Postcards from the Mountains of Madness

Insanity

Two days ago, a Connecticut Republican was arrested for grabbing a woman’s genitals.  Prior to his arrest, he allegedly exclaimed “I love this new world, I no longer have to be politically correct.”  In related news, a week ago, Jeff Sessions, said, regarding pussy grabbing “I don’t characterize that as sexual assault… I think that’s a stretch.”

Seriously, and I mean this, WHAT THE FUCK????  What warped world have we entered?

To begin, I have written several blogs on the idea of nostalgia, and how it is a desire to return to a past that never was, one that we imagine to be better than the present, and definitely better than the future.  At its base, it is pure revisionism that glosses over all of the terrible things of the past to present an idealized vision of things.  Nostalgia gives us “Gone With the Wind” and its visions of happy and comfortable slaves.  Nostalgia presents us the happy housewife.  Nostalgia creates images of smiling children that are seen but never heard.

In short, nostalgia warps our ideas of the past into a bizarre parody of actual life.  It removes all of the bad things, and elevates the good in a horribly distorted manner.  And on the surface, Trumpism would seem to be a nostalgic return to the 1950’s when the races were segregated; miscegenation was a felony; when women were completely subservient to men; and being a white male, regardless of social class, was the best thing in the world.  It would seem that Trump is trying to turn back the clock to a vision of how America would have been without Civil Rights, without Women’s Rights, and without Religious Freedom

The Trump World is not nostalgia, instead, it is a vision of the past through a dark and twisted filter; it is a desire to bring back, not the good things of the 50’s, but the evil.  It is a desire for darkness that, in all honesty, can be called Satanic.

First, let’s look at what real Nostalgia for the 50’s encompasses, and remember the fact that there is a significant amount of truth at its core.  The 50’s were a very prosperous time.  A man, even without a college education, could be the sole breadwinner, bringing home a comfortable middle class life to his family.  His wife would meet him at the door, with a drink in her hand for him and a nice dinner on the table.  Blacks and whites were “separate but equal,” and there was no racial animus. (Remember this is the nostalgic view of the 50’s)  College students were uniformly crew-cut young Republicans that would follow their fathers into business, and in due time settle down in their own white picket fenced heaven.

Of course, this is a false vision wrapped around a core or truth, but it is a powerful and penetrating encapsulation of what remains, even largely to this day. as the American Dream. 

But even if it looks like it on the surface, and even if the claims are that is the world that they want to bring back, Trumpism is hellishly dystopian vision of this dream. In the Trump vision, the man is head of the household, not through respect, but because it is his goddamned right, and woe unto any woman who dares challenge that.  The woman is not the happy homemaker, she is an ornament, a thing of beauty, to be discarded when the first inevitable lines crease her face.  And I will add, those lines will show up much too early because of the pain and grief poured on top of her by the husband who thinks of her in much the same manner as he thinks of his automobile.  And, like the car, she can easily be traded by the Trump Man for a newer and more exciting model.  No sedan wives in this new world.

The black man is not “separate but equal,” he is separate because of the bars on the cell he was thrown into at about the age of 14.  A cell he was cast into because all Black men are born criminals, and if one dies at liberty, they do so only because they have to good fortune to have done so before committing the murder that their genes demand.  (And acknowledgement to Adolph Loos for giving me this turn of phrase, although he referred to the tattooed, not to minorities, but it still applies here.)

And more, Trumpism advocates for literal concentration camps for Muslims (a group so small in the 50’s that they warranted no consideration, unless it was for the CIA to overthrow a government to install their chosen leader)  The Trump vision is also to load several million immigrants onto trains and ship them back to where they came from, on trains that would run day and night, week after week, year after year, to purge the country of the taint of immigration.  At this point, even the Germans are suspect.  Only the Russians seem to be worthy of consideration for entry into this country.

