It’s Getting Better All the Time -- Or Is It?

“Just because something is old doesn’t mean it’s primitive,” Julia Roberts instructs her much-too-knowing students (Wellesley, Class of ‘54) in the movie “Mona Lisa Smile.” In fact, her charges -- snobby, conformist and highly corseted, in the film’s logic -- know that, if nothing else.

Their problem, the movie tells us, is that they’re too devoted to the old and scornful of the new. What they need most is a Bohemian art lover from Berkeley to come and show them that it is more important to follow your own bliss than society’s, and crucial to put the self before the claims of husband or family.

Hollywood, of course, never reflects exactly what we think; but it does tell us, often, what we’re supposed, or encouraged, to think. And “Mona Lisa Smile” drills home the same message served up by “The Hours,” “Far from Heaven” and any number of the acclaimed films of recent times: Back in the ‘50s, people were repressed, ignorant and prejudiced; we, however, are marching from day to day into a brave new world of enlightenment.

But is this really so? Are we so much wiser than the stifled, blinkered folks we mock in the ‘50s of memory? (The ‘50s have long been the favored victim of what could be called cultural ageism: The ‘40s are revered now for their “Greatest Generation” heroics, the ‘60s indulged for their tie-dyed revolution.) In our private lives we know, often painfully, that we seldom progress in a straight line; much of the time we seem to be going backward.

Indeed, that’s why we sometimes hunger for the innocence, the dynamism, the hopefulness of old (and that’s why Hollywood so often serves up trips into the past). Yet, on a cultural level, we assume that we’re more advanced today than we were a decade ago.

Opportunities for women and minorities have undeniably developed far beyond what they were half a century ago. We now have nifty gadgets, too, that make the desktop computer and low-definition TV of two years ago seem ancient. And, on an aesthetic level at least, we can savor the quaintness of manual typewriters and scratchy black-and-white quiz shows, or bask in the nostalgic glow of Nat King Cole or Frank Sinatra.

But when it comes to the ways and deeds of society, is the age of Botox and Prozac and crack and divorce really so advanced? According to some reports, almost half the kids in Detroit cannot read. When I was in Atlanta during the Olympics, 43% of the children in the center of the Olympic city were living below the poverty level. And prejudice is hardly a thing of the past, even if it has grown more nuanced, as what might once have seemed a black-and-white society has turned into a place of many colors.

One of the ways in which we’ve most evolved in recent decades is that we no longer officially and unilaterally assume we’re superior in every way to other places. Yet when it comes to other times, the complacency hasn’t cleared.

In the defining work of what could be called “decadeism” -- the film “Pleasantville” -- two near contemporaries, fascinated by the cuteness of the old world of the ‘50s that they see on TV, actually step into it and find that its people are crying out to be liberated by the Technicolor people of the ‘90s.

Decadeism is the reverse of decadence because it tells us not that things are getting worse but that they’re getting better every day. It’s fueled, inevitably, by technology, which tells us that every new invention is a step forward and that the latest is always better than the last.

This would all be a matter of mere Hollywood fancy were it not for the fact that the global order today presents us with the same question daily.

The United States has always been the cathedral of the cult of youth; here, more than anywhere, we believe in the gospel of the new, the up-and-coming, the cutting-edge.

But much of the rest of the world -- which, in the age of global movement, is ever closer to America -- lives in what could be called the equivalent of the ‘50s: relatively low-tech societies governed by the age-old pieties of family and faith and haunted by age-old prejudices. We tell them that elders belong in an old persons’ home, that “antediluvian” and “prehistoric” are words for inefficient. They tell us that “new” is not the same as “improved” and father often does know best.

Can we say with such certainty that we are entirely in the right?

In “Pleasantville,” after all, it is the ‘50s that are meant to be the self-satisfied and short-sighted culture that sees everything in black and white.

Pico Iyer is the author, most recently, of “Abandon” (Alfred A. Knopf, 2003).