Nostalgia: Why the Past Matters

© Charles D. Hayes

“Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.”

-- Albert Camus

Why does it matter that the past assumes greater importance for people as they age? Why does getting older seem to cause people to discount the future, diminish the importance of the present, and experience a longing to live in the past? Furthermore, will this happen to you, and if it does, what will you do about it?

In seventeenth-century Europe, nostalgia was thought to be a treatable disease. It was an especially dreaded malady in military organizations during that period because it provided a plausible excuse for AWOL soldiers. While it is no longer considered an illness, nostalgia is often thought of today as an escape from reality. It is also associated with aging, and American demographics make nostalgia a topic that’s growing in importance.

In her thoroughly engaging book The Future of Nostalgia, Russian writer Svetlana Boym warns us that “nostalgia can be both a social disease and a creative emotion, a poison and a cure.” She says, “Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy.” She reminds us that what might appear to be a longing for another time, may in fact be an act of rebellion, or a longing for something that never existed. Such is the case, I believe, for many of us who grew up in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, as we shall see.

Imperceptible Influences

I’ve known many people over the years who seemed as they grew older to be lost in time, and you may have observed something similar. My father, who was born in 1921 and died in 2002, appeared to spend the whole of his adult emotional life in the 1950s. Of course, this was only in his attitude toward life in general and his taste for entertainment, but the older he got, the more he seemed to withdraw to earlier times. The days of his youth in the 1930s and ’40s were painful, so he found comfort in the ’50s. As the years passed, the only television programs he would watch were reruns from earlier years. He may have set a record for watching Gunsmoke episodes, and he did so without seeming to remember what would happen next, even though he had seen each show scores of times.

The more things changed in popular culture, the more my father resisted, and the same applied to my mother. Their reluctance to participate in what was currently happening was a mystery to me when I was growing up, but it is less so now, in my seventh decade, as I find myself more and more reluctant to take part in some of the new social media technologies. Puzzling over my own shift in attitude has led me to the conclusion that the past matters because it has much more influence on our experience of the present than we commonly think it does. The better we understand its influence, the more we may be able to help the next generation contend with the future. Let me explain.

The geographic region where we grew up, the economic conditions, the prevalent ethnicity, the social ties, the religious affiliations, America’s foreign relations—all of these states of affairs congeal in our individual psyches in our youth and result in our outlook or worldview. Indeed, the human relations we experience as children very often affect our relationships with others for a lifetime.

In the past, it has been commonplace for generations shaped by circumstances to go through life sharing opinions of a similar nature because of their common experience. History reveals, however, that many of the things taken for granted by generations past were based on illusion or mistaken premises. In other words, each and every generation makes perceptual mistakes in apprehending reality. These can lead to a lifetime of unrealistic expectations based upon misperceptions of the times in which we’ve lived. This is why understanding the past is so important to the present, the future, and the very quality of our lives.

Many of us, even in the fall and winter life, continue to be steered along a life course that began when we were much younger. We are still impelled to act by forces we do not yet recognize as being a part of our motivation. And thus our grasp on the illusive nature of free will is suspect, especially in light of recent research in neuroscience that has many scientists rethinking the whole philosophical premise of free will and the notion of authenticity.

A Search for Significance

In his thoughtful book How to Say It to Seniors,David Solie says, “When we start to realize that we’re not going to be here forever, we become aware that it’s not clear what it meant to be here at all.” I think this is true for many of us, but I don’t think it applied to my parents. They would have shunned this level of introspection, refusing even to entertain such a query, because they never learned to question their experience. They took everything at face value, and when people do this without careful scrutiny and critical examination, they become easily manipulated by anyone with a hidden agenda.

Solie goes on to describe how aging comes with a drive toward discovering one’s legacy. Again, I think this might be true for most people, but not for everyone. That said, I recall that before she passed away, my mother began to focus on things no one but she took seriously, and she dwelled on them repeatedly. It was clear to me that she was in search of something of significance, no matter how trivial it seemed to others.

