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Spineless Admiration:

On Anti-Nostalgia

Though the conception of nostalgia as a disease, or even just a symptom of a troubled mind, faded away in the early part of the twentieth century, the popular understanding of nostalgia hasn’t entirely shed the hostility that usually attends disorders of the mind (or body). Nostalgia is frequently regarded with a certain pointed suspicion.

If you do not quite clock this tendency in the world at large, it is glaringly obvious in the way most academics who have studied it in psychological, sociological, artistic, and historical terms tend to write their introductions: nearly all take particular care to try to justify nostalgia, not just as a subject of inquiry but as a worthy, necessary, or at least overall helpful part of the human condition. Many of them positively reek with the nervous sweat of an author worried about being branded as some kind of misty-eyed sentimentalist reactionary, and even the calmer ones tend to take as a given the fact that most readers’ initial response to the subject is going to be negative. (This, in fairness, probably says as much about the culture of academia as it says about any background distaste for nostalgia.)

If the cloisters tend to concentrate it, though, more casual discussions of nostalgia often share the same buzzing background apprehension. This is evident in how often calling something ‘nostalgic’ or accusing someone of indulging in nostalgia is used as a sort of general slur, an easy shorthand that suggests some level of moral failure or backward thinking without much further explanation needed. This is the kind of nostalgia evoked when someone complains about Hollywood’s latest slate of revivals and reboots, or accuses teenagers of appropriating fashion trends from before their birth, or in slightly more serious cases snipes at a political opponent. This usage of nostalgia is rarely very specific: it can suggest that the target is anything from a sentimental patsy too easily seduced by saccharine stories or things that prop up their own ego, to someone who is generally naive or misunderstands history, to the kind of rock-ribbed reactionary who won’t rest until every pair of pants comes with suspender buttons by default. Its prevalence and its imprecision make the point, though: people rarely seem to have a coherent explanation for why the nostalgia might be bad; it’s just nostalgia, so it’s bad.

Before we dive more deeply into the ways nostalgia manifests itself in our society, it’s worth pausing to consider this discomfort a little more pointedly. Whether it’s an appropriate reaction or not is up to the reader, but in any case I think it’s an essential aspect of the modern experience of nostalgia, a lingering guilt or unease that tends to colour our experience of it, even if we have fully swallowed all these arguments that it’s a mostly benign, restorative force that helps give our lives meaning.

In any event, beyond its nebulous negativity, the overarching unifier of this sort of casual denigration of nostalgia is that it is almost universally applied to other people’s nostalgia. Our own nostalgia might be restorative, or interesting, or might just flit by without sparking further reflection, but other people’s nostalgia is a mark of some deep failing. This complaint – whether it exemplifies the usual dissonance between positive and negative traits (he’s cheap where I’m thrifty; she’s pushy while I’m assertive; they’re blinded by nostalgia, whereas I’m merely nostalgic) or comes from those unique types who rarely feel nostalgia but see it everywhere – is not a sustainable critique. In the vast majority of cases, people who are speaking against nostalgia have a very specific instance of it in mind, and to whatever degree nostalgia-as-insult does capture some of nostalgia’s darker dimensions, there is an extent to which it is just the most convenient term to lob at something you don’t especially like anyway.

Which is not to say we shouldn’t be suspicious of our tendency toward nostalgia, nor even that a healthy degree of skepticism isn’t the most appropriate course of action when nostalgia flares up in ourselves or others. Nostalgia has some plainly essential functions to our identity, even if we only conceive of it as a restorative, but as the lady says, the difference between medicine and poison is dosage.

On that metaphor, overindulgence in nostalgia is likely the most clear and present danger: it is certainly the aspect of nostalgia that seems to provoke the most hand-wringing, although the fact that the growing and excessive prevalence of nostalgia has been a recurring theme since the time the concept entered the general discourse suggests either that we are in a rearward-facing death spiral or that critics of nostalgia might also want to start complaining about our general lack of self-awareness. (Maybe both.) Nevertheless, the point stands: in the same way that a healthy fantasy life is helpful – for distraction, for goal-setting, just for fun – but tattooing the name of your Hogwarts house on your forehead and embarking on a mission to kill Voldemort demands drugs and therapy, the case against nostalgia begins where restraint ends. The precise location of that line is again both nebulous and easier to spot in other people, but the downfalls are glaringly obvious, all curling off the root problem that the fulfillment of nostalgia is inherently impossible. In effect, overindulging nostalgia is living in a dream world, albeit one that’s made more enticing and intoxicating because it comes with the sheen of historical plausibility. Occasional yearning for that dream world may be understandable, but actually trying to return to it is only to allow the world that’s in front of you to crumble from neglect; as with all escapism, the almost inevitable reinforcement – things are bad, you retreat to the past, things get worse, your buffed-up past starts to look even better – only makes it more dangerous.

