Nostalgia ain't what it used to be
As I've previously alluded to on this blog, I have a bit of a soft spot for cricket, and particularly for cricket writing. In fact I think it's possible I enjoy talk and writing about cricket slightly more than the game itself. There's nothing like hearing the Test Match Special team burble on in a drowsy English kind of way about something vaguely cricket-adjacent - the hum of the crowd, the deliciousness of the scones, the memory of games past - which makes the events of the actual game feel like something of an interruption. And it's that which I'm craving as we're currently locked down with no cricket in sight. I'd like to put the radio on and listen to an hour or two of gentle blather from two people who are sort-of watching a game of cricket where nothing terribly exciting is happening.
Of course the reason I want that is because that's what I enjoyed last Summer. And the Summer before that, and the one before that, right back to when I was a lad listening to TMS with my Dad while watching the scores update on Ceefax (ask your parents). I'm nostalgic for it. I'm nostalgic, indeed, for a radio broadcast which is often taken up with nostalgic reminiscences, concerning a game which is practically defined by nostalgia. Indeed the topic of this blog post was inspired by the publication of That Will Be England Gone, a book (which I'm looking forward to reading) about cricket, and how it isn't as good as it used to be.
And neither is England. This most nostalgic of games is played in a country which has elevated nostalgia to a national pastime. Our most famous composers all look back - to English folk songs, to Tudor music, to the town fairs of their youth, to Shakespeare, to a time before war, to a bucolic childhood. The former Prime Minister John Major - a cricket fanatic - once stated:
"Fifty years on from now, Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county [cricket] grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers, and—as George Orwell said—old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist."
This was ostensibly a comment about the future, but it was of course a wistful longing for a glorious past, which certainly never existed in the idealised form Major described. (In fact, even the quote from Orwell is cherrypicked from a list of English characteristics which also included "the to-and-fro of lorries on the Great North Road" and "the queues outside the Labour exchanges," which curiously John Major didn't include in his vision of the perfect country.)
But a bit of nostalgia never hurt anyone, did it?
Nostalgia traps us in a fantasy of the past
Even the most sentimental of nostalgists knows that we view the past through rose-tinted spectacles. We all remember Summer holidays full of endless sun, and snow at Christmas, even though part of us knows (and the meteorological records confirm) that our memory is faulty. But somehow we always feel that, glimmering in the past just beyond our reach, was a golden age when everything was just as it should have been. Certainly it would be better than things are right now.
The poet Billy Collins captures this beautifully in his poem Nostalgia, which I recommend you read (along with almost everything else he writes). His narrator ranges through a huge swathe of history, always lamenting some lost pleasure that will never come again. The twist comes near the end, when he says:
Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.
I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees
and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light
flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse
and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks.As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past...
Billy Collins, "Nostalgia"
He longs for the morning he's left behind; but what was he doing this morning? Longing for a previous age. Nostalgia always sends us further and further back. C. S. Lewis noted this while commenting on William Wordsworth's thoughts on nostalgia:
If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing.
C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
What we long for is longing itself. The actual thing we remember is not at all as we remember it - the Summers were actually wet and windy, it hardly ever snows on Christmas Day, that golden period of our history was beset by political and medical and emotional difficulties just as ours is. But we forget all that. Like a woman whose brain floods with oxytocin, causing her to forget the agonies of childbirth and remember the euphoria of the newborn child laid to her breast, we construct a new myth about our national or social or personal history, and find ourselves desperate to go back.
The irony from a biblical standpoint is that there is a past which we ought to be truly nostalgic for. I have previously mentioned on the blog the thought that to judge the Earth as insufficiently Edenic is to know Eden. As Blaise Pascal suggested, humans have an inbuilt awareness that we have lost something we once had - a greatness and intimacy with God that now lies tantalisingly out of reach, beyond the cherubim with a flaming sword (Genesis 3:24). We can't help longing for a better time in our past, because we really do have a better time in our past. It's a time that we can never get back to - because it's our sin that meant Paradise was lost.
But instead of following this nostalgia to its source - turning back to our God in repentance and faith - we convince ourselves that something relatively minor has gone wrong, and we could fix it if only we turned back the clock just a few short decades. If only Twenty20 cricket hadn't been invented. If only we'd voted for X instead of Y. If only I'd taken that job in London. If only I hadn't said that one thing. The myth we construct is that we could have had the life we'd always wanted - if only one or two decisions had gone our away.
