to remind them that in the old days not only was there not enough food, but even the available food was not good enough.  Under-nourishment was more the norm than otherwise.  I would never want to go back in time. Ever. Because, going back in time means that I have to re-live all those problems our ancestors had to deal with.

In a wonderfully informative and an engaging essay on our "Misguided Nostalgia for Our Paleo Past," Professor Marlene Zuk writes:

It's common for people to talk about how we were "meant" to be, in areas ranging from diet to exercise to sex and family. Yet these notions are often flawed, making us unnecessarily wary of new foods and, in the long run, new ideas.

Yes, it makes us wary of new ideas.  And that is one awful downside.  As I often remark in my classes, what I teach is merely an example of how much humans have progressed from the African Savannah thanks to new ideas.  If we had had nothing but nostalgia for those good old days, then, hello, I wouldn't be blogging this and you wouldn't be reading it either.

Some of our nostalgia for a simpler past is just the same old amnesia that every generation has about the good old days. The ancient Romans fretted about the young and their callous disregard for the hard-won wisdom of their elders. Several 16th- and 17th-century writers and philosophers famously idealized the Noble Savage, a being who lived in harmony with nature and did not destroy his surroundings. Now we worry about our kids as "digital natives," who grow up surrounded by electronics and can't settle their brains sufficiently to concentrate on walking the dog without simultaneously texting and listening to their iPods. ...
Given this whiplash-inducing rate of recent change, it's reasonable to conclude that we aren't suited to our modern lives, and that our health, our family lives, and perhaps our sanity would all be improved if we could live the way early humans did. Our bodies and minds evolved under a particular set of circumstances, the reasoning goes, and in changing those circumstances without allowing our bodies time to evolve in response, we have wreaked the havoc that is modern life.
In short, we have what the anthropologist Leslie Aiello, president of the renowned Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, called "paleofantasies."

 Damn, these people write so well!  I love that phrase "paleofantasies" :)

[In] a larger sense, we all sometimes feel like fish out of water, out of sync with the environment we were meant to live in. If gnawing on that rib or jogging barefoot through the mud is therapeutic, enjoy. But know that should you wish to join us, the scientific evidence will gladly welcome you to the 21st century, in all its inevitable anxious uncertainty.

Perhaps this nostalgia, the paleofantasies, are their defensive approaches to deal with the uncertainties that envelop life.  But, hey, life has never, ever, been for certain.  More importantly, the good old days were not all good old days.