Inevitably, when some improvement in technology, education, or society in general comes along, there will be someone talking about “Well, in MY day...” or “When I was your age...” — their point being that the improvements are unnecessarily coddling the youth of today.

Screenshot of the tweet about college loan debt that inspired me to write this entry.

The specific issue that sparked my desire to write this entry was college loan debt cancellation, which was on liberals’ radars in late 2020. Notable Democrats were listing things that newly elected President Joe Biden could, would, or should do in his first hundred days in office, and Chuck Shumer threw in cancelling up to $50,000 in student loan debt via executive order. Almost immediately, there came cries that it would unfair to everyone who’d ever paid off their own loan debt. I saw dozens of these complaints on social media. The screenshot I’ve chosen here is of a tweet warning Democrats of intense anger from “lots and lots of people who didn’t go to college or who worked to pay off their debts”.

The replies to this tweet — and many others — proved it correct. There actually are a lot of people who are very upset at the thought that the current generation of college students should have their loans forgiven. Most were along the lines of: “By golly, I paid off MY student loans and everything worked out fine for me. So the young’uns ought to do it do.” (This is an approximation of the idea, not an actual quotation. Also, my version has better spelling, grammar, and punctuation than most replies I saw.)

My topic here is not the specific issue of student loan forgiveness, nor the high cost of higher education today. I’m tackling the general idea that things today should be done in a particular way, the only reason being that things were done in the past in that particular way. Often, it takes on the added viewpoint that life was once more difficult than it is now; therefore it should be more difficult now. Neither are logical or reasonable, but both are fairly common viewpoints.

The Failure Of Reason

It should be obvious that nothing in the statement “We used to do things that way” implies or even hints at a reason to conclude “So we should do things that way now.” In the same way, “life used to be harder” doesn’t imply or lead to the conclusion that “life should be just as hard today.” Both are examples of fallacies in reasoning, including appeal to tradition and non sequitur.

In both cases, the premise is true (we did, in fact, do things that way in the past, and things were, generally, harder in the past) yet the conclusion can be — and often is — false.

Of course, the conclusion could be true, but it isn’t evident based on the given premise. With a different premise, the conclusion becomes more convincing. For example: “The reason we did it in the past is because [X], and [reason X] still applies today.” But that rarely happens in these cases.

To Be Clear

I’m not talking about every oldster who tells a tale of harship. Most of those are just tales — I know this, because I am that oldster (sometimes), and I tell those stories to my children frequently.

Me: “When I was your age, phones were attached to the wall; you couldn’t take them with you on a trip.”

My kids (wide-eyed): “How did you ever survive?”

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Me: “When I was in elementary school, the teachers could and did paddle us with giant wooden paddles.”

My kids (horrified): “Is that why you’re so messed up in the head?”

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Me: “In my day, it was considered unusual for the man to stay home and take care of the children while the woman went to work.”

My kids (nodding): “That’s because everyone was sexist.”

It’s clear to anyone listening that in the statements above I’m not advocating for phones to be hardwired to kitchen walls today, for a return of rampant physical abuse in schools, nor for regressing to the silly gender ideals of the 1970s. I’m simply informing younger people about how far we’ve come. By stating how much harder life was in the past, I’m highlighting the progress that has occurred since then.

In the same way, when I was a child and my grandfather talked about walking barefoot to school and missing an entire year due to the whooping cough and having to miss school any time he was needed on the farm, he never once suggested that kids today ought to do any of those things. Or when my parents told us about their childhood homes without indoor plumbing or electricity — they never thought we should live that way now.

No, I’m writing specifically about the phenomenon of “we used to, so we ought to.”

(Related: I wrote a blog entry in 2016, debunking several “we survived it” memes I was seeing on social media at the time.)

Conclusion

In most cases, people deploying this illogical argument are falling into the unconscious trap of conservatism, the basic mindset that “change is bad, therefore we shouldn’t change” — which is based on the faulty premise that change is inherently bad. While no one can argue that change is always good, we don’t have to argue that, because this argument only comes up in situations when the change actually would be good.

Whether the topic is healthcare, student loans, implicit bias in hiring, reforming the police, or something else, look for the arguments that try to block progress based on the idea that progress didn’t always exist. Don’t be fooled by them.