The Past, Another Country?

An interesting point counterpoint between me and co-blogger Elaine at The American Catholic regarding people of the past.  This was in reference to my post regarding the colorization of Civil War photographs:

Elaine:  I don’t believe the past is as much of a “foreign country” as we think. Human nature, after all, doesn’t change much and the people who lived through the Civil War WERE “just like us”. They didn’t have all the whiz-bang technology that we have, of course, and their physical lives were more difficult and precarious than ours; but they had many of the same hopes, fears and desires that we do, and in some ways, were more thoughtful and more knowledgeable than we are.

Don:  In some ways they were like us Elaine and in many other important ways they were not.  They had a deep patriotism that most of our contemporaries do not share.  The same is true in regard to religious faith.  They, and when I say “they” I am referring to a majority of the people who lived through the Civil War, were inured to hardships that many today who are unfamiliar with the period would find difficult to fathom.  They assumed that democratic government could cure most of the world’s ills, an optimism that few of us share today.  Even the most radical of them then would seem quite conservative to most people today.  Death was a common part of their lives in a way that it is not today.  Bodies were laid out in parlors, people would enter into formal mourning for a year, and it was a rare family that did not lose several children, usually quite young, to the Grim Reaper.  They knew who they were and what they stood for, a stability that many of us would envy but few of us have today.  We view their time now through books, a few paintings, and many photographs, rather than the living reality they experienced.  We see them as in a glass, darkly, to crib from Saint Paul, and in many ways we understand them as little as they would understand us, if they could have foreseen us.  History is wonderful, but it can never give us but the shadow of the past.