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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

I'm not sure that your premises are correct. Many people are nostalgic about some very old things which still exist in some form (the Catholic Church, the Imperial House of Japan, primitive hunter-gatherers). They are yet more likely to be nostalgic about recent things because there are more relatively recent things lying around.

Maybe the near-far framework is not the best way to understand this issue.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Picking up from Islander's comment...I think the mechanism is more general than the particular idea of "progress" and "in-group vs. out-group"

For example, for about two thousand years in China, the Zhou Dynasty was held up as the pinnacle of social and political achievement. The earlier Xia and Shang Dynasties were not so esteemed and seen as barbaric at worse or failures at best.

During the Zhou, or at least the myth of the Zhou, formed a central part of what defined China versus not-China. The Zhou were glorified because they defined the "in-group vs. out-group" not just in the space, but also in time.

Similarly, many Americans seem to mythologize the Founding Fathers and the early Republic...whereas many of the liberties and freedoms associated with them were part of a continuous tradition with England.

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