That’s the thing about nostalgia: It assumes constant material progress. One can debate the origins and etymology of the term “nostalgia” – back in the 16th century, I think it was, they used it a few times to describe what we might call PTSD among soldiers – but it’s really a modern phenomenon. A Postmodern one, in truth — I’m talking late 20th century here. Humans have always longed for “the past”, but until the middle of the 20th century the “past” we longed for was mythical – the Golden Age, as opposed to our current Brass one.
The Golden Age was better because the Golden Men were better, not because their lives were materially better. There’s a reason all those medieval and Renaissance paintings show “historical” figures in contemporary garb, and it’s not because the Flemish Masters didn’t know about togas. Though they assumed the men of the Classical Past were better men, they assumed material life back then was pretty much the same as now, because it was pretty much the same as now. One can of course point to a million technological changes between the Roman Republic and the Renaissance, but life as it was actually lived by the vast majority of people was still basically the same: Up at dawn, to bed at dusk, birth and death and community life and subsistence farming, all basically the same. A world lit only by fire.
The modern age changed all that. At some point in the very near past, we started assuming tomorrow would look very different from today. And I do mean the very near past — there are probably people still alive today who remember people who assumed that tomorrow would be pretty much like today. Because, then, our lives are so materially different from even the very recent past, we tend to assume that our nostalgia is for material things. It’s very hard to put a name to something like the feeling “I wish we could have family Christmases again, sharing that one joke we had about how Uncle Bob always sends you goofy socks.” It’s very easy to put a name to something like “vinyl records” or “the Bob Newhart show” or “Betamax tapes”, so we use those as synecdoche.
In other words: Even though we could actually recreate the material world of 1983, and even though we think we want this, we don’t. We wish we could live like we lived in 1983, but very little of that has any relationship to the material culture of 1983.
Severian, “Nostalgia”, Founding Questions, 2021-10-19.
December 13, 2024
QotD: Nostalgia, or “they were better people back then”
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