Granted, our experiences as individuals are so varied that it’s hard to make universal claims about our behaviors. Nevertheless, I believe it is a common occurrence for thoughtful people to initiate a search for the things that have made their lives meaningful when it becomes obvious to them that the time they have left is much shorter than amount of time they’ve already lived. For many people this seems to occur subconsciously. This is where nostalgia can lead us either to a meaningful north or to a dead end of isolation and despair.

It makes perfect sense that as we age we would begin at some point to long for the things that have meant the most to us and that this experience is metaphorically analogous to mining one’s past for value. If this is true, then it is likely that we will find what we are looking for by closely examining the tailings of our life experience and how they compare with other generations. Moreover, this is something we must do ourselves because no one else can sift through our personal life experience.

Fantasy as Reality

Elsewhere I’ve written at some length about how each generation longs for what it grew up without. This novelty is intriguing when we compare our perceptions with what really happened during the time periods we are drawn to. For example, television family life with Ozzie and Harriet Nelson and Lucy and Ricky Ricardo in the 1950s gave the appearance of representing a much simpler and more innocent time when there was little mystery about the notion of right and wrong. Indeed, black-and-white television, which is all most people could afford in those days, provided the perfect moral metaphor for the time period.

I recall the 1950s fondly. If memory serves me right, I took some comfort in the idealized family life portrayed on television during that period. It seemed to me that the Nelsons’ life experience might be something to aspire to and that mine was not a good comparison by any measure. A great many of us probably felt similarly about I Love Lucy. Our lives were not as much fun, but still we could hope for better times. Of course, back then we didn’t know (at least for sure) that Lucy’s sponsor, Philip Morris, was slowing killing many people in the audience with cigarettes.

Knowing what I know now about the history of those days, it’s hard to appreciate what it might have been like if I had been aware that the Nelsons’ television family life was a façade, that Ozzie Nelson was something of a tyrant, and that the dysfunction in his family mirrored that of my own in some ways. What if we had known that Lucille Ball was not the fun-loving nut she appeared to be on screen, but was instead an aggressive businesswoman, obsessive about appearances, or that Ricky was a hard drinker and a womanizer, and that Lucy knew this but kept going for business’s sake? What might this knowledge have meant to us back then? Would it have changed how we feel now about 1950s?

In those days, our entertainment was aspirationally idealistic. Say what you will about the producers of 1950s television, I think they meant well, even if the long-term results of their efforts are not so clear. Today the quest for realism often calls attention to the worst of the worst, as if this were necessary for establishing a credible foundation for entertainment. Believability is paramount right up to the fantasy genre, at which point nothing is too bizarre. If we had been better acquainted with the reality of the circumstances in which we were growing up, you have to wonder whether our ideals and aspirations would somehow be different today.

How might we view the 1950s if we considered our idealistic entertainment to be a distraction from the realities that should have been acknowledged and addressed—realities like mindless conformity, bigotry, racism, misogyny, and a nearly total lack of awareness about how our activities affected the environment? Was our ignorance bliss or arrogance? Answering these questions is not a simple task, but I can’t help but think there might have been a great deal of solace in realizing that television was portraying unrealistic expectations of family life in America. In my own case, the knowledge might have helped to make my family life seem less of an unfortunate exception to normality.

Nearly two decades ago, Stephanie Coontz published The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, a work that should be required reading for every person who wants to truly understand the American psyche. It explains how our egregious penchant for thinking of ourselves as exceptional human beings on a planet of lesser individuals stems from deep-seated illusions about who we are, where we come from, and the way things used to be. Coontz suggests that “growing up in 1950s families was not so much a matter of being protected from the harsh realities of the outside world as preventing the outside world from learning the harsh realities of family life.” She has a point.

Coontz demolishes the historical and ideological justification for government hatred that is so much a part of today’s politics with a narrative of what really took place in the early days of American history, and she exposes the myth of self-reliance for the fantasy it is. This is not to say that the early settlers of the American West were not industrious, hard-working people. Rather, it was railroad expansion, public subsidy, government land grants, and military mobilization that built much of middle America and the West, along with a form of community volunteerism that was based upon expectations of being compensated by the government. Simply put, with almost a religious sense of admiration we celebrate a West that never existed, and by doing so we set ourselves up for failure because we can never quite measure up.