A prescription against excessive nostalgia can often be a bit of a hedge, though: too much of anything can be a bad thing, and anyway, much of what is true of really indulging nostalgia is arguably true of any amount of nostalgic feeling. Nostalgia – or, more precisely, the specific history that nostalgia prizes and yearns to return to – is inherently untruthful, its fundamental yearning unfulfillable; it is dreamy and impossible even in its most fitful spurts. Even if it performs some essential function for our identity or well-being, it may be better for us to try to find those benefits in something more tangible or truthful; alcohol is a powerful stress release, but exercise is probably better, in the long term.

The essential problem with throwing out nostalgia, though – hence the prevalence of the hedge – is that to do so almost inevitably ends up throwing out history, too. This is at least partially because, as noted in the first chapter, there is often considerably less daylight between nostalgia and history than we might like to think. But it is also because there really seems to be virtually no way to maintain a history without provoking nostalgia: again, the very act of recording and disseminating the past is what appears to lay the groundwork for our wistful remembrances of it. Which is not to say that people don’t try to do away with the entire project.

We don’t need to look terribly far to see this in action: though our own era is routinely derided for its supposed prevalence of nostalgia, the advocates of dismissing the past are also doing quite well. Chief among these are what you might consider modern Panglossians, a group of thinkers and critics who are resolutely convinced that the current era is the best of all possible times. As a group, these people share one primary trait: times really are quite good for them specifically. They tend to be pretty firmly ensconced in some upper echelon of the current world order, one of your captains of industry, ‘public intellectuals,’ handmaidens to political power, etc. This perch has convinced them not just that the world is fundamentally just and meritocratic – why else would they be where they are if everyone didn’t get what they deserve? – but that any kind of looking back, especially with longing for what came before, is not just pointless but some kind of moral failing.

The most prominent of these is Steven Pinker, who has made what must surely be the most lucrative career (outside the self-help industry) of convincing people that everything is fine and they are the problem. In books like The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now, he argues that, owing to a variety of broad-stroke, global improvements to things like frequency of violence and poverty rates, we are sitting at the apotheosis of human culture, a rocket ride that will end only if we give up on the lessons of the Enlightenment. Human life, at least for the past few hundred years, has been nothing but progress, and so any desire to change its current path – or even just stop and take stock of where we are – is a way of gumming up the moral arc of the universe. (It perhaps goes without saying that the Panglossians also tend to believe that the key to a prosperous future is to just keep doing what we’re doing right now, which can lead them to make weird pronouncements like ‘We’re at the end of history’ and such.)

For all this surface present-boosterism, though, Pinker and his ilk’s actual view of the past is often just as rosy and ill-formed as that of the most histrionically nostalgic: though they would certainly never advocate a yearning for what came before, their central idea that our recent cultural history is a relentless and undeniable advancement overlooks both how much happenstance has been necessary to get where we are and how precarious and illusory their notion of this apparent peak really is (being able to choose an arbitrary endpoint makes it extremely easy to cast vast societal forces in your preferred light).

If this type of anti-nostalgic feeling is relatively easy to sweep aside, though, it has roots in more fundamental challenges to the notion of nostalgia. The idea of steady and essentially irreversible progress, for instance, is central to the precepts of the scientific method, in which our knowledge about the physical world is very much like the metaphorical tree, spreading and branching from a solid core that grows and strengthens with the overall breadth. We do need to be careful of taking this way of thinking too far. For starters, as I think the Panglossians demonstrate, scientific methods, much less scientific knowledge, don’t always withstand the chaos of human culture particularly well. The scientific method is not religion: it is a way of exploring one aspect of our world, not the way for doing everything. And, of course, scientific consensus has been frequently proven wrong, whether because it has chased a concept down a blind alley or because it has made grander pronouncements than our current understanding can support.

