Do We Suffer from Too Much Nostalgia?

Columbia University professor Mark Lilla and New York Times columnist Ross Douthat have engaged something of a debate over the value of nostalgia.

Already, the term itself loads the dice. One might have said that we look to what worked in the past and normally make it something to try to replicate for the future. When we use a term like “nostalgia” we are casting a negative valence and before you know it, Lilla will explain to us that the ultimate form of nostalgia was the Third Reich or Mussolini’s Italy. 

Of course, this might just mean that those who look to the past might very well misread its lessons. They might use nostalgia like a rhetorical ploy, evoking the glory of ancient Rome, for example, as a reason to restore the Roman Empire. Better yet, they might try to recover the past without remarking on the horrors that accompanied Roman glory.

Then again, ought we to discredit and discard all of America’s achievements because the nation countenanced certain forms of injustice? A simple question, but one that tells us not to be too quick to dismiss America on the grounds that it did not attain perfection.

When Alexis de Tocqueville, nearly two centuries ago, observed that Americans were staunchly patriotic, ought we to dismiss the point because part of America was based on slave labor? Does anyone really believe that patriotism requires slavery or another form of rank injustice? Surely, those who want to recover America’s patriotism would never accept that the price would be a return to chattel slavery?

Similarly, America emerged victorious in two world wars during the twentieth century. We can observe that the armies that won those wars did not fulfill the current criteria about diversity and inclusion. Worse yet, the tanks and boats were running on fossil fuels. Does this mean that our wish to return to a time when the nation united to fight a foreign enemy corresponds to a wish to keep women out of the military or to pollute the planet? 

In short, we may look to the past as a template for the future, and especially for what is possible, without wanting to recover every last aspect of said past. 

If marriage today is basically a broken institution, if the American family is on life support, does that mean that our efforts to recall or to return to a time when families were more intact constitutes a wish to oppress women? How does it happen that America is leading the world in broken homes? Does that mean that other countries, countries with more stable families, are wallowing in injustice?

Douthat wrote this:

Like late-middle-aged adults flipping through vacation pictures that “remind us, or delude us into thinking, that family relations were once simpler and happier than they are now,” almost every society finds itself mythologizing and romanticizing its own origin or past. But the peril is inherent in the romance: No less than the utopian futurist, the backward-looking romantic is tempted to violently wrench the present out of joint, to sacrifice lives and treasure on the altar of a “lost wholeness,” a fantasy of never-was.

Were family relations better or worse when they were more stable? Is this vision of the past really an illusion, trafficked by those who are trying to suppress the current revolution. 

We know, for example, that in a country like India, divorce is unheard of and people report a very high level of satisfaction with their marriages. Are they deluded? Or have they simply not bought the ideology that tells us that the traditional family structure is a form of institutional oppression. 

By now, so many people have made a hash of their lives that you will get yourself in some serious trouble if you suggest that it might have been otherwise. Such is not nostalgia, but it does cast a shadow on some of America’s more recent ideological follies.

So, we like to disparage the past because we do not like to think that we might have done better. After all, the country that won two world wars during the twentieth century, the country that enjoyed a high level of patriotism and a clear sense of purpose, has turned into a country that cannot defeat the Viet Cong or the Taliban, a country whose children are world class academic laggards and whose businesses have been moving offshore for decades now.

Obviously, the perfect is still the enemy of the good. And our obsessive interest in past sins risks making us feel that we cannot accomplish much of anything. But, if that is the message that the anti-nostalgia crew wants us to glean, don’t we end up maintaining our self-esteem, thinking that we have not done worse than our ancestors, but that we have made different choices. The crusade against nostalgia is feeling a lot like therapy.

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