All of this romanticized history was played out in American movie theaters in the 1950s. Not only did we celebrate a west that never was, but we continue to do so today. As a result, we persist in holding on to unrealistic expectations about the general cause-and-effect aspects of daily life and about human character in particular. We readily excuse ourselves for not living up to our own idealistic expectations simply by the nature of being who we are, while we simultaneously project the failure to live up to historical myths onto the imperfections of those we consider out-groups, outsiders, or freeloaders, as we are likely to view them. All of this for the simple reason that we have difficulty relating to people when their differences are so great we cannot accept them into our group. This deeply unfortunate human saga repeats itself in perpetuity, as ignorant people aspire to aggrandizing fantasy, live on misattribution, and thrive on a form of contempt made up from legend.

Coontz understates the case when she describes nostalgia as a potential trap; it is that and much more. Ethnocentric contempt is magnified when groups of individuals idealize a past that never really happened, and they do so because the very existence of the other becomes a threat to their daydream. If human beings cannot be depended upon to learn beyond the heresy of popular culture, then we are doomed to experience needless anxiety and pointless conflict, especially in our politics.

Of course, a much more realistic view of the past has long been accessible for those adults who really care enough about the truth to get beyond the cultural illusions that serve as protective barriers for our respective group identities. The irony is that, even though most of what we need to know about the past is well documented by serious historians, the record of actual American history has been so thoroughly revised by ideologues in our public school systems that many history books are little more than fairy tales with regard to the truth they are supposed to represent. School boards in Texas have been censoring history textbooks for years, and they do so openly.

In the communities where I spent my youth, racism was as prevalent as sunshine. “Separate but equal” was anything but equal in Oklahoma and Texas. The racism wasn’t subtle; it was overtly in your face and ruthless, if pressed. People in Northern states sometimes express doubt as to the claims people make about the segregated South. Unless you experienced it, the depth of social discord and the complexity of the relationships among the races can be hard to comprehend, both then and now.

Though I didn’t grow up in Mississippi, Katherine Stockett’s The Help and the movie of the same name portray the essence of the segregated South very much the way I remember it. The novel and the movie have been subject to a fair amount of criticism, and the ambivalence on the part of African Americans who view this subject with bitterness is understandable. Indeed, the story may not represent the truth as it applies to every Southerner or their memories about those years, or to the racism that continues to be prevalent today. Nevertheless, Stockett raises issues that still need to be aired and examined thoroughly by society at large. Racism is such a difficult psychological hurdle to get beyond that regardless of which race tells the story, and regardless of their sincerity or what they say, their efforts will evoke criticism from the other side as a way of pushing back.

Lessons of Hindsight

In his book Back to Our Future, David Sirota offers a compelling argument that the past has a tremendous effect on the present and that today’s politics are an ideological battle, the first significant shots of which were fired in the 1980s. About this period he writes, “The pitting of the idealized fifties directly against the tarnished sixties and then making that battle America’s central political cause started right at the beginning of the 1980s, thanks to events at once calculated, chronological, and coincidental—events that symbolized a monumental changing of the guard.” Sirota argues that Ronald Reagan represented an ideological return to the 1950s and a complete refutation of the 1960s. Today, the Tea Party is resurrecting the same battle cries.

How strange, how odd, how ironic, and how sad that the very time period that resulted in the civil rights era for minorities and advocacy for women’s rights still raises the ire of many people as a period to be scorned, and that an idealized period that was not at all what it seemed is still revered. It was a time when standing up for one’s conscience was a common occurrence and the Vietnam War was brought to a close, resulting in the cessation of the unnecessary deaths of what surely would have been many thousands more of our servicemen and women.

Warts and all, if there was ever any social movement since the end of slavery to be proud of it should be the 1960s. We take the positive results from those days for granted, and yet the nonsensical things that shouldn’t matter much at all, like long-haired hippies, still evoke a sense of rage in people who see no progress from those years and who continue to see things that weren’t there when they were.