But the point is that the scientific method is an inherently progressive system, one that, theoretically at least, must build off all the knowledge that came before (even the parts that are ultimately misguided). In a system like this, history is essential, but nostalgia is practically nonsensical: even to yearn to go backward would effectively be to give up the entire project, to return to a place of wilful ignorance and enforced stasis. (Hence the reason the ethical dilemmas of science typically revolve around whether we should use some bit of knowledge we have acquired: cut off too many branches and the tree might die.)

Whatever the practical limitations, it’s not hard to extend that ethos to ourselves. To what extent aging can be defined as progress in the positive sense of the word depends on the person, but our identities, what we understand ourselves to be, are inherently progressive: we are the sum of what we have done, experiences piling on top of each other like wet clay. Some kind of deep knowledge of those things, of our personal history, is essential to knowing what we are.

Returning to those times, though, besides being impossible, would also seem to effectively stop the whole business of living, cryogenically preserving some iteration of yourself without even the promise of thawing it out. And that’s only the yearning aspect of nostalgia: the overall effect our nostalgic tendencies have on our memories, lessening if not eliminating some aspects while promoting others to core experiences, would seem to doom the entire attempt to know ourselves, leaving us like some floating consciousness grasping at flotsam and trying to claim that as our authentic selves. (Which is more or less exactly what’s happening, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to fight it.)

This can all seem like a freshman philosophy concern, but this general sense of unease does trickle down into our lives quite frequently. Anyone who has ever tried to argue that they don’t have regrets – or that you shouldn’t have them, either – is effectively endorsing the same basic conception of identity, even if they’re trying to downplay the bad instead of emphasizing the good; the point is that everything you’ve ever experienced all adds up to where you are now. A more forward-thinking endorsement of relentless progress, and often a more explicit thrust against nostalgia, can be found in the current corporate culture of Silicon Valley, with its tenets of fast and frequent failure and #hustle. (Which, for all its typographic innovation, is just the dominant permutation of what you might call American Dream capitalism, in which you are less what you came from than what you’re obviously going to be, at least until it’s time to write a memoir.) Here the past is often little but a story of inevitable becoming, something to be used as anecdote or proof of moxie, but certainly not a time for which to yearn.

Silicon Valley culture also has ties to another force that is arrayed against nostalgia: its most frequent moral justification is that it’s building a technological utopia. Utopians are not always quite as purposefully forgetful as Silicon Valley, which at times seems to want to blank-slate the world and replace it all with something that involves an algorithm, but in its purest form, utopian thinking is quite close to a nostalgia for the future – nostalgia’s polar opposite, at least along the axis of orientation to time. Here, yearning for the past is replaced by a kind of fanatic eagerness for what’s to come; given our experience of time, utopia is technically possible, which should be an important distinction. Though, of course, even avowed utopians would generally admit that their paradise is more of a direction than a realistic goal. (I am obliged by law to note that the original word as conceived by Thomas More was a pun on the Greek words for ‘good place’ and ‘no place.’) So it’s probably fair to say that utopianism and nostalgia are equally frustrated longings, and this fundamental impossibility is essential to the experience. Still, the impossibility of utopia is a spur to action. If the dominant negative image of the nostalgic is of someone frozen in a rosy amber, thwarted by glory they can never reclaim, the worst that can be said about the equally starry-eyed utopian is that they are too much a dreamer, and will have to be more practical. Ultimately, the promise of utopia is the only kind of yearning that any progressive system can swallow wholeheartedly, which makes it a natural antipode for nostalgia.

For the most part, this inexorably progressive mindset is not openly hostile to nostalgia so much as it has a philosophical predisposition against it, a general unease with the concept that anyone might think things were better before, despite all that progress. (To the extent that we live in a world where progress is a basic value, then, pervasive if low-grade hostility for nostalgia is pretty self-explanatory.) Still, for more specific attacks against nostalgia, we have to look to programs that have chosen progression as an ideal, not made it their engine. One of the prime examples of this can be found in the avant-garde, the loosely connected but definable series of cascading artistic movements that dominated the visual arts – and heavily influenced most other art forms – for most of the twentieth century (and arguably even through today). In their quest to constantly redefine art, avant-gardists inevitably arrayed themselves very explicitly against what came before, including the idea of longing for and even recreating the standards of earlier eras, often taking on nostalgia even before it had become codified and widespread.