I mean, really. If you need to think that nostalgia is a personal affront ... Or that the One True Way to progress is to hate the past ... meh.
It's a shame people don't grow their own food. It's a shame that people can't read cuneiform.
One's a bit more useful than the other, if you ask me. Then again, it's a shame people don't read older literature and it's a shame people don't study Latin. Again, those are useful, but not for making widgets or getting laid (for the most part). And if the only things that matter are money and sex, then that's a possible values set. Reductionist and self-parodying, but still possible. Used to be considered "shallow," but that's a judgment from at least equally valid a values set.
On the other hand, growing food makes food deserts largely a thing of the past, and it's something I can do for my family without compelling other people to just "make it so." It's a way of solving a problem using personal initiative instead of compulsion on some external enemy. Tres passe, n'est pas?
Older literature still provides the source of a lot of allusions and keeps a lot of idiom chunks from straying. They provide a common cultural fund for communication and expression, and that's something that's lost--with a lot of the electioneering in the last few cycles showing exactly how "if it's more than 25 minutes old or something that serves to identify me as emphatically not you, it's irrelevant." I know students that are like that. Poor things. My classes are going to provide at least 20 of the next #1 rappers and 15 NFL starters in just the next two years, and that's just my classes. (I calculate we'll need at least 24 000 NFL expansion franchises in the next 8 years, if all those kids are right when it comes to what's "irrelevant". Just think of all the stadiums that'll be built! Stimulus!)
One reason a lot of kids have trouble with vocabulary, apart from disconnected or uneducated parents and the view that pop culture somebody else makes and you download is the best way to express your culture and be creative, is that they don't know words. Vocabulary is often Latin(ate).
By the way, I have a friend, Kasia, who can read hieroglyphs. In her case it's a job skill, she's an Egyptologist.
Take the long view. Things are often fads.
One thing I do miss from the 1800s and early 1900s was the idea that most music and art had to be personal. Either you had to interact with the person or you had to produce it. It meant we didn't have a cult of perfection like we do now, where if you sing a note out of tune or make a mistake you're shit. The amount of intermediate music that was published is astounding because a lot of people could read music or learn from print. The small orchestras and groups that formed were civic glue, whether plucked strings or bowed, vocal or visual performance. Much of what kids consume they could make--it's crap, just glossy crap, but somehow polished turds are more valued than what they can actually do. Sad, the passivization of youth in a consumer society; instead, they focus on how they can bully others.
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