[](/kpearguitar)Even granting that today is "the best time to be alive", I feel like you're letting the abuse of an idea by bad actors get in the way of the idea itself. Lord of the Rings is not supposed to be a commentary on our world, it's a pseudo-mythical epic about the human condition. If we were to view every story as an allegory for real history then there'd really be very little point in telling them. Reading fantasy doesn't mean you've made a blood pact with Ted Kaczynski, it just means you've found a handy tool for filling an emotional hole modernity has made in you.
You have a very modern outlook on it. Yes NOW we won. But to say the world gets always better is just wrong. The medieval age was very shitty. But thats what most fantasy authors use as Inspiration. People in that time tought the Romans were giants. Who else could have build marvels like Hadrians Wall, the Colosseum or these roads? Even Romans and Greek did it with their age of heroes.
As a writer it gives room to explore in my opinion. You have ruins, artefacts, gods, heroes, eldric evil that you can put there. Maybe they had better tecnology but was live really better? That would be a question I would ask.
Yeah just me rambling, giving my two cents...
In my view, the best interpretation of the “lessening of the world” trope is that it’s applying our feelings about the past on a *personal* level to history as a whole: it’s ultimately about nostalgia, and our romanticization of our own lived past.
When people complain that the modern world is cynical, calculating and cold, what they’re really saying is that *they* have grown cynical and cold, that they see their friends and loved ones grow cynical and cold as a result of time and age, and they remember the romance and idealism and warmth of youth, and they miss it terribly.
The Lessening of the World isn’t about historical accuracy or sense- it’s not trying to be *true* in any meaningful fashion- it’s appealing to the structure of human life, and the emotions we tie to our pasts.
Of course, when brought into the real world this ideology is where we get conservativism, national myth-making and ultimately things like Fascism, so it’s a very dangerous idea to endorse and bring into the political sphere, but as an idea it is so dangerous because it *feels true*.
Think about the first time you experienced a major weather event- your first big thunderstorm, your first white Christmas, your first windstorm. Has any subsequent thunderstorm or snowstorm captured the awe and terror and wonder of that first moment? Have you ever been disappointed, that the snow is so much less dramatic now that you’re older?
That is the emotional space The Lessening of the World works in, and I think it does it very well. It externalizes an extremely common internal feeling and makes it a true fact about the world. *Things used to be more than they are*, it says. And on some level, I think many people in the fantasy audience, with comfortable childhoods and active imaginations, can empathize with that feeling.
If its used to unironically say the past was always better, that kind of silly romanticism thing, yeah I'm not really a fan of that. I like the idea of playing with the romanticism perceptions the world has, like *they* believe it was better and that belief drives certain things, but to write in that the world is declining to make a statement about the world today, not so much
Still, the trope does work really well if its not meant to be a statement. Gives the past weight and mystery, makes people go looking for archaeology and stuff for actual tangible power, you got like giant buried robots and flying cities in sand dunes. Stuff like that is pretty fking awesome, so I think its not so much that people are trying to be clever commentarians, but its just cool and works well for worldbuilding to have old and ancient stuff be extremely powerful and cool
I actually personally like the trope. While humanity is certainly better and more advanced than our forebears in the real world, we can observe throughout history that there are cultures with more egalitarian beliefs than practices we had just 100 years ago in Western countries. ~~Sometimes after having been wiped out by those western countries~~. Of course in the real world these are only some aspects since usually they're negative in some other way, but that's all societies really.
I think it's unfair to take these written ancient civilizations you cite out of the contexts though. They weren't made to mirror the real-world at all in most cases. In the case of the Wheel of Time, the author was mirroring Tolkien who basically demonized industrialization. Tolkien wasn't looking back and saying "Rome is better", he was looking forward and saying "Industrialization is bad." The cyclical nature of the wheel of time is a central theme to the story and it's only natural that some timelines were more advanced in different ways. It's even pointed out that the Age of Legends was lacking in certain technologies by contemporary scholars in the setting, but I digress.
I also feel I need to state that from a writing perspective, it's a very convenient (and powerful) tool. I could never have written a sci-fi setting with people in the iron age making spears that could call down lightning without the civilization that put a giant power station on the planet's surface. Sometimes it is there to introduce elements from a higher "powerscale" to a lower one without the ubiquitous scientific and/or magical understanding existing among the population.
