Revisited: How to Use the Past
It's time choose what we take with us 🎒
This essay was originally a contribution to the
Social Club Symposium, on the theme of Nostalgia.
In the chaos of a turning world, it is common for our people to look to the age now passing away for comfort. We can clearly see the failures and flaws of our present, and begin to suspect that our forbears inhabited a finer and grander world, free from the shackles that bind our souls to mediocrity. We are to be pitied, for we live in the shadows of great beauty and yet can produce none. Fear of the unknown possesses us and we convulsively grip whatever identifiably shards of past culture and life remain accessible, brandishing them as talismans against the eye of the void. Of course, we know that this is foolish; conversely, rejecting anything before our generation as hopelessly primitive is a fool’s reaction also. But the temptation lingers. And many succumb without knowing it, hoping that by following the patterns and ordering the steps just like we were taught them we can resurrect the age of our fathers. Restlessly clacking and clattering the bones of our mausoleums, asking for breath to stir them again.
Well then, what is the difference between worshipful, inaccurate nostalgia and learning the best lessons from the past? Some of our generation have eagerly begun to sift the ruins to seek out artifacts and practices they can carry away, ferreting out and imitating the mannerisms of a bygone era. Are they wrong for their small acts of ageless rebellion, for larping as the generation they wish to be? I believe I’ve argued (perhaps even persuasively) for this sort of imitation before. I fault no-one for attempting to copy the best things of the past, and believe intensely that tradition properly maintained is one of the deepest responsibilities humans have. The crucial difference is not in the action of imitation, but in the source material being imitated.
Asserted: Nostalgia is differentiated from tradition by the efficacy of the thing honored.
The historical lesson of the cargo cult teaches us that we need to think carefully about causation before we begin to idolize one or another of the supposed benefits of a golden age. For an updated example, let’s suppose that your earnest desire was to compose intricately crafted worlds in a cycle of mythical fantasy novels. As your patron you look to John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, deservedly revered as one of the best examples of this art. Making a simple list of some of his attributes, you begin to attempt to shape your life and habits around his, thinking that this will produce in your art the same greatness. We can already see the problems inherent in this practice. Tolkien was an intensely devout Catholic, morose and anxious, a war veteran, a linguistic scholar and Oxford professor, a devoted father and a passionate user of tobacco. He also dressed in a style typical of someone born at the turn of the 19th century and had a known aversion to being photographed or tape recorded. Now, which of these habits and patterns will make you into an accomplished author? We might laugh at this, but the internet teems with peddlers of morning routines ripped from the biographies of powerful and successful business moguls and style habits and reading lists of our grandfathers, all with the express notion that these things will produce in us what we feel we lack.
Again, there is nothing inherently the matter with this practice of emulating those we admire, and in fact it is often vital to do so. But we have to understand that panning quickly across vast spans of history with our rose-colored binoculars and selecting a few half-remembered glimpses to use as our formulae is not much wiser than trying to pattern our life after a Norman Rockwell painting. We must go beyond images. Perhaps we are right to look to a figure from our past as a unique and lost pinnacle of achievement; if so, we cannot risk thinking that cheap shortcuts will allow us to refashion our soul. Lazily envying the results of a lifelong process will not get us very far. As we add any element to our lives we must ask ourselves: am I very, very sure that this will produce the kind of person I ought to be? Or am I ascribing power to something properly viewed as a meaningless affectation, or worse?
Asserted: Nostalgia is a degeneration resulting from failure to understand greatness.
Remembering that your heroes were human and lived in times not all that different from your own will prevent you from dissecting their daily routine to slavishly adopt. “If you want what they got, you have to do what they did” is a good saying, but only as you are confident that any specific thing they did influenced what they got. When lesser people such as ourselves are in the presence of people we suppose to be truly great, we tend to search for answers telling us that after all, we are not so different from them. Seeing tradesmen with rippling physiques and mastery of craft borne of lifelong devotion to a single repetitive set of skills, we hope to become like them with a gym to build the body and a Youtube playlist to educate the mind. Both are good, but the best work is to seek to understand the soul of the person you admire. Knowing that they were faulty and flawed will help you sift what is tangential and cling to what is essential. The whole process ought to fill us with humility, not pride or despair. We will realize that it isn’t the decade or the dress or the schools that produce the people, but the choices they make and the legacy of labor they leave.
Misremembering the best elements of an entire period, we tell ourselves that it was all different then, but now it is impossible. No, the opportunity before us is the same that was before every generation. We are free to see the chaos of our time and persevere anyway, sacrificing much which is good to gain what is best. Look closer at your heroes and heroines. Realize that they were in their time rejecters of what had ceased to be helpful from their sires, quick to respond to their perceptive understanding of the need at hand. No-one thinks of their own age as golden. Everyone has the chance to make theirs better. And the people we remember from history are the very few who chose to submit to the painful process of transcending their generation.
Resolved: To stand at the crossing of ages and choose what is best.
That is truly the immensity of your calling, if you are willing. To pick up and lay aside, to carefully chose which treasures we will carry onward and hand to our children. A weighty task. Emotional attachment, a longing for a childhood never finished, is not a worthy guide. I owe my children a better future than to simply try and regurgitate the fading memories of what seemed best when I saw the world through young eyes. Face the storm now, as it is. Secure the things which are about to be torn away by the tide, but know that you cannot save everything. Some memories will drift, and perhaps we never should have been clinging to them in the first place. We can only carry the best things, and even those may have to be fashioned and repurposed to suit our needs. As a passionate believer in the timelessness of Scripture and creed, I am free to dismiss many other things as suitable for their time. We cannot beat back against the waves, because that is not where we are going. Find the best things, and know why they are best. You’ll find the Power behind those you admire is totally accessible to you, if you will allow yourself to be changed as they did. After all, they inhabited a chaotic and broken age, and had to choose their way forward amidst the wreckage of their ancestors.
Just like us.
To study the past does indeed liberate us from the present, from the idols of our own market-place. But I think it liberates us from the past too. I think no class of men are less enslaved to the past than historians. ~ C.S. Lewis, “De Descriptione Temporum”
Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with "normal life". Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil, like the nineteenth century, turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of cries, alarms, difficulties, emergencies. ~ C.S. Lewis, “Learning in War-time,” 1939
Security provides readiness for action or counteraction and is greatly enhanced by flexibility. ~ Marine Rifle Company/Platoon Manual FMFM 6-4
No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. If he does, the patch tears away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made. And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins--and the wine is destroyed, and so are the skins. But new wine is for fresh wineskins. ~ Mark 2:21-22
To paraphrase Alan Watts: “The past does not give meaning to the present. The present gives meaning to the past.”