And finally, College students, like children, need to sit down, shut up, and accept the fact that they will take on a mountain of debt while being indoctrinated into the Republican Party, because all college faculty will have to pass tests of ideological purity to show that they are patriotic Americans who worship at the altar of Adam Smith, God and prosperous Jesus.  And after graduation, their compliance is assured, because they are literally slaves to a debt that they will never, in their entire working life, be able to discharge.  Welcome to Slavery 2.0, where the Masters pull their slaves strings through a combination of threats of debtor’s prison and the dangling fruit of the job that pays in experience, not wages.

George Orwell could not create a world more terrifying than Trumptopia, and H.P. Lovecraft could not envision a monster more amoral and soulless than The Donald.

And the news shows how quickly we can fall into this abyss.  A quick perusal of the headlines of the last few weeks, the race based attacks, the rapes, the hate that pours like sweat off of the brows of the men who now hold our fates in their greasy palms, tells us how far fallen a creature man is, in this time, in this place.

I’d quote Joseph Welch, and ask “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”  But this is just beginning.  This is only the start.  And we have 3 days before the inauguration.  If people can feel free to throw away 50 years of societal growth in 12 weeks, what more will happen in 4 years?  How many more atrocities will we endure before we rise up and scream, “NO MORE, THIS FAR AND NO MORE.”  But I fear that there is much more, and this is only the prologue to a play of such cruelty and depravity that even deSade must turn his head.  This time coming up will teach each and every one of us Artaud’s ultimate truth:

“We are not free, and the sky can still fall on our heads.”

I hope to write a blog full of hope and talk about what can be done to stave off the darkness that engulfs us.  But not tonight, not now.  Right now, I need to take a shower, and weep for this brave new world that has such people in it.

I Reject Your Reality and Substitute My Own

Dangerous Supplement

Nostalgia is the dangerous supplement for the authentic; it substitutes discourse on the past for the actuality of the present.

First some background.  The dangerous supplement is a concept first presented by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his book "Emile." 

            "How people will cry out against me!  I hear from afar the shouts of that

            false wisdom which is ever dragging us onwards, counting the present as

            nothing, and pursuing without a pause a future which files as we pursue,

            that false wisdom which removes us from our place and never brings us to

            any other."

Basically, the origin of the thought came from his ideas on masturbation, which he termed a dangerous supplement to actual intercourse.  The thought evolved into the concept that writing was the dangerous supplement to speech, which was the primary connection to the intellect of the speaker.  Writing, in Rousseau's philosophy, was removed from direct connection to thoughts, and therefore a poor substitute for the authentic.

In this manner, to reframe Rousseau, nostalgia drags us onward, discounting the potential authenticity of the present, for a false promise of recreating a past that never existed.  

To show how seductive the dangerous supplement is, I was trying to explain my take on this to my friend Patrick, and got frustrated with my own speech and told him to just read this post.  In this case at lease, writing apparently is the dangerous supplement to speech.

On a side note, Derrida would discount this, as he deconstructs the notion of the "real presences," and everything relies on a chain of relationships to create meaning.   To Derrida, there is no such thing as "authentic" or "real" and that all truth is merely interpretation.  This is a subject that I may return to in a future post, but for now I am going to leave this philosophy alone and accept Rousseau's assertion that the authentic can exist.

To return to my point, when we allow nostalgia to become the primary focus of worldview, we substitute it for the potential to create the authentic.  This is because nostalgia is the idea that the past is better than the present and definitely better than the future; our best days are behind us; and if we want to have a glorious future, we have to recreate that great past.  In the nostalgia contrivance, there is no way that the future can be bright unless it is a reboot of the "Golden Age."

Except that "Golden Age," never really existed.

Nostalgia, as I have discussed at length in previous blogs, is a rosy view of a past that never existed.  It is Disneyland's Main Street, sanitized and improved for your pleasure.  Because of this, it turns history into illusion; it makes us feel better, but we are living a lie.

