Time & Perspective Quote by Alan Dundes

A neat anthropological jab: Americans don’t just like the future, they have a “penchant” for it, as if optimism were a habit bordering on compulsion. Dundes, a folklorist by training, isn’t making a generic complaint about impatience; he’s diagnosing a cultural style that treats the past as clutter and the future as proof of virtue. In the U.S., progress is moralized. “New” isn’t merely descriptive, it’s a sales pitch, a political platform, even a personality type. The line works because it frames futurism as taste, not destiny: a preference that can be questioned, resisted, or exploited.

The subtext is sharper: disregarding the past isn’t just forgetfulness, it’s a strategy. If the past is kept at arm’s length, then historical debts (slavery, dispossession, labor exploitation) become optional reading instead of binding obligations. Reinvention becomes a civic myth: you can move to a new city, adopt a new brand of self, and call it freedom. The future, in this logic, is a clean room where consequences don’t follow.

Context matters. Dundes wrote in a late-20th-century America saturated with advertising, Cold War “tomorrow” rhetoric, space-age bravado, and Silicon Valley’s early gospel of disruption. Folklore studies had long emphasized continuity, tradition, and inherited narratives; Dundes is pointing out how awkward that lens can feel in a culture that prefers updates to origins. The sting is that the future-facing posture, celebrated as ambition, also becomes a convenient amnesia machine.