Ignorance is Bliss: Nostalgia

Listen to talk radio, go to church, or watch televangelists (or FOX News) and you’ll soon begin to wonder about this mythical fantasyland ever-present in the minds of those who consider themselves religious or conservative: Ye Olden Days. These kinds of people find themselves particularly susceptible to that common feeling of nostalgia, that wishing for things to be again the way they were. You’ll hear them bandy about words and phrases like “forefathers,” “good old days,” or “tradition” as though the past were some kind of Eden. But nostalgic thinkers tend to forget, or not to know in the first place, that times were not always good or simple.

Women could not vote. Minorities lived in fear of being lynched. Catching a cold could lead to death. Children could wake up paralyzed by polio. Cars did not have seat belts. (Nor did horses.) Dentists’ offices were torture chambers. Need I say more? Our world has never been any more or less virtuous than it is now. It has simply changed over time, by our own doing and that of our ancestors, in a never-ending quest to improve our lives. The polio vaccine wasn’t found by praying, or denouncing victims as sinners, or by stubbornly adhering to old superstitious folk remedies. It was found by Jonas Salk, using the scientific method. Civil rights didn’t come about by wishing for the old days of life in Africa, it came about as a result of nonviolent demonstrations led by Martin Luther King, Jr., by the resulting awareness and empathy among the rest of the population, and by the demands they placed on their elected representatives. Perhaps it’s telling of those nostalgic thinkers, that they must not have suffered in the “good old days.” I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a black man calling for a return to slavery, nor have I seen (many) women wishing to be covered head-to-toe and forced to marry against their will. But I have seen many fat old white men with southern accents admonishing society for moving forward and wishing for a return to the old ways of suffering and denial for everyone other than fat old white men with southern accents.

It’s not hard to understand this longing for the golden days of yore. Everyone remembers the music of their youth as being better than any that followed; the tastes that are imprinted on a young mind can be hard to break. I can’t even turn on a radio anymore, except to listen to non-music programming, or old music. As my own parents disliked the music of my youth, so I now dislike the current youth culture’s preferences. Jealousy often is also a factor in finding fault with changes in society. “Why, when I was a kid, I had to walk to school sixty miles, in the driving snow, uphill both ways.” We’ve all heard something like this, or said it ourselves. Partly we say it to let children know how good they’ve got it, but also because there are some petty feelings of jealousy towards these grossly pampered children and the (relatively) safe and sheltered lives they’re now leading. I had to do without, so why should these little brats have it so good? Still, most parents pamper their children precisely because they remember their own brushes with certain doom, and want to spare their own sons and daughters from the same. Nevertheless, there are always blowhards who would make their own children suffer the same risks, mistakenly thinking that such risks result in good, outstanding people like themselves, or who would pamper their own children but expect others to suffer because they are in some way undeserving of the wealth that affords safety.

Nostalgic thinking has much to do with assumptions people make about their own past. Just because our parents or grandparents are content and happy in our memories does not mean it really was so. Perhaps Grandma would rather have been a career woman, or maybe should would have been happier with Fat Joe from down the block. Maybe she didn’t really believe in God; maybe she just went along with it to make everyone happy and to have something to scare her children into behaving with. Perhaps black people in real life weren’t as happy as they were when we saw them on stage. Perhaps they suffered in impoverished neighborhoods our parents were afraid to visit. Nostalgia is the kind of knee-jerk emotional response that needs to be carefully measured against personal research into history and human nature. But the people who most often glorify the past are those least likely to carefully think, reason, or research anything. Their mentality is that of the lynch mob—reflexive, reactionary, and willfully ignorant of anything that may stand in opposition to their wishes. If there is one thing consistent between our supposedly halcyon past and our discontented present, it is the presence of those willfully ignorant.