The Memory You Never Had; or, Nostalgia & Its Discontents

Curation \\ May 2024

Greetings!!

Summer arrives with a vengeance in the South, and the gardenia bushes outside my front door bloom furiously. I have a few blossoms in a small vase on my desk, and every so often I draw in a deliciously-scented breath that delights and sneezes in equal measure.

A brief programming note

For the foreseeable future, curations and explorations will arrive on the second and fourth weekends, and weeknotes on the first and third (and occasional fifth) weekends. We’ll see how it goes.

In this issue, I have three—count ‘em, three!¹—items for consideration, so let’s get to it, shall we?

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Svetlana Boym, Nostalgia

Boym defines nostalgia as a longing for a home that “no longer exists or has never existed.” But then she observes that this yearning is actually a “rebellion against the modern idea of time,” a desire to somehow bypass modernity’s myths of unending newness and technological progress.

Boym suggests that, beyond the desire to “return home,” to cultivate nostalgia is to mourn the “unrealized dreams of the past and visions of the future that became obsolete.” We look backward to a “golden age” and forward to a “utopia” because our experience of the present feels confining, stifling, and stagnant.

Whatever valid criticisms of the present tempt us toward reflective or prospective nostalgia, there exists the danger of a confusion it engenders within us. Nostalgia creates a dissatisfaction with our actual home and time, and a desire for an imaginary one that cannot be found on any map or calendar. And this dissatisfaction often leads us to ignore how the needs of our present can shape the realities of the future.

Noah Millman, The Future Requires a Usable Past

In this essay, Noah Millman engages other essays by Ross Douthat and Matthew Yglesias on the impulse toward nostalgia found in contemporary political rhetoric and policy. Millman observes that looking backward in order to connect to history, rather than flatten it as nostalgia does, enables us to actually build on the past in ways that are genuinely livable. To do otherwise, to indulge nostalgia, is “simply a refusal to live in the real world.”

Millman, though speaking specifically about many on the political right, gets at something that I think becomes a real danger of living nostalgically: our lives and choices become a “kind of sterile cosplaying, […] all empty posturing.” We don’t learn from the past, and we don’t point toward any future.

Kyla Scanlon, The Nostalgia Cycle Loop

Drawing on a subscriber’s comment, Scanlon² observes that nostalgia encourages stagnancy, which diverts us from the imaginative practice of hope. And hope is a practice that requires imagination: to find less-familiar pathways or even to create new paths of traveling where we did not previously expect them.

Scanlon then explores how the nostalgic stance shapes cultural production and the economic supply chain, which is to say, brands and studios churn out endless remakes and retreads because we’ve bought it before. And past behavior often makes for rather predictable future behavior.³

Indeed, past behavior as an indicator of future behavior is not inherently a bad thing! This is Millman’s point: looking toward the past for insights as to how our ancestors moved forward shows us “somewhat proven paths—not necessarily the paths we’re currently on, but ones we’ve traveled forward on in the past.”

That’s the value of a usable past: drawing from it gives us reason to hope that doing a new (to us) thing or traveling a new (to us) path will be less risky, more achievable. In fact, isn’t that why we practice anything at all, and why the first step is always the hardest?

The problems lie in the nostalgic use of the past, because nostalgia is an attempt to eliminate uncertainty. By ignoring what didn’t work, and looking to the elements of the past that “did,” we construct a reimagined past as “as it should have been.”

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Don’t forget…

I'm leading a workshop with U/mi Wellness Center on July 13th!!

Making Tough Choices & Practicing Commitment Care for Self-Compassion

Commitment Care, rather than project or time management, emphasizes a holistic understanding of our responsibilities, interests, and activities. Commitment Care cultivates discernment (what we say yes to) and discretion (what we say no to), so that we can maintain (or renew) personal integrity in our relationships with the divine, with ourselves, and with others.

In this workshop, participants will clarify their commitment areas, and map their existing commitments. They’ll also categorize their commitments by priority, which enables them to make decisions “ahead of time,” so that they can appropriately respond to new opportunities.

• 🗓️ Saturday, July 13

• ⏰ 3:00-4:30p EST

• 🖥️ Online via Zoom

• 🎁 Free!

Would love to see you there!

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How do we bring this all together?

Nostalgia for a different home or time (whether past or future) keeps our imaginations focused on things we cannot change. Nostalgia is for the world "as it could have been" and, without access to the multiverse, is not a productive or fruitful use of our imaginations.

We often think of nostalgia as a looking backward toward a "golden age," a return to "when things were good."⁴ An orientation toward nostalgia keeps us from imagining different futures toward which we can truly move. It keeps us from seeing the past as it is, and learning what we need from it in order to act toward a future that could realistically come into being. But this doesn't mean that looking backward is unfruitful—the past has much to teach, if we're willing to see it honestly and take it on its own terms.

The more we turn toward nostalgia (through film, music, books, or politics), the more we're saying that our present has nothing to offer or teach us. We flatten out reality, expressing our dissatisfaction with contemporary failures, but also refusing to exercise our imaginations toward hope.

Hope is the recognition that things are not what they ought to be, as well as the expectation that things will not remain so forever. Those with a theological bent often find an ultimate purpose that asks for, and shapes that hope, but hope is a universally innate impulse that drives us toward action.

I think we often forget that history is made and experienced by people just like us—people doing their best with the information, tools, and resources available to them. In looking back, we have the benefit of distance—emotional, existential, ecumenical⁵—which allows us to observe patterns of cause and effect that weren't (and couldn't be) visible at the time.

Of course, every solution carries within it the seeds of its own destruction, and usually present efforts are the attempt to deal with the choices of the past.

Which is why imagining different futures requires us to see past and present as they are, not as we long for them to be. Because, though we make choices that reflect our current needs, we also must try to make choices that shape the future in ways that don't ask so much of our descendants in rescuing themselves from our solutions.

In other words, we need to recognize ourselves as making choices in a dynamic ecosystem of past, present, and future, rather than in a static vacuum of now.⁶

So what’s our next significant action here?

Perhaps to ask ourselves whether our personal glances over the shoulder look toward a past that we’ve rewritten, or a past from which we’ve learned. And then, depending on the answer, to decide how we’re going to frame our present-future selves. Let me know what you think.

Here’s to becoming more hopeful, creative, and wise—together.

Shalom,

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2. I love reading Kyla Scanlon’s newsletter on economics and culture. It always make me feel less stupid about how money moves around the world.

3. (:::cough:::Marvel:::cough:::)

4. Good "for me” is the usual implication here.

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6. A thing rather easier said than done, but devoutly to be wished, for a'that.