It’s worth considering here that, regardless of the period in which we grew up, the idealized aspect of that era is magnified by the fact that, when we were children, being free of the worries that come with adulthood made things seem much simpler and better than they actually were. We remember the good with emphasis and relegate the bad memories to the dark corridors of our minds. As children most of us didn’t have an ideological political worldview that we felt we needed to protect and defend. As adults we do.

Many of us who grew up during the Cold War were emotionally acculturated to be so averse to the implied threat of Communism that some of us to this day can’t discuss any subject that veers toward anything socialistic without experiencing a flood of emotional anxiety that in effect ends the discussion before it has a chance to begin in earnest. This crippling expressive response is a political weapon of choice by those factions who know how to use it, and nostalgia plays a big part in their ruse by associating the past with things we cherish, even if they never existed.

Growing up in Irving, Texas, I overheard adults speaking in hushed tones about the evils of Communism and socialism. Two school teachers in our neighborhood, with what today would be considered slightly left-of-center politics, were rumored to be Communists or, worse, Soviet agents. If I recall correctly, they eventually left the state to escape the stigma. Of course, bomb shelters and duck-and-cover classroom drills helped drive home the fear that still makes it impossible for many people to have a rational conversation about matters of overt social inclusion for those considered outsiders. And indeed, part of our argument about the superiority of capitalism over socialism was our access to material wealth. Material wealth was taken as proof positive that our system was superior to socialistic societies.

An abundance of material goods during the 1950s made the future look as bright as one wanted to make it. It seemed as if every few weeks Betty Furness announced a new kitchen appliance or household product that threatened to end housework. This perception was so prevalent that in his book The Fifties,David Halberstam notes that dishwashers didn’t sell well at first, precisely because their use seemed to call into question the need for housewives, period.

The race was on to the suburbs as tract houses appeared by the thousands. Millions of people left the farm when industrialization overcame agriculture as the mainstay of the economy. Income tax rates were through the roof (90 percent in the top brackets), but people still got rich. The wages for many entry-level jobs were enough to enable the purchase of a home with all the furnishings, plus an automobile. Of course, those of us who were children at the time didn’t know that this applied almost exclusively to white men. Not that there weren’t a lot of clues, if one had been paying attention. In hindsight, the racial inequality of those years stands out like a skyscraper.

In comparison to today, the 1950s seem prudish to young people, and no doubt they were. Still, these days, when “the moment is right” Cialis commercials play during prime time, nostalgia for the 1950s seems to me an appropriate response. Think of how far we’ve come from a time when male and female adults could not appear on television sitting on the same bed. It’s important to remember, though, that the self-censoring conformity prevalent in the 1950s carried with it a cultural reaction that would make today’s notion of political correctness seem mild by comparison. Back then, in the community where I grew up, anyone who even mentioned a politically controversial topic in mixed company, like civil rights for women or minorities, was shushed to silence with a vengeance and put in one’s place, so to speak—itself a term laden with contempt and steeped in racial prejudice.

So, is it better to pretend that things are rosier than they actually are and to embrace idealistic entertainment, or is it better to focus on the worst and appreciate that indeed life is not really as bad as all that? I don’t have clear answers to these questions, although I think it is a grave mistake not to ask them and persist in finding answers that suit our individual life circumstances. Perhaps having the answers is less important than encouraging people who lived through those times to figure out why bygone eras have such great appeal. If those of us near the end of our lives were to do this in large numbers, we might be able to offer the younger generations some clear-cut advice that would ring true loud enough to be taken seriously. It could help us decide what we might be doing now that is worth preserving and what we should stop doing immediately. Today the amount of material goods we have dwarfs what we had in the 1950s. We still suffer endless distraction, but our idealism and goodwill for our fellow Americans seems in serious decline.

If we could get to the bottom of what is really valuable and why, perhaps we could cease with generational battles over things that we imagined were important but that never actually occurred or existed. Maybe we could get to the crux of what truly matters in a free society in order to sustain freedom—not an abstract notion of freedom, but something most of us would consider the real thing, like not being bankrupted because of a serious illness. Economic freedom for white males seemed very real in the 1950s. I for one would like to do whatever is necessary to make this so for everyone today. Betty Furness probably could never have imagined the household gadgetry we have today, and yet the American middle class by nearly every measure seems to be in freefall toward a more impoverished existence.

