Amid the barrage of bad news about US politics, I frequently find myself nostalgic.
Sometimes, it’s for the recent past–for last summer, when we were on a family vacation and Kamala Harris seemed to be surging; or the eve of last fall’s election, when I spoke dispassionately about polarization at American and Colgate universities; or even last month, when we thought that Trump might prove more feckless than reckless.
Other times, my nostalgia reaches further back, to the period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11, when this white, male, college-educated, fairly moderate American felt that the republic was secure and the public’s values were evolving for the better with each new generation. That underlying optimism was one reason I spent most of the next 20 years focused on promoting youth civic engagement.
If I wish to return to when I felt better about politics, that means that I want to go back to being naive; and we shouldn’t want that for ourselves. Nor is nostalgia reliable. In the past, not everything was dappled sunlight on a late-afternoon lawn–certainly not for people less fortunate than me.
Near the beginning of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera’s narrator says that everything is bathed in nostalgia in the face of dissolution, even the guillotine. He’s discussing Nietzsche’s trope of the Eternal Return. If we believed that the French Revolutionary Terror would recur cyclically, we would fear it. Because we know that it has passed, we bathe it in nostalgia. Our deepest fear is the passage of time, because events do not recur endlessly for us. They move permanently into the past as our time runs out.
Nostalgia can be a way of grasping at the self, trying to trap that ghost in a display case. As such, it is better avoided, regardless of its cause. As for political nostalgia, it is a common ground of reactionary politics.
A related word is “envy.” In his Theses on the Philosophy of History (#2), Walter Benjamin notes that we never envy the future. He says that happiness that makes us envious is connected to our past. We seek redemption by wishing to recover (sometimes from other people) what we already experienced. A worthy redemption, however, requires a change for the better. Political progress brings a better future into the present and thereby imparts a new meaning to what happened in the past. “For every second of time [is] the strait gate through which Messiah might enter.”
This is a pretentious and roundabout way of saying that what matters is not what used to be but what we do now to improve the world that we are in.
See also: phenomenology of nostalgia; nostalgia for now; Martin Luther King’s philosophy of time