It's like Alan Ehrenhalt's argument in "The Lost City": that people today miss the security of the old 1950s-style neighborhoods, but they would not give up the personal autonomy they've gained since then, despite the verities and the cohesion they've lost.
The observations:
1. Just as a matter of chronology, I can't miss anything at all about 1950s neighborhoods. As for 1950s-style neighborhoods, I lived in as close an approximation as one can manage until I was 18. Though I liked it well enough then (though not so well as to resist moving elsewhere), I'm not sure I'd feel the same way about living in that sort of neighborhood now.
2. I was talking with my dad a few months ago, while he was making coffee. He told me how surprised he was by the wide variety of mediocre coffee available now. When he was a kid, his parents used to make coffee which always smelled great--better than it does now (and ostensibly tasted great, though I don't remember that part of the conversation). The problem is that his memory is almost certainly factually incorrect. Coffee is, by almost any objective measure, better now--from factors like the change from robusta to arabica beans, improvements in packaging materials, the switch from percolators to drip coffee makers, to the widespread availability of a higher quality of bean*--what he's remembering is not the quality of the coffee but all the other things it represented. There's nothing wrong with that: I keep the coffee maker that's in my office at school not because it makes a good cup of coffee, but because it's the one we had in the house I grew up in.
But I think, as a matter of temperament, one either ends up taking the position that some things have been lost irretrievably, or else that we can have, if not the same things back again, than something that is worthwhile in a similar way, which is, I suppose, the difference between meliorist and declinist conservatisms.
*my last four cups of coffee have come from Kenya, Java, Kenya (same lot, different roaster) and Costa Rica
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