Dakota Beacon

What’s the difference? I am not the first person to ask this question. Conduct your own internet search and you will find answers ranging from opinions to psychological research papers as well as a history delving back to the 1700s.

Nostalgia. Reminiscent of younger years; memory of other times; longing for an idealized past.

Sentimental. Derived from emotion rather than reason; a recollection of good times; a choice evoking an emotion or feeling.

With age comes the reminiscence of days gone by and recollections of a more stable time.

Every civilization survives in a world structured by ideas. These ideas, or presuppositions, form a world view which gives context and understanding to the surrounding creation. A culture results.

At one time there was a sense of cultural unity in America arising from the ideas flowing from Reformation Europe. The Reformation (early 1500s through the 1650s) taught that the Bible had something to say about every area of life. Consequently, the Reformers believed mankind should base a world view upon Biblical principles. In turn, the Christian world view taught a unified view of truth, not a relativistic value of “one truth” among “many truths.”

Is that so bad? The model worked. Over the short span of 400 years America rose from wilderness to world leader.

Because man is an imperfect and fallen creature, he cannot be both lawgiver and judge. Our Founders understood this principle and incorporated this thinking in America’s founding documents. The object was never to create a theocracy. Moral law worked from the inside out, not the outside in. A general idea of Christ manifested in a person would work out into the family, eventually into the community, and ultimately into the culture at large. This idea underscored the rationale for limited government. On these grounds it was rightly assumed most people had a good understanding of right and wrong. For at least a century and a half after the colonies stepped away from Britain, America’s laws and legal rulings comported with this world view. Some of this world view survived even into my childhood.

While an undergraduate in college in the 1960s sociologists recognized three legs of the cultural stool supporting a sound America – home, school, and church. Since those days the erosion of our world view proceeded to decompose these three supports and in turn affected American culture. A semblance of home structure slowly collapsed subsequent to World War II. Marriage became superfluous and no longer regarded as a bond between one man and one woman. There no longer seems to be much of a stigma attached to divorce or “shacking up.” Any two or more individuals of the same or opposite gender could “marry.”

As the two-parent family withered, home life also evaporated through the decades. The two-parent family continues to diminish minus two parents fulfilling their rolls in the children’s upbringing. Daycare and the public schools took on the role of parenting allowing the adults in the household to “do their own thing.”

Government schools where most children spent time through adolescence collapsed into an amorphous conglomeration of secular ideas fostered by federally funded programs from the top down. Training at best, propaganda a worst, replaced education.

In the end, government control imposed from the outside became the cultural norm. The federal code, tax code, rules, and regulations became massive beyond belief, a staple of the culture. A Christianity that once undergirded American culture still resides as scattered fragments but portends little. Many New Age and ancient religions petition for equivalency by riding on the ragged shirttails of the once great undergirding of American culture. Now, rather than the “church” salting the culture, the culture salts the “church.”

This assessment of cultural decline is neither imaginary nor conspiratorial in its thinking. It’s an observable, measurable syndrome. Minus the firm foundation our Founders envisioned, the premise of the Republic collapses. The slow and steady dismissal of Christianity from the public square reaps its reward. And everyone did that which was right in his own eyes.

Now what? Which world view will America adopt to fill the void produced by the cancellation of our cultural foundation? Will America regress into the cultures mankind always knew before the founding of our unique American culture – totalitarian, authoritarian, dictatorial, despotic?

If millennials without knowledge of our history offer the answer of Marxism or socialism, then, yes we regress. If, on the other hand, the answer is “we’ll do something new and different and better” – well, that is no answer at all. That answer contains no context, no definition, and no premise.

No one can tell the future, but everyone can ask questions. Are we willing to live an existential existence with answers that lack substance and historical context?

Nostalgia for bygone days may be nothing more than an old man’s daydream.

Dennis M. Patrick can be contacted at (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).