Cochise
Priest of the cult of the Dog with the Broken Paw
- Joined
- Jun 17, 2011
- Messages
- 8,474
A few thoughts:
- might the speed of current change be going against the rate our species has to adapt to change emotionally? If you were born in 3000 BC, the rate of cultural change was glacial compared to today, where you might go multiple generations without much change in local, fashion, and entertainment. The weird twang of nostalgia might just be the emotional state of the mind looking for continuity but instead getting change on too many fronts at once.
- A strong living in nostalgia, or a strong sense of nostalgia as a foe, strikes me as too strong a response that will cause either purist side to miss out. I think that the best path lies in the middle, where you enjoy those things in the past and make some time to remember it, while you also seek out the new and enjoy that as well in equal measure.
A middle course? How unfashionable!
I think everyone who has had good periods in their life , or memories of an exceptional moment, is nostalgic about them from time to time. I suggest this is precisely because they have happened , they are finished and done, and any difficulties one might have had either side cannot now be changed. There are no decisions to make, no doubts. I also have a clear memory of one magic Christmas when I was 7 - I had just recovered from measles ( a serious illness back then) and I got a much better present than expected, and it snowed (well I think it did - it might be a conflation of more than one Christmas!)
On the other hand as one gets older one realises that not all change is for the better, and that human beings are terribly bad at learning from past mistakes, and forward progress is not (despite the propaganda) inevitable.This I believe is more true today than it has been in the past as a consequence of the speeding up mentioned above. As a collective entity, we surely now have the shortest attention spans in human history - it has even changed the way we think.
I personally am concerned that our western civilization may have peaked in the late 1980's and that although many improvements are still occurring, the fundamental underlying structures have been damaged in ways that may prove disastrous. And the late 1980's is not a period I am nostalgic for, in fact I was so busy that its a period that I have few personal memories from. (There are one or two, like my wife beating an irritating Frenchman in a beer drinking contest)
There are of course moments from the past I'd love to see, but I don't think that's nostalgia, its curiosity.