The Fatal Disease Called "Nostalgia"

Johnny Harris, Twitter.

Like a lot of people, I've been watching a bit too much news lately. This included a back-grounder video by Johnny Harris that explained that the reason why Vladimir Putin is so obsessed with Ukraine is because of a genuine nostalgic attempt to bring back the "good old days" of the Soviet Union and Imperial Russian Empire. 

I also watched an excellent CBC Fifth Estate documentary about the Ottawa occupation titled The Convoy and the Questions. It does a good job of identifying the organizers of the occupation and pointing out their particular motivations. It appeared to me that these people were also hearkening back to the "good old days" of Canada---where white men were in charge and people still believed that God spoke to them in their day-to-day lives. 

This took me back to thinking about Donald Trump's slogan that he was going to "Make America Great Again" (or MAGA) and the BREXIT supporter's love of "little England". 

If you look at all the major players in these and similar populist revolts, I think I can see the same broad under-current. They are based on a nostalgic rebellion against modernity. 

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The Marriam-Webster Dictionary defines nostalgia as follows:

1: a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition also : something that evokes nostalgia

2: the state of being homesick : homesickness

Most people don't realize it now, but when the terms were first coined, both nostalgia and homesickness were considered potentially dangerous illnesses. But in modern times they have morphed into something like a romantic affectation---in much the same way depression has become associated with the music known as "the blues". Unfortunately, I think we are suffering through a period when nostalgia has morphed into a populist political ideology---and it's about time people wake up to why it was originally described as a dangerous illness. 

It's dangerous because in the grip of it people become fixated on a past that is generally an historically illiterate fiction---a past that never really did exist. Without an accurate grounding in the past, they seek to restore dangerous absurdities and create chaos in the process.

In 2002 a movie came out titled Far From Heaven that turned an absolutely gimlet-eyed gaze on "the good old days" of 1950s USA. I saw it at the Bookshelf cinema without knowing anything at all about the film, but left absolutely gobsmacked by it's ability to show the personal, emotional cost of both racism and homophobia. 

For those of you who haven't seen the film, it describes the lives of a couple who seem to "have it all". Cathy and Frank Whitaker are a good-looking, middle-class white couple. They live in a beautiful home and Frank has a good job. But he has a secret---he is a closeted gay man who is losing his marbles trying to keep up the pretense of their marriage. When Cathy finds this out, she has no one to confide in except a black man named Raymond Deagan. They fall in love, but social pressures push them apart. Frank finds a male lover and leaves Cathy, while Deagan moves to another city to escape the racism unleashed when people see him and Cathy together. At the end of the film, Cathy Whitaker is totally alone and ostracized from her community. Weren't the 1950s a grand time---.

I mention the movie because it's absolutely crucial that people understand that society has not changed over the past centuries "just because". Women have more autonomy, gays have come out of the closet, and, people of colour have been increasing integrated into society because they suffered horribly in "the good old days". Moreover, these changes didn't come about from the good will of naive liberals---instead, oppressed people had to organize and fight tooth and nail against the status quo for every single improvement in their lives. 

Similarly, the old Russia of the Czars and Commissars was not "good". Ask any Ukrainian about the Holodomor, or "death hunger" that happened when the Russian government accidentally (or on purpose) destroyed the breadbasket of Europe and left the peasantry to starve. 

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I spent a lot of hours these last few days fighting with my computer to get it working again after an upgrade in my old operating system shut down the sound. Now I have something that is mostly working---although today I found out that I have lost my ability to do some of the video editing work I am used to. (Back to the workshop for me!) I'm not whining, but I just want to point out that there's a lot of "behind the scenes" work that goes into putting out these articles. If you like the result, and you can afford it, why not subscribe? PayPal and Patreon make it easy to do.

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One of the things that really bothers me is the casual, indirect brutality that I hear from people my age here in Guelph. I'll talk a bit more about this in a future article, but it fits so well in this op-ed that I don't feel I can avoid mentioning it. 

Poverty is nasty and brutal. I'm not talking about being frugal; I'm talking about not having enough to eat, wearing shoes that make your feet really hurt because you can't afford ones that fit, having to walk everywhere because you can't afford bus fare, missing opportunities that everyone else takes for granted because you are too poor to "show up"----all those sorts of things. 

Now let's talk about one of the key causes of poverty. I'm not talking about "capitalism" or "man's inhumanity to man", or anything like that. Instead I mean the simple, "nuts and bolts" issue of housing eating up every penny you can lay your hands on. And the simple fact of the matter is that "the rent's too dam high" simply because there isn't enough housing being built. And the honest truth is that the overwhelming majority of middle-class people in Guelph who already own their own homes don't want developers---neither greedy nor non-profit---to put up high or even medium density housing in their neighbourhoods. 

This opposition isn't fueled by a self-conscious hatred of the poor. Indeed, some of the most vocal opposition to new housing I've heard comes from people who will tell you that they are "progressive" people who would never oppose helping the less well off. But the fact of the matter is unless we build enough housing stock to house everyone, the poor will always end up putting every penny they get from work or welfare into housing---which will leave them nothing else.

But if you ask the people who are opposing new development they will almost all tell you that they just want to "preserve the community". They want to keep Guelph the way it is now---if not take it back to the way it used to be. They are being nostalgic.

Here's the thing people need to understand about good and bad behaviour. There are almost no self-consciously "evil" people. Instead, most bad things come about because folks believe that they are actually good and refuse to objectively look at either their own motivations or the impact of their behaviour on people they can't see. The traditional way of describing this according to Eastern philosophy is to say they are suffering from delusional thinking.  

When Putin invades Ukraine to go back to the "good old days" of the Soviet Union, he is suffering from a delusion. And in the grips of that delusion, he doesn't really think about the hurt he is inflicting on it's citizens. Similarly, when the people camped out on streets of Ottawa babbled on about how they "loved" the people of Canada, they were deluded about how refusing to get vaccinated was hurting other people in our society---like the immunocompromised and hospital staff. And, when people in Guelph fight tooth and nail against any type of intensification in our housing, they are being oblivious to the harsh lives they are inflicting on the poor. 

This is why our fore-fathers believed that nostalgia was a dangerous illness---it is the source of a great deal of delusional thinking. I happen to agree.

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!