My 4 Questions After Watching ‘Further Back in Time for Dinner’
My family sat down last week to watch the first episode of the ABC’s new show, Further Back in Time for Dinner, hosted by Annabel Crabb.
It’s a brilliant show in so many ways: well produced (the costumes, house, and food are worthy of a period drama); educational (helping my kids see what life was like for their great-great grandparents); and entertaining (watching a modern day digitally connected family handle going to an era without electricity, let alone plumbing is something to behold).
And after seeing what the average Aussie ate in the early 1900’s, I’m hoping it’ll help my kids be less fussy about their dad’s crazy paleo cooking!
The show is guided throughout by a witty, charming and hilarious Annabel Crabb, who does a great job of telling the ‘time travelling’ modern family about the challenges of early 1900’s Australia (such as the absence of toilet paper), and then disappearing from the scene with a ‘See ‘ya! Wouldn’t want to be ‘ya!’ as they’re left to get on with life in 1901.
All in all, it’s a family shows that ticks so many boxes.
But as I walked away from the show last week, I was left with a number of questions.
Questions that made me wonder more about our forebears, about how we view them. And how we view our own era.
Here are the 4 questions this show raised for me:
1) How Did People Back Then Feel About Their Lives?
It’s illuminating to watch a 21st century family suddenly move back to the early 1900’s. As they struggle to adapt to a world without telephones, washing machines or thermomixers, we feel their pain. We share their bewilderment at living in a world where women have next to no career opportunities, where aboriginal people aren’t legally recognised as persons, and where immigration is based on the White Australia policy.
We know what we 21st century Aussies think about life back then.
But how did people back in the day feel about their lives?
Were they as despondent about the lack of opportunities as we are now?
Did they struggle with their spartan existence?
Did they see their lives in 1901 as inherently difficult, as we do from our vantage point?
This leads to an even more important question:
2) How Did People Further Back in Time Cope With Life?
What gave their lives meaning and purpose?
We watch the modern family struggle with life in the early 1900’s – it’s not easy for them as they navigate life in that era. But how did families back then cope?
In particular, what gave their (simpler) lives meaning?
On first blush, a life without the internet and hyperconnectivity, let alone wealth, comfort and career opportunities seems lacking in meaning to us. It seems so boring. So dull. To the point where life would (almost) seem pointless to us – and we see this in the modern family’s reaction to their 1900’s lifestyle.
But here’s why this question of meaning is so important: psychologists tell us that without a strong sense of meaning and purpose, people become more susceptible to poor mental health. If we don’t have a strong sense of ‘why’, then doing the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of life becomes increasingly harder.
And from our 21st century perspective, it’s easy to question how such simple and difficult lives could ever be truly meaningful. Surely, we think, mental health concerns were prevalent in those poorer, more difficult days?
But here’s where it gets interesting: the data says that mental health problems were less prevalent in those days than they are today.
As the former head of the American Psychological Association Martin Seligman points out:
Depression until the 1960’s was a fairly unusual condition, typically reported by middle aged women. In the early 1960’s, depression started becoming more prevalent. Now, after only thirty years, depression has become the common cold of mental illness and it takes its first victim in junior highschool, if not before.[1]
(In case you’re wondering, this isn’t a factor of our society’s growing awareness of depression, or biased self-reporting – it’s based on solid research - see footnote [1] below).
In fact, as Seligman points out, the further back in the 20th century we go, the less likely a person is to have suffered from depression:
[One] study…showed a strong increase in depression over the course of the century – even more than ten-to-one. Consider just the women who were born during the early 1950s and went to school as the feeling-good era was taking hold. By the time they were thirty, more than 60 percent of them had been severely depressed. By contrast, only 3 percent of the women born around 1910, who went to school under the hard-work, dunce-cap ethic, had a severe depression by the time they were thirty.
Seligman concludes:
This is a twenty-fold difference – as big an effect as is ever observed in social science.’[2]
So why might this be? Why might it be the case that the further back in time (for dinner) we go, the less likely people were wracked by mental health concerns?
While there’s no commonly agreed upon answer, Seligman makes a pertinent point when he writes:
[O]ne truth about meaning is this: the larger the entity to which you can attach yourself, the more meaning you will feel your life has. While some argue that generations that lived for God, for [country], for Duty, or for their children were misguided, these same generations surely felt their lives imbued with meaning. The individual, the consuming self, isolated from larger entities, is a very poor site for a meaningful life. However, the bloated self is fertile soil for the growth of depression.'[3]
And this makes sense: evidently in the Australia of Further Back in Time for Dinner, more people felt a strong sense of connection to God, King and Country. This would have brought meaning and purpose to people’s lives.
