"The national morals are looser today than 20 years ago ... the churches have lost much of their influence over the young .... Symptoms of this moral decadence are the increase of the drinking habit among girls and those 'all night dances'.... The present ravages of venereal disease in Ireland would startle the public conscience .... There are streets in Dublin through which respectable women cannot pass after nightfall."
Sex, declining influence of the Churches, all-night raves, venereal disease. No, it's not 2002, but the Ireland described in an Irish Times editorial of November 1925. The Ireland of Dev. and W.T. Cosgrave, where John Charles McQuaid was just a young priest looking for a constitution to write. And where Father Devane, S.J. and General Eoin O'Duffy could urge the Dáil to control "baby-farming".
It is not hard to understand why old people and Irish Times editors in 1925 looked on the new Ireland of that year with horror, and dreamt about the good old days. For we all do it. Every generation as it gets older talks about how today's standards are dropping, how the music is dreadful, how people have no respect. And of course how things were better in times gone by.
Or were they? In 1929, 13 Irish infants were murdered, 12 in 1930. Eighteenth-century Dublin had a higher murder rate than modern-day New York. In the early 1900s one old woman was hacked to death on her farm; another slashed to death in a Dublin church in the 1940s. And in that debauched year of 1932, an Irish Times editorial demanded that "the birth of illegitimate children must be discouraged by the drastic penalising of loose morals".
Repent? Repent?
The past century has seen the violent horror of two world wars and countless conflicts, from Spain to Vietnam to the Balkans. But in the Thirty Years War, 63 per cent cent of all Germans were killed or ethnically clensed. In one respect - the Vatican and sex (don't laugh!) - things have definitely improved. For the 20th was the first century for ages where no pope, as far as we know, had a mistress or boyfriend (though one pope's supposed relationship with a young priest was written about in some extreme Protestant pamphlets while another's 30-year friendship with a nun led to lots of Vatican gossip).
Ironically, those most likely to deplore the present and glorify the past are themselves religious. You know the usual mantra, "The World is Getting Worse. Repent! Repent!" Forget Catholics murdering Protestants, Protestants hanging, drawing and chopping up Catholics, and all sides ganging up on Jews, which pretty much sums up much of religion's contribution to Europe over the last few years, somehow religious people seem to think the 20th century a moral low-point. Of course it was. True morality was mass murder in the Inquisition and the Crusades. Executing Oliver Plunkett. Slaughtering Huguenots. Protestant and Catholic mobs attacking each other.
In contrast, in our immoral age, all we've done is ban slavery, give children an education, look after many of the poor, free women from serial childbirth, fought Hitler, produced Roosevelt, Churchill, Gandhi, Martin Luther King. Supported democracy over autocracy. Not expected wives to live any more with violent husbands (and yes, husbands with violent wives - I have read John Waters!). No longer allowed popes to keep Jews locked in Roman ghettos. Yes, clearly a morally depraved age.
The 20th century had the shame of the Holocaust murders of six million Jews, gays, Poles, the handicapped. Nothing can forgive that sick crime. But the question must be asked: if past centuries had had that technology, would they have done the same? Probably.
Which means that all generations subscribed to the anti-semitism, the racism and the homophobia that produced the Holocaust are guilty, even if they weren't there when the gas ovens were turned on.
Today we have more marriage breakdowns, but is that a sign of immorality or more honesty, itself a moral act? And, which is worse, a world where old people lock their doors for fear of attack, because the media tell them old people may be robbed? Or a world where people were still possible crime victims, but didn't lock their doors because they hadn't a daily tabloid hyping up the danger they are in?
Glorifying the past
So why then do we glorify the past? Maybe it's human nature. We all start off young and enthusiastic, trying to build a new world. Then reality bites, and we end up old, cynical, and remembering our half-experienced, half-dreamt youth.
And along comes the next generation, all enthusiastic for change, and we want to shout "stop. Leave my world alone. I've just got used to it this way!"
Like the Irish Times editorial (yes, another one!) from 1932 that bemoaned people not wearing uniforms anymore. How "housewives in the years after the first-War found their domestic difficulties greatly increased by the refusal of their servants to wear uniform."
This paper asked "if we lose the gaiters and aprons of our bishops, can we hope to preserve the rosette or the red stock of our canons, the burnished helmet of our policemen, or even the whitecoats of our milkmen?" Can we indeed?
Put bluntly, life is simply life, good and bad. Full of up and downs. Moral highs and lows. Perhaps there is no such thing as the good ol' days. Like those long summers we think we had, but which never show up on old weather charts, all they are our own edited highlights of the past, with the bad bits left out.