We have been living in an age of nostalgia for some time, but now it has become political. Our leaders seem to dream of taking us back to the 1950s, before the culture was turned upside down by movements for freedom and equality, or even to the cruder, less sophisticated world of the 1850s, before the Civil War.
Nostalgia is the warm feeling we get when we imagine the good old days, whether they were good or not. After a certain age, we all suffer from it. I have pleasant memories of life before computers, for example, tapping away on my typewriter, making phone calls, sending letters and smoking a pipe in my office. I still prefer paper maps to GPS and would always choose three TV channels that I can trust over three hundred that I can’t. If I visit an antique car show, I’m happy to find cars just like the ones I used to drive to work. In short, I am a relic of the past, like most so-called seniors. Naturally, we are nostalgic about our younger, healthier, more optimistic selves.
It's puzzling to me that some conservative politicians want to destroy Public TV, the very fountainhead of nostalgia with its steady diet of historical dramas. It seems to fit so well with today’s regressive fantasy that we should all be living in the past with primitive politics, primitive medicine, and old-style religion.
Nostalgia never has much to do with reality, but the idea of a Golden Age is endlessly seductive. Two thousand years ago, the Greeks and the Romans looked back with nostalgia to the Age of Heroes. Five hundred years ago, during the Renaissance, Europeans looked back to the Golden Age of the Greeks and Romans, and so it goes. Every nation has its own tales of a glorious history that never existed. England in the fourteenth century was captivated by fantastic tales about King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. America has its mythical cowboys in the Wild West, and less mythical robber barons in the Wild East. Groups like the Islamic State and the Taliban believe that the Dark Ages were pretty much ideal and are doing their best to recreate them.
Nostalgia may be flourishing now because the Baby Boomers are becoming history themselves and prefer to look backward rather than forward. Even the 1950s look pretty good in the rear-view mirror. But I was there, and it wasn’t so good. For most people, life was a struggle. Kids in school had to read real books and take exams without the help of Google or artificial intelligence, and grown-ups had to wind their car windows up and down by hand. Life was hard.
But what I do seem to remember, although it could be a false memory, is that in those days we looked forward very much to the future: the gleaming, prosperous, technologically sophisticated, more equalitarian future that our best leaders had promised us. The past was dark and dangerous territory; we didn’t want to go there. We suffered, I suppose, from a kind of inverted nostalgia, a dream of the good new days to come. It is comforting to have once enjoyed that kind of naïve optimism. In retrospect, I feel quite nostalgic about it.