From this, we discount the possibility that anything can be actually authentic.  Because we are living in an artificial construct of nostalgia, we no longer recognize authenticity, and we make ourselves feel better about this inability by saying everything is fake.  We have achieved a parallel what Ellsworth Toohey in "The Fountainhead," strives to do to art by promoting the trite, the incompetent, and the bad.  We have destroyed it by holding up the dangerous supplement of nostalgia.

A case in point is Las Vegas.

Everyone complains about the "fakeness" of Vegas, and it is a complete fake.  But it is so fake that it actually becomes a new authenticity.  It does not strive to conceal it's fakery, like Disney does, it embraces it, it even revels in it.  And because of it's wholehearted embrace of its lack of authenticity, it bends the curve back around to create a new form of reality.  It is authentic by not pretending to be anything but fake.   Disneyland tries to seduce you into suspending your disbelief; Vegas wants you to get drunk on it.  

And that is what I would consider to be the core of the authentic, not to be "real" but to not try to be something other than what it is.

Most modern cities are nothing more than masturbatory fantasies.  Dubai tries to be Hong Kong, Hong Kong tries to be Tokyo, Tokyo tries to be New York City, New York City tries to be London, London tries to be Paris, and everybody wants to be Rome, at least the way we imagine Rome - as the center of a world-spanning empire.

Towns have the same problem, they want to evoke the bucolic world of the gentleman farmer, the naturalist, the landed gentry, all of which fall back to a nostalgic view of how we imagine the pastoral life should be, without the manure and backbreaking labor that are spawned on the farm.  When we think of rural town life, the first word to come to mind is "quaint."

And all of these visions, fueled by nostalgia, not only limit our ability to see the authentic, in many cases they actually cripple our ability to create it.

For example, we model many new developments on the Andres Duany's New Urbanist patterns that he first developed at Seaside in Florida.  The problem is, these patterns are driven by the nostalgic view that 1900 was the best year ever to live in a city.  People sat on their front porches, there were no cars, the grass was green, the sky was blue, and everything was perfect.  That might have been true if you were white, upper middle class and Protestant.  If you were anything else, city life pretty much sucked.  And today, unless you are rich enough to live in a New Urbanist development, life still pretty much sucks.  At least that is the message being fed to you.

To return to my point, because we have allowed a nostalgic view of how cities should look to drive the new developments we build, we do not look at how they actually should be built so that they reflect the current era.  We spend so much time telling people how they should live, that we refuse to examine how they do live.

Another case study is Pessac.  In Pessac, Le Corbusier created a modernist's dream of how medium density, low income worker's houses should look.  The problem was, the people who had to live there hated it.  They hated it so badly that they did whatever they could to personalize the houses, even to the point of basically strapping salvaged building materials to their houses to personalize them.  Le Corbusier was so set on how he wanted people to live, and what he thought they should appreciate, that he would not accept the reality of how the people themselves wanted to live, or their aesthetic concerns.

By putting preconceptions ahead of reality, anything created becomes, by definition, fake.

And this is why I feel that Nostalgia is a dangerous supplement to the authentic; it sings an irresistible siren song that keeps us from looking at the actual reality surrounding us. 

If we don't work with actual reality, we do not create authenticity.  When we don't create authenticity, we lose the ability to believe that anything can be authentic.  When we lose the ability to believe anything can be authentic, we no longer try to create anything authentic.  When we no longer try to create anything authentic, we have to create a nostalgic vision to substitute for the authenticity we lack.

We have become the Ouroboros, devouring ourselves for the want of the authentic.

Can you find Nirvana in Utopia?

New Urbanism

In my last blog post I wrote about nostalgia, and how the imagination of a past that never was is influencing the course of the future.  In this post I want to examine one of the ultimate expressions of nostalgia, and how the imagined past is destroying the neighborhoods of today.

The idea of New Urbanism is a Utopian vision of the American neighborhood.  Which brings me to the question, can you find Nirvana in Utopia?

