Some of you may be familiar with people who call themselves “trads”. Trad is short for “traditionalist”, and often what they are traditional about is faith and home, or marriage (or some romanticised version of the above). But some do take it further, and seem to look back a thousand years through rose colored glasses to their ideal. Like this guy:
I know I'm real late, but....Thank you for this! I think the more comfortable our material lives have become, the harder it is to even recognize all we moderns have going for us, and imagine that having almost all your babies that grow up, for instance, is a normal feature of reality, not a hard victory that took many generations to win. Clean water is not normal; dying of dysentery is. But in a world where no one even knows a story about a baby dying of dysentery, and where we hazily elide the 1940s and 1840s (I stumbled on this post through this one of yours: https://fieldnotes.katrinagulliver.com/p/who-is-this-woman), I think it's very easy to imagine the more distant past as just like today, in its presence of clean water and its absence of body lice, but different because....um, social values and people had more leisure time, probably? Because, um, people in the past didn't have to file these TPS reports, and how long could threshing wheat actually take?
I feel like a real traditionalist, who wants to honor the past and knows enough about it to be able to legitimately do so, should feel nothing but gratitude at, for instance, vaccinations and washing machines. Our ancestors died for a world where most babies grow up; we are betraying their memory by pretending that their sacrifice for the brilliant world we live in today didn't happen.
Here in America (I think you are in the UK, I am not sure), there is quite a culture of religious women embracing domesticity and a sort of back to traditional values lifestyle. On the lefty end of the spectrum, there is a whole hippie culture of embracing back-to-the-land agricultural practices, though their sexual, gender, and economic policies are often quite different. At any rate, there are all kinds of lifestyle blogs around this kind of thing, usually written by women.
And of course there are the anarcho-primitivists on the left, who literally (I think) want to return to being hunter-gatherers, or maybe only gatherers, because some of them are vegan. Those tend to be men, from what I've observed.
I myself often have quite a bit of nostalgia for earlier, pre-modern times, as I suppose does anyone who is interested in history. That is not to say that I would want to give up all my modern amenities (not to mention human rights) to go back. But I do think there's a lot we could learn from earlier eras and incorporate into our present lives, and we may well have to, in the face of climate change and the decline of oil production.
Yes the anarcho-enviro strain of this is something I've read less about.
You're right about the trad wife thing, I see a lot of it online (it's usually as you say explicitly Christian, at least those I'm familiar with).
The male version can be faith based but there's also a more atheistic version, seems to be more about wanting a patriarchal system to return. When I've seen it espoused it's often by the kind of dudes who talk about "alphas" etc. The idea that it's today's world that's wrong, and they'd be a winner in another era, is obviously the undertone.
I guess I'm also a nostalgist in vague ways? Perhaps we all are. Our culture is built on old narratives and of course we feel an affinity for them.
I had a friend who was into Jane Austen and used to say things like "I wish I lived in the 18th century". I reminded her of things like no anaesthesia, no university education for women, etc.
I know I'm real late, but....Thank you for this! I think the more comfortable our material lives have become, the harder it is to even recognize all we moderns have going for us, and imagine that having almost all your babies that grow up, for instance, is a normal feature of reality, not a hard victory that took many generations to win. Clean water is not normal; dying of dysentery is. But in a world where no one even knows a story about a baby dying of dysentery, and where we hazily elide the 1940s and 1840s (I stumbled on this post through this one of yours: https://fieldnotes.katrinagulliver.com/p/who-is-this-woman), I think it's very easy to imagine the more distant past as just like today, in its presence of clean water and its absence of body lice, but different because....um, social values and people had more leisure time, probably? Because, um, people in the past didn't have to file these TPS reports, and how long could threshing wheat actually take?
I feel like a real traditionalist, who wants to honor the past and knows enough about it to be able to legitimately do so, should feel nothing but gratitude at, for instance, vaccinations and washing machines. Our ancestors died for a world where most babies grow up; we are betraying their memory by pretending that their sacrifice for the brilliant world we live in today didn't happen.
It's interesting, I have often percieved a lot of the trad culture stuff as being primarily feminine, as in the tradwife: https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/tradwife-gen-z
Here in America (I think you are in the UK, I am not sure), there is quite a culture of religious women embracing domesticity and a sort of back to traditional values lifestyle. On the lefty end of the spectrum, there is a whole hippie culture of embracing back-to-the-land agricultural practices, though their sexual, gender, and economic policies are often quite different. At any rate, there are all kinds of lifestyle blogs around this kind of thing, usually written by women.
And of course there are the anarcho-primitivists on the left, who literally (I think) want to return to being hunter-gatherers, or maybe only gatherers, because some of them are vegan. Those tend to be men, from what I've observed.
I myself often have quite a bit of nostalgia for earlier, pre-modern times, as I suppose does anyone who is interested in history. That is not to say that I would want to give up all my modern amenities (not to mention human rights) to go back. But I do think there's a lot we could learn from earlier eras and incorporate into our present lives, and we may well have to, in the face of climate change and the decline of oil production.
Yes the anarcho-enviro strain of this is something I've read less about.
You're right about the trad wife thing, I see a lot of it online (it's usually as you say explicitly Christian, at least those I'm familiar with).
The male version can be faith based but there's also a more atheistic version, seems to be more about wanting a patriarchal system to return. When I've seen it espoused it's often by the kind of dudes who talk about "alphas" etc. The idea that it's today's world that's wrong, and they'd be a winner in another era, is obviously the undertone.
I guess I'm also a nostalgist in vague ways? Perhaps we all are. Our culture is built on old narratives and of course we feel an affinity for them.
I had a friend who was into Jane Austen and used to say things like "I wish I lived in the 18th century". I reminded her of things like no anaesthesia, no university education for women, etc.