In our current predicament of chronic crisis (ecological, political, social, etc.) nostalgia is ubiquitous. It may have always been the case that people living in the “now” have looked back on the past and detected an innocence or virtue that has been lost or corrupted by the current age. It’s a tale as old as time, even going back to the first piece of “Western Literature,” the Iliad, in which the old Greek general Nestor longs for his younger days when men were truly heroic. But today as we face an onslaught of crises, nostalgia seems more popular than ever. It can be found on almost every side of the political spectrum and within a wide variety of social and spiritual movements. Regardless of the specific time-period towards which people look, it seems like almost everyone is looking backwards for solutions. Why?
It is easy to imagine that things were better—simpler—in the past than they are in the present. It is easy to look at the problems we face today, to look at the past, and to think to ourselves, “People back then didn’t have to deal with the same problems we do. If only we could get back to that time period, then we could have the wholeness that we lack in today’s world.” These types of solutions try to ignore the present situation as much as possible in order to resurrect a situation that has been lost to the past. By trying to act as if the present were not operative, these people hope to get rid of the contradictions of the present age by ignoring them all together. There is a sincere belief that our present problems could disappear if we merely recover a situation in which these problems never existed.
There are several reasons why it is so tempting to look to the past as the solution to our present problems. One reason is because the past easily lends itself to our fantasies for wholeness. We ignore that every time period contained its own antagonisms and contradictions and instead imagine that people used to live in a state of harmony. We imagine that the current “corruption” that we face wasn’t always already present in the past. But another reason is because we lack imagination. In the face of our current predicaments, it is easier to point to the past and say to ourselves, “Look! That seemed to have worked,” instead of trying to imagine new ways to deal with the present and the future. We see this everywhere in politics, where people believe that a previous political leader or agenda had the right answer, and if we could just get back to what they were doing then everything would be back on course.
The problem with looking at the past for solutions to the present is that we ignore the fact that our present situation exists because of the way that the past played out. If we were try to recreate the conditions of the past, it would only lead to the same contradictions as history played out (as every protagonist of a time-travel movie knows). Our situation is never static. Every time-period has its own contradictions and antagonisms, and these eventually play out to create a new situation with new contradictions and antagonisms. The problems we face today evolved from the problems they faced in the past, so we can’t go back without finding ourselves in the same situation. The “innocence” of the past wasn’t destroyed by the “corruption” of the present coming. The “corruption” of the present is an outgrowth that emerges from the supposed “innocence” of the past.
But there is a deeper issue in attempting to revive the past, namely that it is impossible. We can refer here to Freud’s notion of the “return of the repressed”—we cannot merely repress some trauma without it returning as a displaced symptom. Or, as the psychoanalytic and Hegelian theorist Slavoj Žižek puts it:
After a true historical break, one simply cannot return to the past, or go on as if nothing happened—even if one does, the same practice will have acquired a radically different meaning.1
In other words, in our attempt to return to the past, we necessarily have to repress something of the present. This repression give the old practice a “radically different meaning” than it may have had in the past. For instance, we cannot return to the innocence of childhood after it has been lost. Once the tooth-fairy’s true identity is revealed, we cannot go back to our innocent belief without appearing psychotic.
Often, when people try to repress the present and return the the past, the symptom that emerges from this repression is the creation of an enemy figure. Despite our attempts to ignore our present antagonisms, they continue to persists, and so we have to find some external reason to blame for our current troubles. Instead of taking ownership of the present as our own problem and understanding how each of us has a role to play in our current struggles, we blame some outside group for the way things have gone awry. If only such and such group were eliminated, we believe, then we could go back to the way things used to be.
This inability to go back to a practice without it acquiring a radically different meaning is especially true in current religious attitudes. There are Christians who believe that things would be better if we could just return to a time before secularism ruined everything, while there are pagans who believe that things would be better if we could return to a time before Christianity ruined everything, as if Christianity didn’t emerge from paganism and as if secularism didn’t emerge from Christianity.
But we have also seen another recent religious movement. The explosion of online information and communication has created a “Deconstruction Revolution,” a movement of people all over the religious spectrum who have deconstructed many of the rigid teachings and practices from their childhood spirituality. This movement has incited its own counter-movement of “faithful” people who long for the time of lost innocence before the “Deconstruction Revolution,” when their family and loved-ones had a simpler approach to faithful living.
Many, however, desire to ignore the “Deconstruction Revolution” altogether, hoping instead to continue living their lives as if the contradictions and antagonisms that this movement made manifest never existed. But we cannot simply return to the past. Even for those who never went through deconstruction, the movement itself has been so difficult to ignore that we cannot merely return to a situation when belief was merely simple and straightforward.
It is easy, however, for both sides of this movement to turn the other into an enemy of corruption. For those who have deconstructed, it is easy to turn parents and childhood leaders into religiously corrupt agents who used their power and influence to ruin an childhood of innocence with religious dogma. While those who remain faithful see those who have deconstructed as corruptors of an innocent safe haven (i.e., the church). The truly radical move, however, is for those who deconstruct to realize that there is no such thing as an innocent and incorruptible childhood, while the faithful need to realize “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God,” even or maybe especially the church itself.
The point of avoiding the traps of nostalgia isn’t that we should merely give up on the projects that we are most passionate about. Just because we encounter deconstruction doesn’t mean we have to give up religion. But it does mean that our relationship to religion and our practice within it has a fundamentally different meaning (maybe even looks entirely different) after we have faced deconstruction. It is this game-changing possibility that many faithful people are most afraid of because it requires us to give up our fantasies of a lost wholeness. As long as we can retain the fantasy of wholeness, we can continue to believe that we can regain it. Likewise, those who have deconstructed and moved on from religion can give up their fantasies of regaining the lost innocence of their childhood and move on to creating something new in the present.
For everyone, whether they choose to stay religious or not, the real challenge is to avoid the traps of nostalgia by bravely facing the contradictions and antagonisms of the present in order to create something new for the future. But remember, just because something new is being created doesn’t mean its own contradictions and antagonisms won’t emerge. They will.
Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, 193.