First for those of you who may not be familiar with New Urbanism, I will sketch it out for you.  First, it advocates a slightly higher density than the average suburb, with six to eight houses to an acre, as opposed to the standard three to four.  It prescribes neighborhood stores, preferably in walking distance to the residents.  Garages go in the back, off of alleys, because garage doors and driveways destroy neighborhood cohesion.  In the same vein, the front of the house should have a large porch, to promote neighborliness.  White picket fences, tree lined streets and an overall walkability dominate.  In short, it is Seaside, Florida, which was one of the first and most influential New Urbanist projects.

It is a completely hollow, and overly precious answer to the suburban condition.

Please don't think that I am advocating traditional, postwar suburbia, which is also hollow and on top of it, soul-killing, but the answer cannot be a false recreation of a model that ceased to be valid when Truman was president.

There are many problems with New Urbanism, that it doesn't actually stop sprawl, that it still promotes an environmentally unsustainable lifestyle, and that it reinforces some very bad demographic patterns, but one of the most important is that it is a complete nostalgia fabrication.  It attempts to wind back the clock, through environmental determinism.

In that regard, it is the bastard child of Pruett Igoe, which was the first "housing project."  The project was based on the idea that if you take people out of the slums, and put them in good architecture that's designed to inspire them, they will become better and happier people.

It was a complete failure within a decade.  It was so bad that it had to be imploded in the early 70's.  (On a side note, Minoru Yamasaki had two buildings that he was noted for, Pruett Igoe and the World Trade Center, both of which met a visually similar end.)

New Urbanism draws from the same deterministic roots as the housing project; both envision altering the patterns of human behavior through design.  If you make everything in walkable distances, and make those walks visually interesting, people will stop using their cars and walk to the store.  If you put the garages in the back, and add large front porches, people will sit on them and get to know their neighbors.  If you put people in traditional turn of the century neighborhoods, they will stop having modern problems and live a traditional happy turn of the century life.

First I would like to deconstruct those propositions. 

Whether or not the store is in walkable distance, people will still drive there.  I have lived in New York City, and trust me, if you have an alternative to lugging your groceries several blocks, or more, you will take it.  You will find freedom in not having to stop by the store every day for stuff to cook for dinner.  Add in dragging along a couple of cranky children, whom social services frowns on you leaving at home alone, and you have a recipe for a very unpleasant afternoon.  Driving to the store for groceries is one of life's major conveniences, and one that most people are not ready to abandon, no matter how pleasant the walk might be.

And I would like to add in a tangentially related complaint.  The car is not the enemy to sustainability, it is the internal combustion engine, and our desire for a single family detached residence.  I hear many "green" people say that we need to get rid of the car, because it is the cause of all of environmental ills.  They advocate that no one should have a car, and everyone should walk or use mass transit.

There are two problems with this attitude.  First, except for the environmental zealots, this attitude will turn off the majority of Americans.  Even people who care about the environment will turn away if you tell them that in order to be green, they have to give up a car, even a hybrid or electric.  Second, all of our cities, with the exception of the borough of Manhattan and part of San Francisco were designed based on the car.  Mass transit for everyone will not work in most cities.  To make it work, you would have to demolish everything built after about 1940, and rebuild it at a Manhattan density.  All of that reconstruction would take far more resources than finding clean sources of energy to power the car.

Getting rid of the car is another nostalgic impulse that is false; the idea that getting rid of the car, and returning to a pedestrian centered lifestyle of the past will make cities better.  This is a false re-imagining of the past because, in America at least, we have always had personal transportation.  People had horses and sometimes buggies.  They had bicycles, which are still acceptable to the environmentalist, even though people on bikes are every bit as rude on the road as a car. (Even though they seem to not think so, they are still bound by all of the same road rules as a car, including stopping at stoplights and obeying speed limits.)  But the upshot is, most people have always had access to some sort of private transportation, at least for in-city transit.

This is not to say that we should not have mass transit.  Alternative transportation should be a part of any new development, but it is not a panacea for all of the problems of cities.  But even the vaunted streetcar suburbs still had plenty of private transportation as well.  For example, I live in one of the streetcar suburbs in Denver, and almost every house in the neighborhood has a carriage house that is as old as the main house.  Most of them held actual carriages in the day. 

