This post is part of Mashable's You're Old Week. Break through the haze of nostalgia with us and see what holds up, what disappoints, and what got better with time.
When nostalgia pays a visit, it knows exactly what to whisper into your ear.
The emotion might well up because you randomly heard a favorite song from childhood, clicked through college emails sent by a best friend, or spent time with a beloved relative you hadn't seen in years. No matter, nostalgia still delivers a variation on its universal message: This is where you once belonged in the world. That sense of kinship, though, is always based on a complicated reality, and when it enters politics and pop culture unchecked, it helps us tell disingenuous stories about ourselves and others.
SEE ALSO:The skills that every teen should learn before they ever get a cellphoneNostalgia, at its most powerful, isn't just longing for a bygone era or moment. Instead, it makes invisible the discomfort and pain festering at the margins of our most cherished memories. And it gives us permission to ignore how those experiences are frequently built, in some fashion, on retrograde beliefs and ideas.
Since we live in an era that could be aptly described by two wildly different world views — All Your Faves Are Problematic and Make America Great Again — it's clear that nostalgia can be a persuasive, even dangerous, tool.
Credit: janel moloney / giphyThe sentiment pulls us to the past and, if we're paying attention, makes for a striking contrast between something we once loved and the complex circumstances surrounding the object of our affection. As evidenced with Donald Trump's election, nostalgia is also a powerful way to cloak racism and sexism in the gauzy veneer of patriotism and prosperity.
"Nostalgia is softening the hard edges of history and intensifying those moments we find desirable," says Herman Gray, professor of sociology at University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of Cultural Moves: African Americans and the Politics of Representation.
"It's not that the feelings are illegitimate, but how they get put in the service of different ideological and political projects."
"Take something like Make America Great Again: Great for whom? Great when? Nostalgia elides history — it's a way of not having to confront the historical realities of how that moment was and how it produced inequalities and marginalization," Gray says.
Some people may follow the beckoning call of nostalgia without thinking much about the implications. Others, especially those turning a critical eye on the media they consume and memories they elevate, develop a fraught relationship with the past.
When people are nostalgic for a childhood characterized by the goofiness of the 1980s or ennui of the 1990s, is it possible to simultaneously account for the millions of kids whose lives were not so carefree because those years marked the advent of breaking up black families through draconian drug sentencing laws? Or how, for example, can we square a sentimental attachment to the Cosby Showwith what we know now of Bill Cosby's private behavior?
Via GiphyIn a recent New Yorker essay, the actress Molly Ringwald explored the paradox of playing complex female characters in the John Hughes films Pretty in Pink and The BreakfastClub, but then coming to realize how those movies were threaded with racist and misogynistic asides and scenes that are uncomfortable to watch now.
"There is still so much that I love in them," Ringwald wrote, "but lately I have felt the need to examine the role that these movies have played in our cultural life: where they came from, and what they might mean now."
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Being drawn to the familiar past, or a cultural or personal touchstone, isn't necessarily a bad thing. Nor is feeling anxious or sad about the loss of a treasured moment or experience. Instead, the mistake we too often make is to accept that nostalgia at face value, as if it exists untouched by political, social, cultural, and economic forces.
"It's notthat the feelings are illegitimate, but how they get put in the service of different ideological and political projects," Gray says.
"Nostalgia makes a lie go down a little bit easier."
Take, for example, Trump voters. When a recent study looked at why some Americans supported the businessman and reality TV star, it found they wanted to protect their own dominant status in American culture and politics. People can long for the past and also want to preserve their place in the hierarchy at someone's cost.
But political nostalgia is always complicated, regardless of one's partisan beliefs. Those who pine for the leadership of Barack Obama or Bill Clinton, both arguably far more competent and compassionate than Trump, still must contend with both presidents' mixed records.
For Obama that includes drone warfare, increased deportations of undocumented immigrants, and initial opposition to same-sex marriage. Clinton didn't fight for full LGBT inclusion in the military, signed controversial welfare reform legislation, and abused his power by having a sexual relationship with a White House intern. It's much easier to gloss over those and other moral crises and focus instead on the warm glow of feeling like your side was winning.
"Nostalgia makes a lie go down a little bit easier," says Gray.
He urges a more productive relationship to nostalgia, one that allows for feelings of attachment to, say, a TV show, politician, or certain traditions, and yet is also capable of looking at those emotions critically. The point isn't to dismiss a sense of loss outright because the surrounding circumstances are problematic, nor is it to insist on remaking the past into the present. Rather, Gray suggests we can use the conflicts presented by nostalgia to develop a "critical imagination" that creates a better world.
"There's the possibility that confronting it could lead you to somewhere else — not necessarily to loss and despair," he says.
So if nostalgia unexamined and unbound has a dark side, it also contains the potential to see your culture and politics with fresh eyes, and to understand what it really means for everyone, not just yourself, to belong in this world.
TopicsSocial GoodPoliticsRacial Justice
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