In the 1950s, the American economy nearly doubled, and job growth was explosive in all sectors of the economy, while the percentage rise in wage compensation was greater for rank-and file-workers and middle managers than for CEOs. Since the 1970s, the economy has grown exponentially at warp speed in the other direction. Perhaps if we can shift back and recall what we thought was valuable before we became psychologically politicized, we might be able to think our way through today’s growing inequality.

Many of the parents of those of us who grew up in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s themselves experienced the hard times of the Great Depression. So, it’s not surprising that they would want much more for their children than what they had when they were young. And thus, it’s also not surprising that a whole generation and subsequent generations would be given more in material comforts than any generation in history and that we would thereafter be viewed as spoiled. No doubt many of us were. Perhaps we still are. But growing up accustomed to getting just about everything we wanted had a surprising effect. Instead of being eternally grateful as we were expected to be, hundreds of thousands of young people in the ’60s, with the aid of college and television, began to become overtly aware of the injustice that they had taken for granted as the way things are.

Sad to say, I wasn’t one of them. I was discharged from the Marines in 1964, after a four-year hitch, and it wasn’t until many years later that I began to see through the cultural façade that I had thought was a just society. The civil rights era began in earnest in 1955, but it didn’t pick up full steam until the ’60s. Once this movement was coupled with ending the war in Vietnam, the whole country appeared to be coming apart.

Make no mistake in assuming that what at times seemed like a revolution underway didn’t have its share of charlatans. The so-called Age of Aquarius yielded a seemingly unrelenting barrage of new religions and spiritual snake-oil salesmen of every bent imaginable, not to mention the sexual revolution generated by birth control or the rise in drug use. The call to“do your own thing” was taken understandably as an affront to everything the older generations had worked for. Those who were young then but are old now can surely empathize all of the way back to their grandparents as to why they were troubled by the chaos.

No one had a lock on moral virtue in the 1960s, but when the psychological dust has cleared from that era (and I’m not sure that’s happened as yet), I trust it will be apparent that the good that came out of the ’60s outweighs the bad in some ways, but not in others. We are without a doubt a better society as a result of the civil rights and women’s rights movements. But it’s not clear that we have learned the lessons we should have from our experience in Vietnam. Moreover, the anxiety kicked up as an aversion to the ’60s culture resulted in a war on drugs that by any standards is a legal and moral disaster. Further still, business malfeasance coupled with government corruption has led to greed so scurrilous that it threatens our very way of life. If the financial meltdown in 2008 didn’t convince us of this, perhaps nothing will.

Mining for Value

Some noted psychologists in the past have observed that if we could take a snapshot of the world when we were about ten years of age, we will have found the well from which our values spring. By that age, we have come to accept that the way the world is, is pretty much the way it should be. So, now that we know this, how do we make an adjustment that realigns the older adult that we have become with a world of experience, a flawed memory, and the ten-year-old who mistakenly took a childish worldview for an acceptable reality? I regret that there is not an easy answer to this question. But, in my view, it’s crucial that we must ask it of ourselves. Just as one must prime a pump to draw water from a well, we must also question our past critically in order to learn from it.

Whatever your political views are today, I would wager that a thorough rethinking of the past, beginning when you were about ten, can help you make better sense of our current situation and perhaps have a positive effect on the future. If the experts on aging are right, we are going to feel the tug of nostalgia anyway, so why not make it worthwhile? Having been raised with blinders on, so to speak, it should be easier for us to help the younger generations see through the illusions that have enveloped them since birth.

It’s almost embarrassing that every time a major election rolls around, our political candidates try to outdo one another in their claims about American exceptionalism. We are no doubt exceptional in our arrogance: America is a land where millions of people have adamant opinions about subjects they’ve never seriously looked into. The fields of psychology and neuroscience have made great strides in the past two decades in understanding the frailties of human behavior and the powerfully dominating influence of our political identity, but we are still far from benefiting en masse from this research.