Moving back to the problems with New Urbanism, the porch in the front, garage in the rear set up does not inherently promote neighborliness.  Yes, in the past, people sat on their front porches, but it had nothing to do with preference, and had everything to do with what the backyard used to be.  This is again where nostalgia fails us, because we do not understand the original purpose of the backyard.

The backyard in 1900 was not a place you would want to spend time in.  It contained the kitchen compost pile, probably some chickens, and maybe a pig and quite likely a horse.  The carriage house would hold a horse drawn cart or buggy, and probably a stable space.  Prior to about 1870, it would also have had the family's privy.  In other words, it would stink like manure and rotting food, both of which would be used to fertilize the kitchen garden.  In the hot summer, you can imagine the stench.

Because of this, people would spend time on the front porch because the smell would be less.  Not gone, because of the piles of horse manure in the streets, but that was at least a distance from the house, and you could plant roses and other fragrant flowers between you and those horrific hills.  Why do you think the traditional home has fragrant vines and climbing roses draped around the porch?

Also, in the days before air conditioning, sitting (and sleeping) on the porch was the only way to escape the oppressive heat of the inside of the house.  They weren't out there to enjoy the neighbors, or to participate in community engagement, they were trying to avoid heatstroke.  The human interaction was a side effect, not the reason for the behavior.

The last issue, that people will be happier in traditional neighborhoods is woven from the whole cloth of nostalgic reinvention.  As I discussed in the last blog, people in the past had many of the same problems as we have today.  Also, the neighborhood that we are recreating in New Urbanism was not the norm one hundred years ago, it was the exception.   Most people lived either on farms or in crowded tenements.  The New Urbanist vision was actually only available to a small segment of middle class and working class people.  Trust me, those people had just a many problems as we do today, and they had to deal with them without indoor plumbing.  Saying that a neighborhood plan can solve societies ills is the same sort of wrongheaded environmental determinism that has failed over and over throughout the decades.

It is Utopia, which actually means "not place" in Greek.  It is an imaginary or fictional place, someplace that cannot be real, but only envisioned.  The use of utopian to describe the New Urbanist vision is very fitting, but for all of the wrong reasons.

They are trying create a place that never was for people who do not live in the way that they want to prescribe.  For good or for ill, the patterns of our lives have shifted.  We are not going to sit on front porches and talk to our neighbors while escaping the heat inside, we are going to crank up the air conditioning and sit on Facebook chatting with our virtual friends.  The garages in the back are not going to make walkable streets, it is simply going to make the street appear uninhabited.  This is because we will still drive everywhere, even if it is only a few blocks away because we no longer have the time for a meandering walk to wherever we are going.  And with the garage in the back, we will drive into the garage and go into the house through the back door.  We may never set foot in the front yard, except to mow it, and if we have a service for that, we may never go there.  And now that mailboxes are conglomerated in a hut at the neighborhood entry, we don't even need to go out front to get the mail, we just swing by the box on the way in or out.

The patterns of suburbia are very empty, which is the actual meaning of Nirvana; the word does not mean heaven, it means nothingness.  We do not have actual engagement with the people around us, we stay locked in our air-conditioned sanctum sanctorum, except when forced to venture out for supplies or to earn money to pay for this lifestyle.

I understand the motivations of the New Urbanists; they understand the hollowness of modern suburban life.  But the problem is, rather than addressing it by developing new typologies, they are fueling the fire by producing a new suburb that only differs from others in terms of being slightly more dense and somewhat more attractive.  Even though environmental determinism is a false syllogism, urban planners can attempt to create vibrant communities by inferring current behavior patterns and developing their designs from them.

Unfortunately, they are as caught up in nostalgia as everyone else today is.  They operate from the idea that the neighborhood of 1900 is the greatest and best model to work from, and adamantly try to recreate it.

