Enchantments of the Past

The crescendo of Home Alone belongs to the stirring sounds of John Williams and his hook, “somewhere in my memory” and “living in my memory.” Nostalgia can be a bit like that: an ill-defined but pulsating yearning for the past. And what’s not to like about the trappings of Christmas as presented here? I know I’ll be watching it come December.

But does nostalgia do anything for us? Dr. Clay Routledge, who has extensively studied this field, says nostalgia is often “characterized as an unproductive fixation on an idealized past, one that prevents people from living in the present and planning for the future.” He’s come to a different conclusion, and so have I (just without the hard-fought academic research). I think about how the staff team at my church recently bonded over karaoke, where we could “turn back time.” Nostalgia can be a shared experience that brings us closer together.

Historical nostalgia is a strong force in my own life. This is where you — or … well … I — have nostalgia for a time that pre-dates me. I was never there. Moving to central London last year was a joy. Whatever you’re interested in, you can “remember” anything in a place like London, but for a Beatles fan like me (for a couple of years, pre-kids, I was in the top 1% percent of listeners globally on Spotify — impressive, I know), the aesthetic of central London is deeply connected to the fab four. Then I reflect on being born in Australia, but like other anglophiles, I escaped the “tyranny of distance,” if not the tyranny of time, to my ancestral home. Why is it that I’ve experienced a rush of emotion driving amidst heather-carpeted hills in Scotland? It might be the altitude, or maybe it is the culmination of a yearning that has driven me to the other side of the world. Nostalgia can move us forward.

Far from being an earnest outlier (apparently), the research from the Human Flourishing Lab at the Archbridge Institute places me with other millennials and Gen X-ers as experiencing high levels of “historical nostalgia.” We look in the rearview mirror more than Boomers. But where it gets really interesting is for the smartphone natives. Sixty percent of Gen Z adults wish they could return to pre-digital history. Whether it’s through playing a vinyl record where they can’t skip tracks, or immersing themselves in solitude or with friends but sans smartphone, they can learn from the best of the past without rejecting technological developments. Routledge writes: “Historical nostalgia may be helping a younger generation to harness the benefits of new technology while preserving the virtues of the tangible, physical experiences that remain essential to human flourishing.” Without this, developing their own sense of self and agency might be difficult. The past is a kinder, fertile soil that they can dip into. Then they can go back to the future.

This isn’t to discount where it hurts. The word “nostalgia” comes from the Greek words nostos (return) and algos (pain): “a feeling of wistful longing for a past time or place — a sense of belonging and peace that is yearned for but absent.” There’ll be the empty seats at the Christmas table and the pain we get used to but are not over. But perhaps we’re longing for something even more significant than a pre-digital world. A time before the fall, a lost innocence, a closeness to God in the cool of the day. This pain can lead us to experience that recovery of this relationship is possible.

The closeness between our aspirations and memories is not only something we experience as individuals, but also as societies. It’s interesting how public intellectual Yuval Noah Harari has been scathing about nostalgia, remarking that

the political system is no longer capable of producing meaningful visions for the future, so you see nostalgic fantasies about going back to the past. This definitely is not going to work, because nostalgic fantasies by their very nature don’t provide us with answers to the real questions we are facing. It’s kind of a transitory phase until somebody manages to come up with a new meaningful vision for the future.

A vision for the future is not lacking with someone like Harari, whose recent canon has peaked with Homo Deus: our future of harnessing and engineering godlike powers. The account of Genesis and time-bending prologue in John’s Gospel, however, teach us that we become godlike not through grasping but by receiving the gift of grace. We become children of God by receiving the gift of the God who became man.

Our longings are real. More real than we realize. I often meet Christians who don’t believe in or understand the bodily resurrection. Life after death therefore feels less real, and nebulous at best. But the hope of heaven, or our homesickness for it, is embodied. Nostalgia doesn’t need to be escapist. It can propel us to live with a heightened awareness of reality for now and the future. It’s the homecoming at the end of C. S. Lewis’ world of Narnia, the “story you have never heard but very much want to know … a deeper country: every rock and flower and blade of grass looked as if it meant more.” Where incarnate reality is diluted and distanced from us in a digital world, going back to the future is just what we need.