It’s also worth saying that religious observance – something common in early 1900’s Australia – is proven to be a protective factor against poor mental health – especially in children.
Today, however, the weight of achieving a meaningful is placed squarely on our (secular) individual shoulders. Thanks to the radical individualism that became mainstreamed in the 1960’s, we ‘get’ to make our own meaning. God, Country, Duty: these have all been marginalised. When it comes to meaning, it’s now all up to us.
But as the above psychological evidence suggests, our individual selves alone aren’t able to bear this weight of meaning.
(Which might also in part explain the meteoric rise of Jordan Peterson, who aims to give people some sense of meaning and purpose to their lives).
In light of this, I’m not sure we’ve advanced all that much, at least when it comes to our mental health.
What about morally? How might we compare to 1901?
3) It’s Easy to See The Blind Spots Of Earlier Periods
But What Are Our Blind Spots Today?
It’s not hard to pick out the blind spots and sins of previous generations. Further back in time highlighted the White Australia policy, maltreatment of aboriginal people, and the lack of the female vote. These moral failings are obvious to us – but evidently most of Australian society at the time thought these policies acceptable. At the very least, they were a moral blind spot of society in the early 1900’s (though I’m sure some were aware and agitating against these things).
And we do well to condemn such policies.
But what are our blind spots today, in 2020?
If Annabel Crabb’s granddaughter were to produce a ‘Further back in time 2020’ edition in 60 years’ time, what moral failings might she highlight?
For starters, she may highlight our society’s acceptance of abortion. Or the push by many lawmakers and elites to impose gender fluidity ideology on our children. She may wonder about the sexualised culture our kids grew up in (Cardi B, anyone?).
I also wonder if she’ll look back and shake her head at how disconnected we had become from one another – with an epidemic of loneliness wreaking havoc in people’s lives.
I wonder if she’ll look back at the crisis of meaning many are facing – especially our young men – wrought by our secular individualistic culture. A culture that gives little more to aspire to than comfort and wealth.
As I thought more about our moral blind spots today, it made me realise the danger I face in ‘writing off’ previous generations, and assuming we’re inherently more advanced than they were:
4) Are We In Danger Of ‘Chronological Snobbery’?
CS Lewis coined the term ‘chronological snobbery’, which he defined as:
[T]he uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate of our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that count discredited.’[4]
Further Back in Time helpfully shows us many things that have gone out of date: woodfire stoves, handwringers to do the washing, the White Australia policy, among other things. We can thank God our society has moved on from these things.
And yet.
I found it all too easy to walk away thinking how morally inferior our forebears were, in every way. After all, if you could tolerate a White Australia policy, surely you have no moral compass worth speaking about? Surely such society and all the ideas around it are not only discredited, they’re also repugnant?
But if all we see are our forebear’s failings (while ignoring our own), are we getting a high-resolution picture of who they were, and the strengths of their society? Or are we in danger of getting a low-res black and white view, that (unintentionally) encourages us to write them off as little more than ‘racist misogynists’, whose statues we should tear down, and whose memory we should eradicate?
To be clear: I’m not advocating nostalgia. I don’t we should hearken back to some ‘good old days’, where everything was hunky dory. Those days didn’t exist. Every era has its moral failings, and we need to understand those failings. Not least, so that don’t repeat them.
But if we work off low-res views of our forebears, could we be in danger of chronological snobbery?
A Great Show: But Could It Be Better?
Further back in time for dinner is such a clever show. But I would love it to explore the spiritual/emotional dimension of what gave people of each era rich, meaningful lives.
Hey Annabel, could the show ask more questions around this in the next series?
[1] While these studies are American, Australian society was very similar, so we could expect similar findings. Martin E. P. Seligman, Ph.D, The Optimistic Child - A Proven Programme to Safeguard Children Against Depression and Build Lifelong Resilience (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 41, 37. At this point, some might argue that depression today is just being diagnosed more than it was before. But as Seligman points out: ‘You might wonder if this explosion of depression is just an artifact of labelling. Maybe our grandmothers suffered as much as we do but didn’t call it ‘depression’. They just called it ‘life’. Maybe the grinding misery that we call depression used to be an acceptable, inevitable part of the human condition. Now it has become a “disorder,” and a treatable one – one that we believe we can and should get rid of. These factors are valid considerations, but they do not explain the explosion of depression. The interviewers [of the major studies that show a massive increase in depression] did not just ask “Have you ever been depressed?” They asked about the occurrence of each symptom over a lifetime.’ Seligman, 38-39.
[2] Seligman, 38.
[3] Seligman, 42. Emphasis added.
[4] Taken from: https://www.cslewisinstitute.org/webfm_send/47 as at 8 Sep 2020.
Image: Squarespace.com