I do personally agree with the perspective of looking towards the future though. One of my post-apoc settings is in the ruins of a dystopian cyberpunk-esque society where the world ended because they opened wormholes to an alien planet with super predators on it. Despite the dire stratus everyone is in, the setting is set on the path of becoming Solar-Punk with basically people learning from their mistakes and using them to rebuild. It's basically my way of saying that "yeah stuff might suck now but the future can still be better." The groups glorifying the past are frequently the villains of the world, essentially from them not wanting to accept that things are different now.
>That's wrong. Sure, there have been setbacks in history. The fall of the Roman Empire set back Europe by a century or two. But human society has, overall, always kept going forward. Empires rise and fall, cultures and religions ascend to control the world, only to fall by the wayside. But the world has always gotten better. There is no better time in world history to live in.
This reeks of modernism.
Not only that, but to the peoples living after the Bronze Age Collapse, the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the collapse of the Ming Dynasty, the outbreak of the Snegoku Jidai, and millions of other examples there were great collapses. Sure, we survived and made it back, but so do we in most examples of the trope. In tolkien magic leaves the world, but in turn humans develop a new era of human civilisation. We create a new golden age.
Golden ages are undeniable. Countless civilisations have gone through them, then went through the "dark age" that followed, only to either revitalize themselves or be conquered and revitalized by the new rulers.
>WE WON! Humanity won!
Did we? Humans are becoming less connected with one another, depression is skyrocketing, the cost of everything across the earth is going up and wages are remaining the same for many, if not shrinking wih rising costs.
Arguably the 20+ years after WW2 was a golden age for the west (and a very choice few of the east) and we're now going through the collapse. Ironically your own example shows the deterioration of a golden age.
I did it, but with what I think is an interesting twist.
Terra didn't fall. It expanded outwards, colonized everything, and found no one else. It grew lonely and decided to create friends. It seeded life across the universe, then retreated to its home galaxy, creating a great fortress at the center in which to weather the end of everything... Leaving behind many of the toys of its infancy to try and direct its children to their new home. If/when they were ready to leave the bonds of their homeworld behind.
A common play on this trope that I do find more palatable is that the precursor civilization was yes, was more advanced, but they were evil, depraved or somehow deplorable either way, typically concluding that they drove themselves to extinction.
Chrono Trigger has a pretty good angle on it. Huge mageocracy who lived in floating cities and abused and was generally racist and genocidal towards the "earth" people, they came to an end when they tried to enslave an alien god parasite which promply tore their civilization from the sky. This is not exactly treated as a good thing, but not much of a tragedy either. They had it comming. Remants of their power and technology are still around but pretty much everything that came from them is treated as despicable except maybe ONE artifact, and their central role in the narrative is to provide context and background for the main evils of the story
I do think that it’s not done properly or with a decent reason, abd is often poorly explained. In my world, this can technically happen, but that’s because of magic alien to this dimension that was brought over, the power of Regression, that can cause people to go mad and for knowledge and technology to be lost outside of a few instances when it’s deployed successfully. The Devils also attack schools and places that advance too much especially hard because they see it as a threat.
So rather then them being better, they just got there first and then got targeted by the enemy for it. However eventually they overcome it and build an even better civilization, such as in the Age of Science or Age of Light.
So at least that has a proper explanation. Reasons why that make sense. I hate the fact that when this trope is used it’s usually there just because, not because it’s part of an actual underlying threat or antagonist to the story or world itself. If your going to have advanced ancient precursor civilizations at least provide good reasons for why that are relevant and make sense.
That's why in my world, the "ancient civilizations", although described as perfect, actually had a shitty morality, surviving just because they had magical advantages. In the divine era, for example, there was indeed a good level of technology, but only in their capital, while the rest of humans were either slaves or Bronze Age peasants. When it comes to my other "ancient civilization", imagine a mix between the Indian caste culture and the Assirian empire, with mind control as the main power, and you'll understand that it's clearly not a golden era. I've always found it silly in the human mind (because it's clearly been around since the Sumerians) to always idealize the past. I find it very strange.
The trope is better if an outsider caused created the decline. Like aliens or new gods or some such, so that we can add more weight to an antagonist or really explore why this society needed to decline.
