Against Nostalgia

Why political nostalgia is destructive, and the attitudes we should foster instead.
The written version of this article can be found here: theworthyhouse.com/2024/06/19...
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This and all Worthy House narrations are offered with accurate closed captions (not auto-generated).
"Do you want your teddy bear? If you are on the Right, you probably do. All around your enemies celebrate their endless triumphs over you. They steal your wealth, trans your children, and scream for your death. You can do nothing, because they control all the levers of power, and lust to use them violently against you. The sky darkens. You tell yourself that tomorrow might be better, but you do not see how. The natural reaction of most is to turn inward-to hug that worn stuffed animal and try to sleep. And, as you drift off, to reflect on how good it used to be, with an inchoate hope that someday we can return to those sweet days, of 1985, or 1955, or 1925. You are nostalgic!" . . .

[@haroldgodwinson3442]

Thanks Charles for the talk today

[@WiseGuyGene]

Self-delusion is hardly restricted to commies. There's a time and place for a little nostalgia, but now is not the time, and anyway nostalgia ain't what it used to be.

[@BBQQueen1999]

"Without memory and without the re-enactment of what is remembered, our sense of reality, and with it our self-confidence, would be shattered." Hannah Arendt "The Human Condition"

[@standTrueNorthStrongandFree]

Hmm.. Not bad. Two truths (givens): though "things were better before, on every axis", "we cannot go back". So yes, we'll have to find our way forward "by destroying our enemy", while "learning from the past". I'll buy that.

[@in.der.welt.sein.]

A lot of overlaps here with the Frankfurt school. Adorno too argued against political nostalgia.

[@SvetlanaVladimirova8590]

That's hardly surprising. Adorno and his merry men regarded looking back to the past with affection, admiration or a feeling of loss as "bourgeois" and "reactionary." With the left, the "clean slate" is always the answer, as we stride purposefully into the radiant future.

[@in.der.welt.sein.]

@@SvetlanaVladimirova8590 for what specific purpose exactly? "Radiant future" is such vague puffery. I also don't think leftists, at least not those influenced by Marx like Adorno argue for a "clean slate". Even in the Communist Manifesto it's clear Marx doesn't believe the new society will start from a clean slate, but rather from the best insights and discoveries of the Enlightenment, from the immense knowledge and advances in technology, medicine, the natural sciences, from the immense increase in mastery over nature and the productive forces of capitalism. Adorno himself has immense respect for Hegel and certain currents within the Enlightenment project as well, while remaining critical of others. Most communists know that it's not a matter of selecting from this or that system like you're shopping from a catalog, that Revolutions don't take place in a vacuum. But even so, "clean slate" is so vague too -- as if it was just "everything" that was to be wiped away, destruction of everything for its own sake, and that they had no actual specific criticisms.
Marx himself has some serious criticisms, mainly inspired by Hegel, about the liberal Lockean "clean slate" idea. And the whole narrative that the right "criticizes equality" and the left "supports it" doesn't fit for someone like Marx who offers a trenchant criticism of equality in Critique of the Gotha Programme and Kapital.

[@SvetlanaVladimirova8590]

@@in.der.welt.sein. One of the main slogans of the Marxists was "the radiant future" (or maybe "the bright future" - depends on how one translates it), the idea being that humanity was marching toward the glorious future of communism. As a Marxist, Adorno subsribed to that concept. And yes, you're right, it is "such vague puffery."

[@in.der.welt.sein.]

@@SvetlanaVladimirova8590 Adorno was much more pessimistic than that and he was a critic of teleology in history. You'll never find the phrase "radiant future" in Marx, but it was a Bolshevik staple, e.g. in Zinoviev, and Mussolini borrowed it from the socialists. It's everywhere in nationalist revisions of Marxism like stalinism, Maoism or Juche, and honestly those revisionist schools have more in common with fascism than they do Marx.

[@SvetlanaVladimirova8590]

@@in.der.welt.sein. Yes, thank you, I'm aware of all that. You seem to have seized on a light-hearted, ironic phrase of mine with all the humor of a Stasi inquisitor.

[@isaackellogg3493]

“Fruitlessly dissipating our energies.” Call it what it is-mental/social/political masturbation.

[@SvetlanaVladimirova8590]

As Russian film director Tarkovsky said, "Nostalgia is a desire to return to one's childhood." He was, I think, at least partly right,

[@hemanhimen8133]

Nostalgia is true and practiced by everyone. Therefore we should embrace it.
Anti-nostalgia is adopting a leftist frame. Like back when we were libertarians.

[@user-rx162r]

When what we want in our future is held hostage to the prospect of preserving aspects of our past, we must step over it.