Nostalgia Has a Use?

 Nostalgia bothers me. I feel its pull to the past and I know the past was not a place of sunlight and good cheer but a time I survived. The whole MAGA movement I see as a con leveraging the sentimental view of the past as a place of safety, of lacking in defects.

The Paradoxes of Nostalgia from The Raven Magazine makes this point most eloquently:

What we really seek in our nostalgic reveries, I want to suggest, is the inertness of the past. The present is a torrent: bills to pay, meals to cook, classes to teach, meetings to attend, children to mind. And more abstractly: projects to pursue, relationships to honor, selves to tend, puzzles to solve. These are the demands we labor under simply because we can do things; they are the burdens of agency. But the past has none of this. It is fixed, settled, complete. There is nothing for us to do because there is nothing that can be done.

 Of agency - which I think of as including responsibility - the essay says:

"The influence of the will on our perception is so persistent that it takes an object of unusual formal power—an object of beauty—to liberate us. But this is also why nostalgia is so tempting. If you can think of something sufficiently dead, something like the past, then you can have a holiday from agency almost any time you want. Just retreat to images of the past and let them wash over you.

Okay, this seems to me as bad nostalgia - living in the past and dead in the present. It is a drug anesthetizing human beings against the stresses and pains and responsibilities of reality. 

The essay offers a solution:

I can search for thematic connections and alternative narrative forms. I should do these things not because I think the received view is wrong and I want to get it right. I should do them as a way of taking responsibility for myself. There is enough slack between my recollections and the meaning I ascribe to them for me to play with them—for me to approach my past with the same spirit of invention that I bring to a painting or poem. And when I do this, I am, to use Nietzsche’s phrase, giving style to myself.

***

But aesthetic engagement offers the next best thing. It offers a holiday from the mundane forms of agency, the agency of embodied creatures who need to eat and sleep and take shelter, in favor of a form that is less servile. Our aesthetic agency is not in service of wants and needs. It a faculty for play, invention, and experimentation, and turning this kind of agency on our own selves is as close as we can come to satisfying nostalgia’s impossible temptation.

I certainly cannot escape my past. A more successful suicide would have been an escape, was thought to be an escape, and then I lost that chance. Still being alive means coping with my past without slipping into the delusional sentimental nostalgia of MAGA for their nostalgia means a future of death. The means of coping has to be creative, which is how I read the author's "aesthetic engagement." Boy, I keep biting off a lot for an old man.

sch 9/21/22

Update 9/23: When I found Doug Masson still blogged, I took a look around and found Nostalgia and Cynicism Masquerading as Wisdom, another perspective on this problem and quite succinct in its writing:

I don’t know that there’s a lot of help for these things. But, the anxiety associated with thinking you live in Fallen Times compared to the good old days isn’t healthy for us. I think the best we can do is probably to be aware of these dynamics, calibrate for them, and adjust our filters accordingly. Also, take a walk and talk to your friends, family, and other real people.