And because of this, the answer to my earlier question is yes, you can find Nirvana in Utopia, as long as you understand that what you are finding is nothingness in noplace.

The Illusion of Nostalgia

Modern Problems

In our current, nostalgically enframed world view, we think that the past is better than the present and definitely better than the future.  It envisions a perfect time when men were strong and brave, women were respectful and obedient, young ladies were demure and virginal, and children were seen but not heard.  It is at it’s core, a desire to return to the Garden of Eden when everything was paradise.

We ascribe a nobility to the past that is probably not warranted. 

We tend to reminisce about the good old days, which always seems to be the period when our grandparents were children.  As we enter our declining years, the good old days morph into the period when we were children; it always seems to skip our parents' generation.  That time never seems to be what we describe as the good old days, probably because we are too close to them and we remember them too clearly to ascribe a nostalgic fog to them.

We need to have about fifty years of elapsed time before an era becomes the good old days that we long for.  We need to be able to hear about that time in wistful reminisces from beloved elders.  Right now the good old days are the 1950's, when America was at it's zenith, home life resembled "Leave it to Beaver" and a good job was something you had for life.  When I was very little, I remember the good old days being the depression (yes, really) because "that was when people worked together, communities were tight knit, and even though they didn't have much money, by God they were rich in love within their families."

This nostalgic view of history is false.

It makes us feel good, and we love the bittersweet quality of those days, but the reality of the past is more "Blue Velvet" than "Leave it to Beaver."  There is always a dark and sinister underside to the past.  We think about all of the good of the 50's, and gloss over the bad parts, the "duck and cover," the McCarthy Hearings, Jim Crow Laws and Little Rock.  The reality of this side of the fifties can be seen in "Good Night and Good Luck," "Rebel Without a Cause," and "Death of a Salesman."  These are not happy reminisces.  

Nostalgia carries connotations, buried deep within the coded language of melancholy remembrance, of racism, sexism and other, even more unpleasant “isms.” There seems to be a veiled desire in nostalgia for people to return to their "proper" place.  Anne Coulter recently told an audience of George Washington University that women should not have the right to vote, that it was bad for the country, because they are the reason that Democrats elected.  (For the full article on the debate, click here)

We can layer nostalgia onto anything to create a false memory of how wonderful it was.  We can impose nostalgia on horrific events like the Great Depression and World War Two, calling people who lived through those times as the “Greatest Generation,” and talk about how much better that group was than any other in history. 

Never mind that they were often violently racist, anti-Semitic (yes even in America), and just plain violent at times.  Although the Axis far superceded the Allies for atrocities during the second world war, our side was responsible for horrors such as the Dresden Firebombing.  And remember, prior to Pearl Harbor, public sentiment in America would probably sided with Hitler.  Prescott Bush (W's grandfather) and Charles Lindbergh were two outspoken proponents of this alliance.

But to return to the point, this nostalgic impulse has always been there.  I’m sure that in the 1400’s there was even nostalgia for the time of the Black Plague.  I can probably even reconstruct some of the discourse:  “At least then, people knew the absolute power of God.  Back then, they didn’t question Divine Right.  The plague made those who survived strong.”  The conservative of society, and certainly the nobility, must have been nostalgic for the feudal society that the plague shattered. 

Nostalgia must be recognized for what it really is, the most radical revisionist vision possible.   It is not a desire to return to the past, it is a desire to recreate the past the way it should have been.  It is a pure fabrication, created out of whole cloth, of a time that never really was.

And coupled with this nostalgic view of the past is the certainty that today's problems are unique, and if we just had the morality of the past and all of the other things that made it so perfect, our problems would cease to exist.  Just take away a woman's right to vote and contraception, and the world will be a more moral and better place.  Bring back Jim Crow, and those "uppity" people will be put back in their place.  All we have to do is return to the way we were in the past and everything will be perfect and all of our problems will be solved.

The nostalgic impulse warps our perceptions of the actual past.  We envision issues such as rape, out of wedlock babies, pedophile priests, prostitution, divorce, affairs, religious hetrodoxy and other "modern" problems as being the result of our current lax morality.  We think that these were not a problem is the past.

