Two Versions of the Golden Age Fallacy
Midnight in Paris (2011) is a funny flick by Woody Allen. If you like the humor of Allen and actor Owen Wilson, you’ll likely find it amusing.
But the story is intellectually interesting as well. It examines what I call the fallacy of the Golden Age. This is the mistaken reasoning that supposedly great periods of the past are better than the present because, well, they are in the romanticized past. Thus, as the error goes, any change from these past periods to the present is bad. On this view, yesterday’s good old times are always preferable to today. Let’s call this Version 1 of the Golden Age fallacy.
Some folks commit a similar fallacy which points in the opposite temporal direction: the future must be better than the present; all change is progress; tomorrow is the Golden Age. This is Version 2.
Versions 1 and 2 of the Golden Age fallacy differ from the appeal to tradition and appeal to novelty fallacies. Persons who commit Version 1 emphasize the past as a ‘special time’ in history, but don’t necessarily think about the traditions of the past. Persons who commit Version 2 favor the future qua future but not necessarily its newness. Versions 1 and 2 are temporally oriented, whereas appeal to tradition is concerned with past ways of thinking and acting, and appeal to novelty is about newness.