There are things about our present culture that we don’t like. For socially conservative Christians especially, the present culture seems to want to basically trample on everything we see as holy while demanding we keep our mouths shut or even prove our wokeness by joining in the debauchery.
The bucolic village scene where everyone knows everyone and seems to have each others back, where when men and women still act like men and women and raise their own kids, and where wholesome values are even taught in school is far from the perfect picture of reality back in, say, the 1930s to the 1950s. But the myth of this bucolic life of innocence, love, hard work, and virtue is a powerful draw and is certainly more desirable than some of the slop being called “the evolution of the family” today.
If we feel right at home in the mythos of this golden age of American virtue, true Americana, this doesn’t mean we don’t know the difference between the myth and the reality. But that’s not the point. The mythos of this 21st century dystopian derangement that passes itself off as culture is definitely garbage compared to the idyllic picture taught by media and the schools, an idyllic picture that wasn’t reality but which was something people generally thought SHOULD be!
No, most people in the 50s didn’t life “Leave It To Beaver” realities, but this was the reality the culture presented as ideal. What’s our ideal compared to this? A bunch of drug addled, sexed-up woke genderless freaks running amok and rioting? Sorry to sound so rude and crass, but the mythos of the 21st century Western Person is really rather barbaric and savage and is disconnected from the necessity of marriage and the family, the pillars of any advanced civilization.
Like the Beav, most people aren’t living like the fictional and academic presentation of the mythos. But unlike the Beav, the truth is that if most people actually fulfilled the present mythos we would have chaos and collapse. People would all be accusing each other of anti-woke transgressions and canceling each other and would have little time to get much productive work done.
The objections to the 30s to 50s are sometimes legitimate but almost always ignorant. There were racial issues, sure, but the culture within the minority communities was still better than the culture of today. It was wholesome and lifez-affirming. Women have come a long way, but, sadly, they aren’t any happier and now it takes two people 40 hours a week to raise a family, if indeed raising a family is a thing any more.
It seems all the cultural changes have done, again aside from actual reforms that protect the rights of all people equally, is makes things worse. People are unhappy and sad, tired, and frustrated, and now, increasingly afraid to say or do anything that might get them canceled. Again, the Beav’s world was never perfect, but the wholesomeness of his life is much more preferable to the debauchery of this culture.
We cannot re-create the 30s to the 50s. But we can choose the wholesome values of faith, family, traditions, and virtues as our way of life. We can adopt our own modern version of that idyllic vision and extend that fairly and equally to all people.
What we propose is that the idyllic vision of wholesome values, deep love, and close connections through faith and tradition which so inspired America’s cultural golden age, is, in a modern form, the very path to true progress for our country.
Of course we can sift out the bad, remove any and all coercion, and not leave anyone, not any man or woman of any ethnicity or ancestry or race behind, and modernize our approach. But we should see in this golden age an ideal worth resurrecting in a new and better form than it was ever conceived of back then.
It’s not so simple to make things “the way they used to be” because this was always the ideal, never the universal reality, and not everyone equally enjoyed this idyllic vision. But that doesn’t make the vision, when it is adjusted to be inclusive of all who desire it, on a freewill participatory basis alone, a bad vision. It doesn’t mean our barbaric anti-culture is superior.
If we tend to lionize the great era of the 30s to the 50s as the golden age of Americana, it is, again, mostly because this ideal, if applied equally to all and expressed in a modernized form, is far superior to the woke cancel culture authoritarianism we endure today.
