Future Nostalgia

Tradwives and RETVRN have taken the social media world by storm. All of these new terms and ideas like “lindy” and “based” are usually around someone doing something or living their life in an old-fashioned way. A call back to a simpler time when the world “made sense” and where traditions and long-held values hold sway above all things. So why are we so into the past? Why people advocating for a return to the land, a return to farming, or a return to simpler living? It’s complicated, but I’m excited to report that it has happened before.

RETVRN

In a society with changing values, collapsing traditions, and shifting social norms, people who are thrown off by the changes will want to go back to “better” and “simpler” time. Any time there are large shifts in society, you’ll see a call for a return to the past for its benefits.

It is important to remember that these phenomena is not unique to our age. It’s already happened before in this country, especially in the 1880s and into the years before World War II. A “back to the land” movement had already been popular because of the squalor of the industrialized cities like Pittsburgh, Chicago, New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. The American wing of the Victorians were already obsessed with cleanliness to prevent debilitating diseases like tuberculosis, various fevers, pneumonia, and typhoid fever (among many others). The country was long considered a cleaner more pure place and as Europeans settlers moved West into the vast expanses of the interior, farming and rural living were extolled as virtuous.

There was certainly a reason this was popular, cities were dirty. Sanitation was sparse, if it existed at all, and wood and coal were the primary ways of heating homes and powering factories and there wasn’t an air cleaner in sight. Soot, dirt, and befouled air was a common experience for city dwellers. This was also doubly true for those who were packed into tiny tenement housing projects with limited airflow where disease could abound. Even for the middle classes, clean air was hard to find in the cities and transportation hadn’t yet allowed suburbs to develop in a meaningful way.

Urban fetishism of the rural life extends back to antiquity. Aristotle advised that men should be involved in city states and politics when they are young and then retire to the county when they were old (around 40 in his time) and make the young men ride out to seek their advice. This extended into the 18th and 19th century, when the country man of leisure was considered the best way to live. This idea is now back in fashion.

Much of this call for a return promotes an independent, largely exurban and rural life where hunting, fishing, gardening, farming, and tradesman work is held in a higher regard than the drudgery and oppression of the white collar jobs in the city. This also extends to social mores around marriage and family. It is fashionable to worship at the feet of the stay-at-home-mother and the “strong” and “traditional” family of one man, one woman, and plenty (more than 2) children. The modern version is more like being a gentleman farmer with some chickens and animals and a work-from-home office job. Still others extol the simply pleasures and life of relative poverty of simply living off the land with simple jobs that are available in rural areas away from the big cities and their high housing costs and crime issues. Both of these perspectives look to a better, purer past, but did that really exist and even if it did, why do we obsess about it so much?

Why are we obsessed with the past?

There is a specific reason why we are so obsessed with the past, it in some ways, not always, but in some ways was better. Adam Curtis returns to this theme again and again in documentaries, mostly around the Victorian obsession with the past and how it informed their morality and the politics leading into WWI and the years after.

Calling people back to a mythically better past is also the bailiwick of every dictator and repressive regime. Hitler used a germanic past to gain power. Pol Pot embraced the dominance of the Khmer people in their past to create one of the worst and most deadly regimes of the 20th century. In this way, the Soviet Union was a bit different. They would rather not recall the imperial and bourgeois past but rather to a socialist future. China also had a similar dynamic which was typified by the Cultural Revolution.

Even in today’s politics, Trump recalls a mythical past with fewer minorities and certainly less vocal minorities. I also find it a big ironic that the theme for the Biden campaign in 2020 was “Build Back Better.” Contrast that with the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign that prominently featured an arrow pointing forward and a slogan of “Stronger Together.”

In our modern politics, much of this desire to return to the past has to do with an unfulfilled future. It comes from a place of certain grief, but the question remains, can you grieve something you never had? I even find this tendency in myself. I always imagine what it would have been like to have a job at a magazine or newspaper and to have a functioning job market in my field. On the bright side, all the changes that have disrupted by industry have enabled me to create The Cameron Journal but it has come at the tremendous expense of starting my own company, publication, and pouring thousands into making this a reality instead of being paid. I didn’t buy a house:; I bought myself a career instead.

How Now Shall We Live?

Change is difficult for most people. In the past, changes could come from war, climate, famine, and other such events. They were sudden and required adjustment to a new normal. Our situation is a bit different. It is all-pervasive, but it is not sudden. That was what made the pandemic somewhat of a relief, it had a beginning and somewhat of an ending. There was a beginning, middle, and end. I think that is why people secretly yearn for World War Three as well. They want whatever to happen already so that they can either die and not care or adjust to the new normal. It may not be pleasant, but at something will have happened. Instead, we are stuck with small and incremental changes that people perceive as making life “worse” but there isn’t a real beginning or an end, it proceeds and goes on.

The world has always had problems, but we handle problems differently. This is why the past appeals so much to people. Unfulfilled futures are difficult, but the way we discuss problems has shifted as well.

Our modern politics is filled with the “issue of the moment” which can range from trans bathroom etiquette to abortion and everything in between. It seems like we lurch from one crisis to another without end. It just never stops. That is why the past appeals: it seems simpler. Part of that is because the farther back we go, the farther we get to being children, where our ignorance of world affairs protected us from its gravity.

Conversely, never before in human history have people had access to so much information about world affairs. We’ve watched the war in Gaza on Tik Tok. If Vietnam brought war in America’s living rooms, Tik Tok and social media have put it in our pockets. Our brains feel like we are a part of it and the next video is another crisis. Our feeds can feel with various things ranging from the student loan crisis to climate change, new diseases (another pandemic, oh no!) to economic crisis. It’s all another scroll away. The next crisis doesn’t have time to be addressed by seasoned journalists or considerate politicians. The next crisis bypasses all of that is delivered directly into our faces at the touch of a button. If the world seems more complicated and like it’s “on fire.” It’s because we are over-aware of what is going on in the world. We used to have to wait for the evening news or a newspaper to tell us what was going on, and now we don’t have those filters.

This system has filled people with despair that they can’t quite put their finger or define. Adam Curtis defines this as “Oh Dearism.” In his thinking, our minds are filled with events that we can have no effect upon, therefore all we can say is, “Oh dear.” I have interviewed various leaders and productivity experts on The Cameron Journal Podcast and I can say that to a person, the first recommendation they offer is to stop watching the news. The fastest way to get happiness back is to simply unplug.

For those that can’t/won’t unplug, the next best thing is to wish for a better past where it seemed like things were better, people had more money, better jobs, and the potential for a better future. Some of this is backed up by numbers but much of it is also vibes. Economically speaking, we are not in the same place, but our lives today are far better than they were 20–50 years ago. We live longer (if you can afford it) and we die less of various diseases. We live with disease more now. Things are cleaner and often more convenient than they were in the past. However, it is hard to realize these gains in everything from materials and car safety to medicine when it seems like life has gotten harder and more difficult. Social mobility has stalled out and is retreating. The price of everything is higher and things seem far more precarious than before and with less of a chance to bounce back.

Final Thoughts

I once wrote an article that nostalgia was not working for me. It still doesn’t. However, I understand that in a world that seems like it is on fire, the desire to return to a simpler past has a great deal of appeal. I have a great deal of sympathy for this idea. I don’t believe the world is one fire, but it is easy to see how that would be easily perceived. I think that is why both liberals and conservatives flock to the past for different reasons. In that way, nostalgia is delightfully bipartisan.