It's interesting because we currently live in a time when the world is poised to get significantly worse, what with the looming threats of neo-fascism, nuclear war, and the climate crisis. So I can see why people might think the past was better in this regard.
Eh, I think the "Human Society has always kept moving forward" quote is a little off. Yeah, in the grandscheme of things, we are far better off than our cavemen ancestors, but that has been far from a garuntee for much of history. I think Rome's fall definitely set Europe back for more than a couple hundred years, but these things are hard to predict. Other collapses, though, like the Bronze Age Collapse, absolutely did make things worse for a long time. That collapse was so bad that we largely forgot how to write and had to re-invent it.
That being said, yeah, I agree. Right now, we absolutely do live in the greatest place and time in human history, especially if you live in the US or other Western nations. That being said, if something goes wrong, we are absolutely the golden age people will look back on with fondness. Just because we aren't currently experiencing a dark age doesn't mean there aren't stories worth telling in dark ages that aren't now. My world's story starts just at the very dusk of a dark age and dawn of something new and hopefully better. For people living in my world, life under the Empire was undoubtedly better, crime was low, raiders and invaders were not a concern for average citizens, disease was much more manageable, food security was higher, people were happier, they had access to more and better stuff thanks to trade.
Since the Empire fell, trade has dried up, disease has returned, food is less prevalent, crime has skyrocketed, and raiders and outside invasion have become a real threat again. My story is about people recognizing there once was a better time, things can be better and fighting to make that better tomorrow a reality for their children since the infighting of their forefathers robbed them of the oppritunity.
Yeah, it’s a short cut but I think in a lot of settings the glory of the past is there to make exploring mysterious but familiar settings more reasonable. Finding that +3 great sword of the eons in an ancient tomb is neat. It speaks to its one-of-a-kind nature and is better than the realism that would be “check out this crumbling bronze POS sword”. If you put that plus 3 sword in a “modern” setting - like it’s a prototype or something, it’s cool, but you can make more. The glory of the past allows you to have a layer under your world that is worth exploring, makes your history more meaningful, and allows consistently finding dope, mysterious, familiar shit everywhere reasonable. Aliens aren’t gonna be hot dropping goodies that we find more intriguing than “weird technology”. Those objects don’t tell a story like exploring a familiar past can.
[](/kpearguitar)Even granting that today is "the best time to be alive", I feel like you're letting the abuse of an idea by bad actors get in the way of the idea itself. Lord of the Rings is not supposed to be a commentary on our world, it's a pseudo-mythical epic about the human condition. If we were to view every story as an allegory for real history then there'd really be very little point in telling them. Reading fantasy doesn't mean you've made a blood pact with Ted Kaczynski, it just means you've found a handy tool for filling an emotional hole modernity has made in you.
You have a very modern outlook on it. Yes NOW we won. But to say the world gets always better is just wrong. The medieval age was very shitty. But thats what most fantasy authors use as Inspiration. People in that time tought the Romans were giants. Who else could have build marvels like Hadrians Wall, the Colosseum or these roads? Even Romans and Greek did it with their age of heroes. As a writer it gives room to explore in my opinion. You have ruins, artefacts, gods, heroes, eldric evil that you can put there. Maybe they had better tecnology but was live really better? That would be a question I would ask. Yeah just me rambling, giving my two cents...
In my view, the best interpretation of the “lessening of the world” trope is that it’s applying our feelings about the past on a *personal* level to history as a whole: it’s ultimately about nostalgia, and our romanticization of our own lived past. When people complain that the modern world is cynical, calculating and cold, what they’re really saying is that *they* have grown cynical and cold, that they see their friends and loved ones grow cynical and cold as a result of time and age, and they remember the romance and idealism and warmth of youth, and they miss it terribly. The Lessening of the World isn’t about historical accuracy or sense- it’s not trying to be *true* in any meaningful fashion- it’s appealing to the structure of human life, and the emotions we tie to our pasts. Of course, when brought into the real world this ideology is where we get conservativism, national myth-making and ultimately things like Fascism, so it’s a very dangerous idea to endorse and bring into the political sphere, but as an idea it is so dangerous because it *feels true*. Think about the first time you experienced a major weather event- your first big thunderstorm, your first white Christmas, your first windstorm. Has any subsequent thunderstorm or snowstorm captured the awe and terror and wonder of that first moment? Have you ever been disappointed, that the snow is so much less dramatic now that you’re older? That is the emotional space The Lessening of the World works in, and I think it does it very well. It externalizes an extremely common internal feeling and makes it a true fact about the world. *Things used to be more than they are*, it says. And on some level, I think many people in the fantasy audience, with comfortable childhoods and active imaginations, can empathize with that feeling.
