Popular sentiment in light of economic, political, and ecological crises calls out for old-fashioned simplicity. Who can understand the intricacies of mortgage trading, toxic assets, and corporate bailouts? Let’s return to fundamentals, handshake deals, and tradition. This is the only way we can save society and ourselves.

 

The truth seems self evident. Once upon a time, the world was in perfect shape. Everyone got along, people talked with each other, and everyone was happier back then. If we can restore conditions to their previous state, life can finally return to normal.

 

Religious and spiritual traditions often seek a return to Eden as the final goal for a utopian world. Paradise has been lost, and it must be regained.

 

Facing deep uncertainties about the future, memories of the past feel comforting. We’ve never dealt with issues on this scale and scope before now. Life’s complexity is more intricate than ever, and life’s speed is accelerating at an unprecedented pace.

 

Retreating to a simpler time offers the allure of uncomplicated comfort and structured assurance. However, our remembrance of the way things were isn’t always clear. Life wasn’t ideal ten, fifty, or a hundred years ago. In the past century, we experienced World War I, the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression, World War II, the Holocaust, Stalin’s purges, the Cold War, the Chinese Revolution, the human disasters in east Asia, the aftermath of decolonization in India and Pakistan, the Cultural Revolution, genocide and famine in Africa, war and human rights abuses across Latin America, severe ecological adversity, Middle East turmoil, and the introduction of nuclear warfare.

 

Like us today, people throughout the tumultuous twentieth century longed for a return to a simpler time. They romanticized about an earlier age of bucolic peace. Religious fundamentalism in Christianity, Islam, and other world religions emerged as an alternative to the chaos. Political idealism evoked traditional narratives calling for a return to a mythic past. Economic theories promised that a return to the time-honored ways would fix all of our problems. A segment of pop culture craved the happy days of a bygone era.

 

However, the way into the future cannot be traversed through reversing course and revisiting our illusions of the past. Nobel laureate for literature Hermann Hesse explored the disastrous consequences of attempting a return to the imagined past in his short story, “Dr. Knoogle’s End.” Written in 1910, this tale illustrates how the utopian impulse can result in tragedy if it compels us to naively impose our artificial ideas of how the past was onto the reality of today’s world.

 

Hesse’s protagonist, Dr. Knoogle, is a retired German school teacher. To treat some health concerns, he becomes a vegetarian. His new diet alleviates his symptoms dramatically, and Dr. Knoogle begins visiting vegetarian spas and retreat centers. Now circulating in the vegetarian community, Dr. Knoogle meets a variety of bohemians and protohippies. These folks are a bit distasteful for him, but the affable teacher makes several new friends.

 

Meanwhile, he discovers various factions within the vegetarian community. Some, like him, had become vegetarians for health reasons. Others were “long-haired apostles, fanatics who fasted all the time.” On the spectrum of vegetarians, Dr. Knoogle was a “mixed vegetarian” because he ingested cooked vegetables and dairy products. To the more zealous types, Dr. Knoogle was a disgrace.

 

This, however, did not deter Dr. Knoogle from enjoying life and eating as he saw fit.

 

Meanwhile, Dr. Knoogle heard about the founding of the International Vegetarian Society. It had acquired property in Turkey, and it sought to establish a permanent settlement of vegetarians. The colony’s organizers invited “all the friends of the vegetarian and vegetarian lifestyle, of the nudist culture, and the movement to reform life” to participate in the new commune. They would restore society by recreating a Golden Age of vegetarianism.

 

While moderate in his temperament, the nostalgic appeal of a return to nature lured Dr. Knoogle. In this land flowing with fruit and veggies, the only items not permitted were alcohol and meat.

 

Upon arrival, Dr. Knoogle encountered some old friends and met several colorful characters. Many people wore the common fashions of the day, but others donned loincloths—or nothing at all. The various types of vegetarian practitioners gravitated toward their likeminded friends and formed factions, clubs, and even religious assemblies.

 

The most extreme group was the pulpists. Longing to return to nature, they renounced all manmade living structures and ate nothing except things that could be broken off trees and bushes. The pulpists looked down on all other vegetarians and saw no difference between milk drinkers and alcoholics.

 

A pulpist named Jonas outshone the others. His loincloth was indistinguishable from his hairy body. He lived in the forest and swung from trees. He had become so adept at his practice that his body had begun devolving into an ape-like form. Eventually, Jonas earned the nickname “gorilla,” and some pulpists deified him as “the Perfect One.”

 

To Dr. Knoogle, though, Jonas was far from perfect. He felt disgust for the fanatical excess of Jonas, and looked upon the “gorilla” with repulsion. Jonas returned the animosity and loathed the doctor, bearing his teeth and hissing whenever they met.

 

Soon, Dr. Knoogle decided to return home from this wild experiment. Reflecting on his experience in the restorationist community, he decided one evening to take a stroll. Suddenly, Jonas bolted from the nearby bushes. The doctor chuckled at the sight, and this mockery infuriated Jonas. In a fit of rage, Jonas strangled Dr. Knoogle with his bare hands and returned to the forest.

 

The next morning, the villagers found Dr. Knoogle’s corpse. They suspected that Jonas was the murderous culprit because he sat eating nuts in a nearby tree. However, the others—fearing they might suffer a similar fate as the doctor—refused to take action against Jonas. Instead, they quietly buried Dr. Knoogle and marked his grave with a plain stone.

 

In the tumultuous social milieu of pre-World War I Europe, Hesse forecasted the destructive path society would take if it accepted any of the multiple ideologies that leveraged the beliefs of primordial holism. With prescience, Hesse warns that fanatical restorationist movements eventually result in frustration, annoyance, and even death. He projected the dystopic course for society if people opted for a future based on trying to recreate an illusory past.

 

This was never a primeval Golden Age. Subsequently, there is no utopian past that we can access and replicate today.

 

Because the future is an eternally unfolding cosmogenic process, any attempt to recapture ancient times is sure to fail. Today’s societal conditions are unique to our time. A return, say, to a provincial agricultural world is not possible in our global interconnected stage of development.

 

Likewise, your personal life and relationships are not in the same place as they were a year (or decade) ago. Conditions on the ground have changed. You can’t return to what was. You can only move to what’s next.

 

Instead of being a cause for grief, this awareness opens world of hopeful possibilities. Your life, family, society, and planet are not destined to remain in a slump or downward spiral. Pressing issues can be addressed and solved with thoughtful creativity reflecting an inventive spirit.

 

The future will emerge as we create it—and there are an infinite number of futures that we can create individually and collectively.

 

Today, we face immense pressures to return to the supposed ideal era of earlier times. Rashly, we may opt for the imaginary consolation of the ideologies, economics, and spiritual impulses of our mythological past. If we take this course, we will soon learn that we are unable to meet the immensity of our current challenges. We will be left looking back helplessly like Lot’s wife.

 

There is no reset button.

 

The siren song of primordial holism beckons us to devolve—perhaps in some cases hoping that primitivism is utopia itself. However, as Hesse shows, this course ends not in a new Eden. Instead, it takes us to the place where violence, fear, and ignorance substitutes for civilization, mutual respect, and cooperation. Our history can inform our present and future, but it cannot substitute for our active engagement with it.

 

Kevin Beck is COO of Presence International and author of This Book Will Change Your World. He is married to Alisa, and they live in Colorado Springs with their three electrifying children.