Nostalgia, though, is a good place to start because it cuts to the chase of what we really value. We long for what we care deeply about. Not what we imagine was valuable, but what we really think that matters or mattered in the past, period. Getting to the bottom line of what stands out as being truly important in our lives is something adults do more and more of, especially when their future is eclipsed by the reality that the time they have left to live is short. Simply put, nostalgia can become a comforting refuge from the ever-increasing complexity of a world we find more and more estranged from than the one we grew up in, which makes it enticing and a bit slippery.

In Composing a Further Life: The Age of Active Wisdom, Mary Catherine Bateson appends a footnote, or perhaps something better described as an amendment or an add-on, to Erik Erikson’s life stages. Once an assistant life-stage teacher to Erikson, Bateson introduces us to what she calls Adulthood II, characterized as engagement versus withdrawal, with the basic strength being active wisdom and indifference existing as its core pathology. Sad to say, my parents chose withdrawal and indifference. Today, as we each become aware of such tendencies in ourselves, we can make a conscious choice in favor of wisdom.

If the past represents the holy grail of our values, then getting to the bottom of our fondest memories is an effort vital to our aspirations as human beings. Nostalgia is a key to unlocking that which was once valuable and subconsciously still is. But even if what we value is still present and ubiquitous in popular culture, it is often obscured by the increasing complexity of everyday life. Hindsight really is valuable but not for the reasons most often given. Over the next two decades American demographics are going to make nostalgia a front-page issue. It’s already underway in the entertainment industry, and these efforts will pull at the heartstrings of those of us who can and will be easily manipulated politically. Ideologues of every stripe see opportunity in the vulnerability of public sentiment, especially among large groups of people near the end of their lives.

The quality of the future will depend in part on whether we learn from the past or whether we are simply manipulated by advertisers and politicians. If we can mine the past for real value, perhaps we can gain enough existential equilibrium to live without blaming others for our misfortune, whatever it might be. But as long as we continue to live by historical illusions, we will continue to fail to live up to expectations that were doomed to failure from the beginning, and the need to find others to blame will continue to dominate our politics. There is much about the past to treasure for good reasons. Let’s just be sure that we know what those treasures are and whether, in fact, they are real.

KINDLE Books and EBooks on Amazon:

September University: Summoning Passion for an Unfinished Life

Existential Aspirations: Reflections of a Self-Taught Philosopher

The Rapture of Maturity: A Legacy of Lifelong Learning

Beyond the American Dream: Lifelong Learning and the Search for Meaning in

Proving You're Qualified: Strategies for Competent People Without College Degrees

Training Yourself: The 21st Century Credential

Self-University: The Price of Tuition is the Desire to Learn. Your Degree is a Better Life

Portals in a Northern Sky: A Novel

KINDLE Essays on Amazon:

Aging Existentially: Getting the Most Out of the Fall and Winter of Life

America’s Greatest Enemy: Ignorance

Atlas Begs To Differ: Why It’s a Mistake to Believe in Ayn Rand

Class Warfare: Is It Real? Is It Over? Or Has It Just Begun?

Heroism, Cowardice, and the National Tragedy of Hidden Guilt

Learning A Living: Career Success Without Formal Credentials

Nostalgia: Why the Past Matters

Pursuing Justice: Foxes, Hedgehogs, and the Baby-Boom Legacy

Why Political Dialog Is Disingenuous

NOOK Books and Essays on Barnes & Noble

Portals in a Northern Sky: A Novel

Aging Existentially: Getting the Most Out of the Fall and Winter of Life

America’s Greatest Enemy: Ignorance

Atlas Begs To Differ: Why It’s a Mistake to Believe in Ayn Rand

Class Warfare: Is It Real? Is It Over? Or Has It Just Begun?

Heroism, Cowardice, and the National Tragedy of Hidden Guilt

Learning A Living: Career Success Without Formal Credentials

Nostalgia: Why the Past Matters

Pursuing Justice: Foxes, Hedgehogs, and the Baby-Boom Legacy

Why Political Dialog Is Disingenuous

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