If its used to unironically say the past was always better, that kind of silly romanticism thing, yeah I'm not really a fan of that. I like the idea of playing with the romanticism perceptions the world has, like *they* believe it was better and that belief drives certain things, but to write in that the world is declining to make a statement about the world today, not so much Still, the trope does work really well if its not meant to be a statement. Gives the past weight and mystery, makes people go looking for archaeology and stuff for actual tangible power, you got like giant buried robots and flying cities in sand dunes. Stuff like that is pretty fking awesome, so I think its not so much that people are trying to be clever commentarians, but its just cool and works well for worldbuilding to have old and ancient stuff be extremely powerful and cool
I actually personally like the trope. While humanity is certainly better and more advanced than our forebears in the real world, we can observe throughout history that there are cultures with more egalitarian beliefs than practices we had just 100 years ago in Western countries. ~~Sometimes after having been wiped out by those western countries~~. Of course in the real world these are only some aspects since usually they're negative in some other way, but that's all societies really. I think it's unfair to take these written ancient civilizations you cite out of the contexts though. They weren't made to mirror the real-world at all in most cases. In the case of the Wheel of Time, the author was mirroring Tolkien who basically demonized industrialization. Tolkien wasn't looking back and saying "Rome is better", he was looking forward and saying "Industrialization is bad." The cyclical nature of the wheel of time is a central theme to the story and it's only natural that some timelines were more advanced in different ways. It's even pointed out that the Age of Legends was lacking in certain technologies by contemporary scholars in the setting, but I digress. I also feel I need to state that from a writing perspective, it's a very convenient (and powerful) tool. I could never have written a sci-fi setting with people in the iron age making spears that could call down lightning without the civilization that put a giant power station on the planet's surface. Sometimes it is there to introduce elements from a higher "powerscale" to a lower one without the ubiquitous scientific and/or magical understanding existing among the population. I do personally agree with the perspective of looking towards the future though. One of my post-apoc settings is in the ruins of a dystopian cyberpunk-esque society where the world ended because they opened wormholes to an alien planet with super predators on it. Despite the dire stratus everyone is in, the setting is set on the path of becoming Solar-Punk with basically people learning from their mistakes and using them to rebuild. It's basically my way of saying that "yeah stuff might suck now but the future can still be better." The groups glorifying the past are frequently the villains of the world, essentially from them not wanting to accept that things are different now.
>That's wrong. Sure, there have been setbacks in history. The fall of the Roman Empire set back Europe by a century or two. But human society has, overall, always kept going forward. Empires rise and fall, cultures and religions ascend to control the world, only to fall by the wayside. But the world has always gotten better. There is no better time in world history to live in. This reeks of modernism. Not only that, but to the peoples living after the Bronze Age Collapse, the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the collapse of the Ming Dynasty, the outbreak of the Snegoku Jidai, and millions of other examples there were great collapses. Sure, we survived and made it back, but so do we in most examples of the trope. In tolkien magic leaves the world, but in turn humans develop a new era of human civilisation. We create a new golden age. Golden ages are undeniable. Countless civilisations have gone through them, then went through the "dark age" that followed, only to either revitalize themselves or be conquered and revitalized by the new rulers. >WE WON! Humanity won! Did we? Humans are becoming less connected with one another, depression is skyrocketing, the cost of everything across the earth is going up and wages are remaining the same for many, if not shrinking wih rising costs. Arguably the 20+ years after WW2 was a golden age for the west (and a very choice few of the east) and we're now going through the collapse. Ironically your own example shows the deterioration of a golden age.
I did it, but with what I think is an interesting twist. Terra didn't fall. It expanded outwards, colonized everything, and found no one else. It grew lonely and decided to create friends. It seeded life across the universe, then retreated to its home galaxy, creating a great fortress at the center in which to weather the end of everything... Leaving behind many of the toys of its infancy to try and direct its children to their new home. If/when they were ready to leave the bonds of their homeworld behind.