But this is a fantasy. Nostalgia fogs our eyes and stops us seeing - really, clearly seeing - who we really are. The truth is that every era of history is mired in rebellion against God; that sin touches every area of our lives; and that if we had avoided that one sin, we'd surely have committed another. The line between good and evil does not divide one period of time from another, any more than it runs down the centre of the Houses of Parliament. Rather, as Solzhenitsyn famously said, it cuts through the heart of every human being. No matter what time we live in, sin will ruin our attempts to forge the good life for ourselves, our families, or our societies. Nostalgia keeps us from seeing it.
Nostalgia stops us from acting in the present
The truth is we simply like being nostalgic. An endless yearning for something we've lost leaves us feeling pleasantly melancholy - and as Sally Sparrow once said, sad is "happy for deep people." But very often nostalgia terminates there. We drift off into a snugly pessimistic reverie, thinking it makes us wise (or "deep"). But, as Oliver O'Donovan explains wisdom is about living well in the present:
The unwisdom which asks why past times were better than these has assumed a false position, that of an aesthetic observer valuing goods of different ages from some supposed time-transcending viewpoint. Our position in time is not capable of judging the present against the past... It is a moment of deliberation, of making up our mind to act.
Oliver O'Donovan, Finding and Seeking, 196
The nostalgist laments what has been lost, but does nothing to retrieve it or to try and improve the present. But this is to deny our agency and fail to do the good works that God has prepared beforehand for us to do in this moment, at this time:
Luxuriating with morose aestheticism in the decadence of our times, we rob ourselves of the normative significance of our knowledge as law, showing us the ends and modes of action we may presently conceive...
Oliver O'Donovan, Finding and Seeking, 196
If there's something correct about our nostalgia - if we have noted that (O'Donovan's example) school exams are getting easier, and drawn the conclusion that standards of education are falling, then we should redouble our efforts to teach young people well and thoroughly. But nostalgia rarely reaches the level of action - rather, we are happy to be sad that young people today don't know they're born, and to feel smugly superior as a result. As Lord Palmerston famously said: "Change, change, change: aren't things bad enough already?"
Nostalgia keeps us from looking to the future
Nostalgia can be the bane of a local church pastor's life. New members who have come from other churches will often bend his ear about how much better their old church was in this or that area, even if (perhaps especially if) they left that other church in protest. Or programmes and practices which have existed for 20 years and have outgrown their usefulness are retained because "it's the way we've always done it." Or nostalgia for a particular period of revival leads people to conclude that the only faithful path is to replicate the earlier conditions of that revival, regardless of whether they makes sense in the present climate and context. Rather than looking to the future - to think about how the church might grow, and what needs to be put in place to help that happen, and to commit to short-term pain as we take risks to enable that growth - we yearn for the past.
But there's an even greater danger. If C. S. Lewis is right, our nostalgia - which is really a longing for communion with God - is pointing in the wrong direction. We are constantly trying to get back to the Garden of Eden. But the good life we seek cannot be imagined back into being through yearning for a previous time. We need to look forward instead.
That is not so we become ruthless, relentless progressives, despising nostalgia and pushing on to a new future. That too is a mistake, which I could have written a post about. It would go like this - progressivism traps us in a fantasy of the future ("if only we change, life will be better!"); it keeps us restless and dissatisfied in the present ("we need to go further, faster - surely in this day and age we should have solved this by now!"); it prevents us from looking to the past ("who needs the Bible? It's outdated and irrelevant"). I didn't write that post because it's not my natural inclination - someone else a bit more left-leaning can do it.
But if the pessimism of nostalgia leaves us wistfully, passively aching for the past, the optimism of progressivism puts all its hope in human activity for the perfect future. Neither will do. Instead we need to realise that what we've lost in Eden is the relationship with God we were all made for; and that only God can mend that relationship through Christ. The longing in our hearts will only be met through restored intimacy with the God who made us, through the reunion of heaven and earth, and through the final cessation of hostilities by the defeat of sin and Satan.
As Paul says in Colossians, God has done, once-for-all, everything needful for this:
For in [Christ] all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.
Colossians 1:19-20
But the full enjoyment of that reconciliation will only be enjoyed in the future, when every tear will be wiped away and all things will be made new (Rev 21:3-5). That is, perhaps, what all our nostalgic longings ultimately point to (as Lewis suggests with his use of the concept of sehnsucht). But whether that's right or not, nostalgics like me should be wary of hopeless yearnings for the glorious past. Rather, as Paul says in Romans 8, these yearnings need to be transformed to hopeful groanings for a glorious future:
For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.
Romans 8:22-23