That view is also false.

I am currently reading an excellent book called "Montaillou" by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, which chronicles life in a small region of the Pyrenees during the early 14th century, just before the Black Death.  This book is based on an exhaustively detailed register kept by Jacques Fournier, who later became Pope Benedict XII.  His records were made during the Medieval Inquisition at Pamiers, and provide one of the most complete records known of 14th century village life.

In reading that book, I was somewhat surprised to find that many of the things that are currently in the headlines were also occurring 600 years ago.  And these things were not even happening in a large city of the time like Paris or London, which both had populations at the time over 100,000, but in a series of tiny villages in the mountains of Southern France, with a total population of maybe 1,000.  In our nostalgia, we also think that problems are the bailiwick of the urban condition, and that if we returned to our agrarian roots, we would be better and more moral.

For example, the last fifteen years have had revelation after revelation about pedophile priests, and we act as if this is a brand new problem, certainly one that has only been occurring for the last few decades.  However, the Fournier Register documents numerous pedophile priests, especially one Arnaud de Verniolles.  He was introduced to homosexuality by a fellow classmate, who also became a priest, then was made a catamite, along with other students, by the master of his school, Pons de Massabucu, and ultimately became a violent pedophile rapist himself.  There is a description in the Register of him raping a young man at knifepoint in an encounter that seems to be ripped from today's papers.  There are also accounts of him "grooming" his victims with small gifts and other indulgences, almost identically to today's scandals.

Rape was common in that time as well, with the only major difference being that many times the girl would be forced to marry her rapist.  Now, they just want her to have his baby if she's unlucky enough to get pregnant.  Most of the shepherds used prostitutes for their entire lives, since most of them were too poor to marry.  Prostitution was also one of the few ways a woman could earn living without a husband.    

The men, especially the rich and powerful ones, had numerous affairs, while one notable woman, the only noble described in the book, slept with both a priest and one of her servants.  The two richest brothers, the priest and the bayle, seem to have slept with half the women in the town.  Also, because many marriages were arranged people only found love connections in extramarital relations, with the woman often becoming a formal mistress, or concubine.

Pre-marital sex was the norm, as it is now, and often marriage happened if the woman got pregnant, which happened, then as now, when their contraception failed.  And yes, they did use contraception, mostly local herbs, but the condom was probably known to them as well.  There is a detailed passage about the priest using contraception when he wished to "know (her) carnally." 

Gossip ran rampant, as did heresy.  People right and left rejected the teachings of the church, yet went to mass on Sunday, and seemed to all outward appearances to be good Catholics.  Even the village priest (the one who slept with the noblewoman and many others) was a mix of Cathar and Catholic.

In all, most of the ills that we blame on modernity were as common 600 years ago, in a tiny rural setting.  This should teach us that nostalgia about morality really is a false view of the past.  Human nature does not change significantly, and none of the sins of the present are particularly original.

Which leads me to my final question, why do we want to recreate the world that we imagine in our nostalgic daydreams?  Even with all of the bad things in the world, so much is actually better now.

We can cure common illnesses that just a few decades ago would have been a death sentence.  We live longer, healthier lives than even our grandparents did.  Our families may not be as traditional as in the past, but we still manage to raise fairly well adjusted, successful children.  Even though there is still poverty and hunger in this country, there is at least some sort of a safety net in place.  Our children are not working full time in factories at the age of ten.  My god, we even have decent toilet paper, which trust me, is probably mankind's most important invention.

We need to build a future from the present, not to be haunted by ghosts of a past that never was.  Our world is not perfect, by any stretch of the imagination.  But rather than try to wind back the clock, we need to look at what is good in the world around us and build off of it.  We need to strive to build the future we want to give to our kids, a world without hunger, war, discrimination.

We don't want to give them the failure of a world that never was, and never could be, and instead we need to give them a real future, full of hope for a better tomorrow.