The Infallible Past

Yesterday, David Brooks of the NYTimes published a screed that will rank him among some of the best old fogies out there. He was complaining that technology - mainly TXTng - is ruining romance with a capital "R" (whatever that means). While I'm prepared to be sympathetic to these arguments, I think that his logic as a whole is absurd, and glosses over what i'm sure were the same complaints made in the past about Scary tehnologies like movies, automobiles, etc. Ta-Nehisi Coates elequently points out that idealizing the past is a typical conservative stance:

This is a theme residing in the conservative soul--a professed, thinly-reasoned skepticism of the fucked-up now, contrasted against a blind, unquestioning acceptance of the hypermoral past. This is a human idea--most people, like those slaves, believe some point in the past was better. And indeed, in some case the past was demonstrably better. But the writer who would argue such has to prove it. He can't just accept his innate hunch. He has to bumrush and beat down his theories of the world, And should they emerge unbroken, that writer might have something to tell us. It's got to be more than justifying your prejudice. It's got to be more than those meddling kids.