America has a fetish for nostalgia and it’s woefully unproductive. It’s so painfully obvious that even South Park has joked about it. While having a bit of nostalgia in moderation is totally fine, we’ve taken it to the point of objectively living in the past at the expense of the future. Our tendency to live in the past has sold us out to corporate interests and has sold us short by snuffing out new creative endeavors. We need to stop living in the past.
As I just mentioned, there is nothing inherently wrong with occasionally looking back fondly. The entertainment industry knows this and uses this to market us the same intellectual property over and over again. Don’t believe me? One of the most beloved films of the 80’s was Ghostbusters, and Hollywood has decided to bring the dead intellectual property back to life. Their 2016 re-boot was an abject failure. The cartoon series He-Man from the same time period is another example of a popular 80’s icon floundered in later decades. One has to think of all the new and creative ideas that were rejected by studio executives in favor of callbacks from a bygone and socially-backwards era. In this regard, nostalgia directly led to a large waste in human capital. Why innovate when we can just revive a dead franchise over and over again?
While nostalgia in entertainment is relatively harmless, an area where it has real gravity is in the field of genetics. Genetic testing services such as 23andMe have sprung up in recent years and have gained a lot of popularity. Their service allows people to submit DNA samples to their lab and then receive a report that details their genetic lineage. There’s only one problem; the testing company is all too happy to sell your genetic information. Nostalgia has made it actively harder for people to keep their genetic information private. While it’s illegal for insurance companies to discriminate based on genetics, one has to wonder why else they’d want that information in the first place. We live in the age of Big Data, and purchasers of your genetic information will march onto the future because trendy Americans couldn’t help but to live in the past. Was selling your genome worth it to know that you’re 17% Swedish?
Nostalgia even has implications on the geopolitical scale. Donald Trump won the 2016 election in part due to nostalgia; invoking Reagan-era campaign slogans, thereby subtly making the connection between himself and Reagan. Vladimir Putin loves using nostalgia to justify his actions. Whether he is legitimately stuck in the past or is just using it as an excuse is up for debate. What isn’t up for debate is that Putin’s nostalgia is a net-negative for the world. “But Dan, you’re just cherry-picking!” okay, China does it too, and so doesn’t Brazil. When a head of state takes the podium and starts reminiscing of the alleged good ol’ days, your inner alarm bells should start going off.
To be clear, I’m not even against history. I love history, so much so that I recently spent two weeks in Eastern Europe to immerse myself in it. We should absolutely learn the events of the past. However, the old adage goes those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. Nostalgia is essentially learning history but then intentionally repeating it. Honestly, I can’t think of anything more opposed to social progress than nostalgia.
The problem with nostalgia is that it wears a heavy set of blinders; we rarely ever look back at a decade objectively. The 1980’s were the years of the AIDS epidemic and when crack-cocaine flooded the streets. Others look towards the peace-loving hippie and Woodstock era of the 1960’s, akin to an Austin Powers movie, while conveniently overlooking the Vietnam War, mass civil rights protest and cultural division that nearly tore the nation apart. The 1950’s are another era that people look to fondly, while forgetting to mention that things were not all jolly for women and racial minorities.
Essentially, we decided to revive dead movies to avoid having to be creative and we chose to take ancestry tests to distract us from having to tackle climate change. Our obsession with the past may very well have cost us the future. Something tells me that our grandchildren will look back on this time in history and likely not be as kind to us as we are (undeservingly so) to the 80’s.
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