What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

serjames asked: So why is nostalgia such a big thing then? Why do we hold up the past as something that we should aspire to equal, not surpass. It's not *all* rose tinted glasses, surely...

Nostalgia is an effect of selective memory: we yearn for the good aspects of the past while forgetting that they didn’t happen in a vacuum. Take a show like Mad Men, for example: everyone’s so in love with the clothes, the atmosphere and the retro design that even when the rampant sexism, racism and discrimination of the era are right there in the script, people are still more likely to talk about  how fabulous the suits are than how appalling it is that Don Draper serially cheats on his wife. We handwave away all the bad stuff by saying, ‘Yes, I know it was terrible back then, but GODDAMN is that dress awesome!’

We romanticise the past because we think that progress is a mechanism that steals more from us than it gives, when in fact we just resent the necessity of change. People forget the interconnectedness of things; they look at the clothes in Mad Men and think how wonderful it would be if society still embraced that aesthetic, if we all still took that much pride in our appearance, when in fact the whole system was based on rigid gender divisions, wives who ironed their husband’s shirts daily, put curlers in their hair at night, got up an hour early to do their makeup and still had breakfast on the table: we forget that it worked society-wide because nobody could opt out of it, even when dressing nicely didn’t make a damn bit of difference to how you did your job, and that anyone who transgressed or lapsed was punished.

We treat the past like a dress-up box, and when we’re self aware about doing so, that’s fine - but when we try to yearn for those past ideals as though they could be transplanted into the modern world with no ripple effect, as though they weren’t products of an interconnected social system whose other consequences we’ve rightly learned to deplore, but rather magical sets of timeless values that somehow exist independent of culture or context, then we’re romanticising; then we’re investing in a false narrative about how society works.

Personal nostalgia is one thing; cultural nostalgia is another. The people who most yearn for an idealised Western past invariably belong to whichever group held the most power and privilege in that past. It’s unfortunate, but it’s modern privilege in action: we do it without even thinking.

  1. thebrightwateralchemist reblogged this from kogiopsis
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  4. pilferingapples said: DAMN I wish I could reblog this.Beautifully written.
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