Like many people in their fifties, I love 80s music.
It’s the soundtrack to my teenaged and young adult years. I still listen to it regularly and I enjoy new music that tips its hat to the sound of that era.
But I don’t want to revisit the 80s. Sure, it’d be great to have the pre-dad body and the energy and drive that came with it but I don’t miss the mullet, the thick glasses and being – to quote a much newer song – young, dumb and broke.
That’s what the Russian writer Svetlana Boym calls reflective nostalgia – savouring the sweetness of days gone by but not actually wanting to go back there.
Nostalgia isn’t just reflective, Boym notes. Restorative nostalgia is the longing for days gone by but through rose-coloured glasses. The good times are remembered two-dimensionally, with none of the nuance or the context.
Reflective nostalgia is often bittersweet – the excitement of a slow dance in the high school gym, sweaty, trembling bodies pressed together in the darkness while George Michael sang of careless whispers comes with the knowing that girl died in a horrific car accident a few months after graduation.
Reflective nostalgia makes us treasure the good old days while also recognizing those good old days, including the sadness and loss and regret, form who we are today and we’re constantly creating more good old days to look back on 10 and 20 years from now.
Restorative nostalgia evokes different but equally powerful feelings of loss, coupled with pain and fear. The good old days are not only gone forever but even the memories of them are being stolen, replaced with something crude and rotten.
Through the lens of restorative nostalgia, the present and the future are bleak. The best days are behind us, decay now surrounds us and our children and grandchildren are oblivious to what they have lost, hypnotized into subservience by their phones.
While reflective nostalgics look back with love, restorative nostalgics look back with anger.
The crucial difference between the two is the response. Reflective nostalgia is passive but restorative nostalgia is not only a call to action but also a call to arms.
In her book Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, Anne Appelbaum devotes an entire chapter to the toxicity of restorative nostalgia on a social scale.
Make America Great Again is restorative nostalgia.
So is a true north, strong and free.
So are the statues of Canada’s first prime minister, the myths of brave white male Europeans singlehandedly conquering the unknown North American wilderness and the desire to build big things over the wishes of the Indigenous peoples who called this place home.
Restorative nostalgia deplores the complexity of modern life while romanticizing the clear choices of earlier generations, when men were men, girls were girls, everybody looked and acted like everyone else, problems had obvious solutions and everyone knew who the enemy was.
The most dangerous aspect of restorative nostalgia is proving one’s worth, ideally through violence. The heroes of yesteryear fought and died for what was right, their gallantry immortalized. What is the purpose of a life lived in freedom, without the need to fight for it?
With no apparent purpose, conspiracies and lies easily fill the void with a heroic tale of existential conflict for restorative nostalgics, placing their pure intent at the centre of the action. Will you take the red pill, learn the whole truth, become a patriot and fight for what’s right or are you going to take the blue pill and return to blissful ignorance?
Once engaged in the battle, restorative nostalgia condones a win at all costs mentality because the enemy is truly evil and will stoop to any low. Illegal and immoral behaviour by brothers in arms is dismissed with an “everybody is doing it” cynicism, followed by “what about” fingers pointing at the enemy for similar transgressions.
Now enter the carpetbaggers, riding in to exploit the restorative nostalgics for power and fortune.
The politicians who validate their views while seeking votes and donations.
The entrepreneurs who set up fake news websites and social media profiles filled with the grievances of the restorative nostalgics while selling T-shirts and ball caps on the side and cashing in on the page views.
The pundits sharpening the furious arguments with useful but meaningless catch phrases to grow their audience base and influence.
These carpetbaggers are the absolute worse because they don’t actually believe in the cause. They just act like it for the attention and the cash. When the restorative nostalgia flames they fanned becomes a deadly forest fire, these same individuals either double down on their righteousness or throw away their matches and gas cans while proclaiming they had nothing to do with the out-of-control blaze.
Nostalgia should run sweet and warm through our memories, not bitter and hot.
Each new day is the opportunity to either create more nostalgic moments to be savoured down the road or remain bound to an incomplete or outright false narrative that darkens our soul.
