There is a certain kind of eccentric who spends a lot of their life pretending they are living in some age past. If I recall right, the eccentric Tasha Tudor, illustrator, artist, writer of children's books liked to make believe she lived in the 1830s. Others pretend they live in the Victorian period, complete with gaslit homes, others in some totally imaginary medieval period or the time of the Civil War.
The hobby-lifestyle of anachronistic pretense is, of course, silly. No matter what people pretend they cannot reproduce the lives of people in the past because they are doing that while being people of the present with a knowledge of the present, the knowledge that unlike those people, they can step out of their pretend into the real present. They can't undo their knowledge of life during their lifetime, ideas and things which were entirely unknown to those in the period they imagine they would have liked to live in, instead. Which I doubt they really would if they could really go back. But we can't go back to even the past we once knew.
How ridiculous it is depends on the extent to which the person demands that other people go along with their pretense, how they manage to interact with the everyday reality around them. If they pretend that they really can live in the past it goes from eccentricity to mental illness and,perhaps, can even become a danger to them or others.
That kind of make believe is far more dangerous in our legal system which is structured on the pretense that we live in 1787, that we have a kind of moral obligation to pretend that we do, that the conditions that held then are to be the ones that govern our lives and our government now. If you think that's a statement not tethered to reality, consider how much of our Supreme Court holds it as their ideological pretense, that the ideas and words of men who died two centuries ago, the last significant one of them, James Madison, should govern us even as we never agreed to. By the time he died in 1836, the original words and ideas of the Constitution had already needed radical alteration to their meaning to meet the changed reality, not a little of that change having to happen almost as soon as the thing started to be implemented. If I had the time I would look up the passage in which Franklin Roosevelt noted how dangerous the first decades under the Constitution were, how easily it could have pitched the United States into despotism, so badly did those amateurs do at founding a republic which would, at the same time, favor their own interests, as, in fact, the thing did do more successfully.
There will be no pretending that the free-speech-free-press absolutism of the 1960s, or 2021 will be workable in the future. In discussing the taking down of Parler, intelligence officials are already talking about how the worst of the insurrectionists were already using encrypted communications, no doubt communicating mostly with their dupes, suckers and true believers through Parler and other apps.
I don't think the future will find that they can allow the use of encrypted electronic communication, I'm not even certain they will be able to allow anonymous communication on the regular internet. So useful for organized criminals, terrorists, the enemies of the common good or even a manageable non-egalitarian, even tolerably awful world that it will be necessary to find ways to thwart their use of the internet or whatever succeeds it from using encrypted messaging. That's already a problem, as police fighting organized crime have found, there are always computer scientists and techies, even some working for the police who have been entirely willing to sell out society and democracy for money, not caring who gets hurt or killed in the process. Democracies will have no choice but to reject absolutist civil liberties positions on such things because they are simply not possible in today's world anymore than the things allowable when neighbors lived miles apart could be tolerated in the middle of a residential neighborhood. When the courts, when regulators pretend that you can keep things as they once were, they sacrifice the lives, the safety, the rights of far more people. I see absolutely no virtue of any kind in allowing the mere preferences of the few to overwhelm the needs of the many, that the 18th century aristocrats, slave-owners-slave-profiteers who wrote that document didn't consider those problems is no reason for us to live with the pretense that their assumptions can rule us today.
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