The Old is Better

Of course I am in training to be grumpy old man.

But it is true that the old is better, in general.

That is sometimes because the old was better. Education or writing or music or culture or... just might have been better in some times and places than they are now. Sometimes the old was better.

But very often a process of natural selection has taken place over history. A lot of the dross and ephemera has simply been forgotten.

Smith may have been a pretty average poem in general. Say he wrote 3000 poems and 100 of them were published and we remember three. We remember them for a reason or reasons (maybe good or bad) but they have somehow for some reason fought their way through the noise and the years to the present. That is often because they have something about them to commend themselves.

So it is with mushrooms and bacon. It is a classic and enduring combination because it works. Mushrooms and pineapple has no doubt been attempted from time to time but it has not generally established itself as a go to combo for a very good reason.

Time is a great filter. Give it 100 years and some of the stuff that is served up to us today might be worth enjoying still. Much will mercifully be forgotten.

(See also C S Lewis on The Reading of Old Books: https://reasonabletheology.org/cs-lewis-on-reading-old-books/ - his introduction to Athanasius’ On the Incarnation)