Anti-Climacus

I am nostalgic for my childhood what I consider to be a reasonable amount: there are many parts I remember fondly, but others I do not. My admirable clear-eyed recollection of my own youth notwithstanding, it's a normal human tendency to gradually filter out less-pleasant experiences until one's memory is all sepia-toned. Robert Graves identified the phenomenon well in Goodbye to All That:

Yet when we had said our very worst of Charterhouse [their school], I reminded him, or he me, I forget which: 'Of course, the trouble is that at any given time one always finds at least two really decent masters in the school, among the forty or fifty, and ten really decent fellows among the five or six hundred. We shall always remember them, and have Lot's feelings about not damning Sodom for the sake of just ten persons*. And in another twenty years' time we'll forget this conversation and think that we were mistaken, and that perhaps everybody, with a few criminal exceptions, was fairly average decent, and say: "I was a young fool then, insisting on impossible perfection," and we'll send our sons to Charterhouse for sentiment's sake, and they'll go through all we did.'

When people get nostalgic for how wonderful it was to be a child in the 50s or 60s, as opposed to now, I get skeptical. Megan McArdle points out how many of these memories require forgetting that things were not so wonderful for women or minorities (reminiscent, in a way, of the "was there ever an age of liberty?" libertarian dust-up last year).

The one thing that McArdle, and a few of the others I've read but now lost the links for, seem to miss is even more obvious than this: there's no reason to assume Paul Krugman, Jim Manzi, or any other child has special access into the mindset of adults. It may well appear that they received no active supervision, but as kids they might not have been aware of it. Nor would they be aware of networks of communication among adults, nor the decisions about which places they were free to visit and which they were not. When I think about my own childhood, it appears to have been largely unguided in the manner of all these retrospective memories; but I can remember just enough to think my parents put some effort in to know the people I was (to my memory, randomly) choosing to befriend, and at least some of their parents; and that the freedom I had to go anywhere--or what felt like anywhere--was actually pretty geographically restricted, on reflection.