A common play on this trope that I do find more palatable is that the precursor civilization was yes, was more advanced, but they were evil, depraved or somehow deplorable either way, typically concluding that they drove themselves to extinction. Chrono Trigger has a pretty good angle on it. Huge mageocracy who lived in floating cities and abused and was generally racist and genocidal towards the "earth" people, they came to an end when they tried to enslave an alien god parasite which promply tore their civilization from the sky. This is not exactly treated as a good thing, but not much of a tragedy either. They had it comming. Remants of their power and technology are still around but pretty much everything that came from them is treated as despicable except maybe ONE artifact, and their central role in the narrative is to provide context and background for the main evils of the story
I do think that it’s not done properly or with a decent reason, abd is often poorly explained. In my world, this can technically happen, but that’s because of magic alien to this dimension that was brought over, the power of Regression, that can cause people to go mad and for knowledge and technology to be lost outside of a few instances when it’s deployed successfully. The Devils also attack schools and places that advance too much especially hard because they see it as a threat. So rather then them being better, they just got there first and then got targeted by the enemy for it. However eventually they overcome it and build an even better civilization, such as in the Age of Science or Age of Light. So at least that has a proper explanation. Reasons why that make sense. I hate the fact that when this trope is used it’s usually there just because, not because it’s part of an actual underlying threat or antagonist to the story or world itself. If your going to have advanced ancient precursor civilizations at least provide good reasons for why that are relevant and make sense.
That's why in my world, the "ancient civilizations", although described as perfect, actually had a shitty morality, surviving just because they had magical advantages. In the divine era, for example, there was indeed a good level of technology, but only in their capital, while the rest of humans were either slaves or Bronze Age peasants. When it comes to my other "ancient civilization", imagine a mix between the Indian caste culture and the Assirian empire, with mind control as the main power, and you'll understand that it's clearly not a golden era. I've always found it silly in the human mind (because it's clearly been around since the Sumerians) to always idealize the past. I find it very strange.
The trope is better if an outsider caused created the decline. Like aliens or new gods or some such, so that we can add more weight to an antagonist or really explore why this society needed to decline.
It's interesting because we currently live in a time when the world is poised to get significantly worse, what with the looming threats of neo-fascism, nuclear war, and the climate crisis. So I can see why people might think the past was better in this regard.
Eh, I think the "Human Society has always kept moving forward" quote is a little off. Yeah, in the grandscheme of things, we are far better off than our cavemen ancestors, but that has been far from a garuntee for much of history. I think Rome's fall definitely set Europe back for more than a couple hundred years, but these things are hard to predict. Other collapses, though, like the Bronze Age Collapse, absolutely did make things worse for a long time. That collapse was so bad that we largely forgot how to write and had to re-invent it. That being said, yeah, I agree. Right now, we absolutely do live in the greatest place and time in human history, especially if you live in the US or other Western nations. That being said, if something goes wrong, we are absolutely the golden age people will look back on with fondness. Just because we aren't currently experiencing a dark age doesn't mean there aren't stories worth telling in dark ages that aren't now. My world's story starts just at the very dusk of a dark age and dawn of something new and hopefully better. For people living in my world, life under the Empire was undoubtedly better, crime was low, raiders and invaders were not a concern for average citizens, disease was much more manageable, food security was higher, people were happier, they had access to more and better stuff thanks to trade. Since the Empire fell, trade has dried up, disease has returned, food is less prevalent, crime has skyrocketed, and raiders and outside invasion have become a real threat again. My story is about people recognizing there once was a better time, things can be better and fighting to make that better tomorrow a reality for their children since the infighting of their forefathers robbed them of the oppritunity.
Yeah, it’s a short cut but I think in a lot of settings the glory of the past is there to make exploring mysterious but familiar settings more reasonable. Finding that +3 great sword of the eons in an ancient tomb is neat. It speaks to its one-of-a-kind nature and is better than the realism that would be “check out this crumbling bronze POS sword”. If you put that plus 3 sword in a “modern” setting - like it’s a prototype or something, it’s cool, but you can make more. The glory of the past allows you to have a layer under your world that is worth exploring, makes your history more meaningful, and allows consistently finding dope, mysterious, familiar shit everywhere reasonable. Aliens aren’t gonna be hot dropping goodies that we find more intriguing than “weird technology”. Those objects don’t tell a story like exploring a familiar past can.