Note: I wrote this and scheduled for publishing before the terrible news of a large-scale war in Europe. I don’t know if I will address it directly but I really don’t have much to add that so many others who know more about it than I do. So hopefully this can be a quick distraction and let me just say anyone involved with or supporting the Russian invasion can go to hell and all support to the Ukrainians trying to make that happen as soon as possible.
Watching the Super Bowl the other week made me realized how much of current culture in the US is just nostalgia right now. Ads featuring or for Austin Powers, Sopranos, Big Lebowski, Cable Guy, Jurassic Park, Law and Order, Bel Air, never mind the whole halftime show. Those are just examples I came up with without looking things up. — I blame Uber Eats for already using Wayne’s World— It seems especially awkward considering Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow himself was born in 1996, the time everyone seems to want to go back to.
It seems to be just looking backward. The humorist John Hodgman put it quite succinctly in his memoir Vacationland when he claimed:
…I consider nostalgia to be a toxic impulse. It is the twinned, yearning delusion that (a) the past was better (it wasn’t) and (b) it can be recaptured (it can’t)
Quite frankly, I get it. Now kind of sucks. And where it isn’t awful, most things are just a little bit worse than they were just a few years ago. Like even where things are “back to normal” it’s just not quite. Maybe some supply issue, maybe some covid protocol thing, possibly just the universal issue of how social connections weaken with age and longing to have that sort of life back. No matter why, it seems marketers are keen to get to the forty somethings who want to relive their teenage years in the 90s.
But the thing with nostalgia and why it’s so toxic is that it’s a completely made up world. It’s so easy to just remember Smashing Pumpkins, Titanic, Seinfeld or all the other things that make us smile, but somehow when reliving the 90’s the subjects of the Oklahoma City bombing, Yugoslav Wars, Rwandan Genocide, etc… never seem to be a part of that.
Quite simply we make the past in our heads a curated gallery of everything we thought was great. And Museums are nice to visit from time to time, but they often aren’t reality. It can be like wandering through Versailles imagining what life was like in the 18th century without the obvious counterpoint of just how unrepresentative it was. I mean, in that case they let it get to their heads, and subsequently were freed from possession of those very same heads.
These idealizations can get quite extreme. There are people who seriously debate that the industrial revolution was a positive for human quality of life. Let me be perfectly clear on my position on this: The fact that there is even a debate is batshit bonkers!
Prior to the industrial revolution nearly all humans spent nearly all their time either directly farming for food, preparing shelter, making fabric, making light —incidentally my theory of why full moons have the associations they do is that pre-electricity, it was rare to have night so illuminated — and various other mundane tasks. I’m pretty happy being able to go to the grocery store and get all the food I want. The only reason I’m around to write this is because of modern medicine’s ability to be able to perform invasive surgery on an infant. I could go on and on about how wonderful it is to be able to talk to people instantly anywhere in the world and how unimaginable this level of communication would have been just a few decades ago, but I’ll just say quite simply, modernity is good.
The fact that solving major problems for the vast number of people means that either new problems are created or old problems allowed to be focused on, does not mean that the solution was a bad thing. This is a point that seems to be lost on many that there is no perfect solution to anything.
Society learns by incrementalism. Basically we solve what’s right in front of us and then see where we are and what’s the next step. This is a theme that’s on my docket, but I think there’s too much big picture thinking going on in the world of trying to tie everything into a single grand narrative.
I’m utterly fascinated with emergent order and I will definitely write more about it in the future but the one sentence version is that it is the order that comes about when individual pieces of a system act independently yet the whole system moves as a whole. A simple example is a school of fish. Each individual fish just knows to avoid trouble and stay near other fish and no else, yet the mass can move in ways no individual fish could imagine.
Think also of an ant colony, any single ant can only follow a few instructions. Basically wander, follow trail, get food. Yet the whole colony can have sophisticated methods for searching for food, storing food, specialization within ants, etc…
Anyway, I often think that there is too much invested in some grand ideological arc of history (at least with respect to development) when in reality it’s just individuals trying to alleviate the problem they have in front of them with the resources available. Of course life is much more complex and problems and solutions can be influenced by culture, but the overall idea seems reasonable to me.
So to return to the original point of the past, we are no different now than any of the previous thousands of generations before us, of just trying to solve the problems in our individual lives, and we’re generally pretty good at it. Yes sometimes there are things that come along as a society such as a war or pandemic and will set us back a few years but we all seem to end up much better in a relatively short period of time.
Even in the last few years, yeah too much online connectivity has caused it’s own issues, but I’d much rather live in a world where I can write this comfortably from my couch in Spain and not have any sort of gatekeeper to keep my words from being heard by people all around the world.
So since the past is unattainable and the past in our collective minds isn’t what really existed anyway, let’s stop trying to relive it.
And I’d just like to end with the idea of humility. There is a quote from Robert E. Lee that sums up how I feel about the idea quite nicely and I find the fact that it comes from a man who dedicated his life to an evil cause that he believed was right to be even more important. In remembering that we can all fail. We may not even ever know it, but it’s the sum of all people working toward solving all of our problems that helps us get to where we need to be.
The march of Providence is so slow and our desires so impatient; the work of progress so immense and our means of aiding it so feeble; the life of humanity is so long, that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope.
- Robert E. Lee
Personal News
This is published on Thursday and assuming the authorities don’t suddenly actually realize the insanity of letting me join the club, I should legally be a Spaniard on Friday. Quite a big day and I have quite a few thoughts on the experience of being an immigrant and integrating into a new society that I’ll try to write about over the next couple weeks.
Big news in the dog world in that we sent for a genetic test and now have the results. Turns out he’s a mix of mostly American Staffordshire with Labrador as the next largest contributor. Really goes a long way to explaining the extreme strength and just how much he wants to play all the time.