The word “old” brings several images to us humans, some positive and some negative. One the positive side, “Old” is a symbol of stability, quality, time-honoured etc. And on the negative side, it symbolizes outdatedness, fraility, unreliability, irrelevance and such. With such polar meanings, how come we put so much value on something being old, especially traditions, culture, and religions?
Imagine you board an aeroplane and hear this announcement – “Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to this flight to Narnia. You have the privilege of travelling in an antique Boening x-liner, a 180 years old model. Enjoy your flight.” Surely, you will be outraged at the airline and scared for your life and unless you have a death wish, you’ll immediately demand to deboard the plane. Surely, you wouldn’t think “old is gold” and stay put. Sadly though, we do the exact same thing with various other things that endanger our lives everyday.
I was suffering from a bad allergic reaction and was sitting in a doctor’s office waiting for my consultation. The clinic specialized in allergies and acupuncture, two things that don’t necessarily go together but never mind. To pass the time, I picked up an information leaflet. One sentence caught my eye immediately – “Acupuncture is a 2000 years old medicinal practice”.
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” I muttered to myself. “They definitely think it’s a good thing otherwise they wouldn’t put it in their marketing material” I thought. After coming home, I read a bit about accupuncture and was promptly convinced about its non-scientific fundamentals and practices but that’s the topic for some other day. Today, let’s just focus on the value we put on the age of something. Just because acupuncture is 2000 years old doesn’t make it good. But people think that because “otherwise it wouldn’t have survived as a medicinal practice for all those years”. To them, I say two things – 1) don’t underestimate the human stupidity when it comes to mindlessly carrying older, outdated things for tradition’s sake, and 2) if acupuncture is really 2000 years old, how come it uses the same principles even today. Any “real” science undergoes significant improvements every decade, hell every year or even month at the current pace. And it’s not like the acupuncturists 2000 years ago cracked the ultimate code of health that can’t be improved upon any further. If they did, accupuncture would be a cure for every disease of the present era and the diseases to come in the future.
In reality, just because something is 2000 years old is a cause for more skepticism and not more trust. Something that was conceived 2000 years ago was conceived for a society that was radically different to ours, a society with completely different social structures and value systems, and for people who had different physiologies and different ailments. But for some reason, the age of something bolsters our trust in the said thing. Otherwise there wouldn’t be huge debates about the dates when bible was written and people wouldn’t be so chauvinistic when they said “ours is the oldest culture in the world or the oldest familiy in the whole state”.
To be fair, the oldness of something does have a certain value – historic value. Objects, traditions, hymns, literature, or even medical practices from millenia ago can be used to study the society of olden times. Sad part is that many people or groups don’t care about this scholarly value of those objects/concepts but use them for their religious/nationalistic/political agenda. They wouldn’t care about the anthropological significance of an artifact but will try to use that object in their beliefs as an evidence for why their race is the most noble or their religious the one true religion or their culture the epitome of humanity.
And if old really is better, why do we draw a line at thousand years. Why don’t we go back further in time and say that cave-dwelling humans were the peak of humanity. Or better yet, the human ancestors from Africa were. Nope, we don’t do that because then we won’t be able to justify many of our actions such as the the enslavement of the Africans by the Europeans or the colonization of the whole world by European powers.
“And what’s so bad about being proud of one’s golden past” one might ask. Well, it’s not bad to be proud of your past as long as it doesn’t make you blind to the problems in your present or make you too lazy to make any efforts towards improving your future.
cool