And here’s a good, and relevant, quote, from Gandhi!

“There is more to life than increasing its speed.”

You deal with some very profound questions here. This is quite excellent.

Best,
PDH

As well as being inhumane, it is interesting that Dewey also seems straightforwardly self-contradictory here. To say man has no essence and must adapt to his circumstances is really to (surreptitiously) argue that man does have an essence, which is continual adaptation.

Since something can’t have and not have an essence, Dewey should have either taken up the task of defining man’s essence, and argued why it is constant and ruthless adaptation, or he should have remained consistent to his premise and admitted that man having no essence means he may have need of ossification as much as progress (something his more clear-minded mentor, William James, would have certainly admitted).

But this morning, for some reason, I found myself explaining the John Deere “B” tractor to some older college students; telling them how for a generation of people who grew up in rural America the sound of those tractors represents the sound of a farm. There’s some baby-boomer nostalgia there — at least for older boomers. One of the young men was interested, saying he was going to ask his grandfather about it when he visits him on his Tennessee farm in a few days.

A few minutes ago I finished watching the movie Бабуся, thinking as I watched it that a lot of Front Porchers would probably like it, too. (I downloaded it here. There are English subtitles.)

But I think a lot of Front Porchers would like this one even if it wouldn’t have the same nostalgia value for them. (BTW, the acting of the lead character is probably the weakest part. But the movie is still good.)

I sought to raise more questions than I answered in this essay—to open a set of questions about the meaning of nostalgia. Unlike some who have responded, I do not think that every generation has the same way of remembering. Because memory is produced in the context of a constellation of circumstances, the differences between the way people of an age remember reveals something about who they are (or were). In other words, describing and explaining diverse ways of remembering is an important part of the historian’s task of telling history.

Moreover, the empirical evidence that people in different times have different relationships with time, with memory, with ancestors and descendents, is so overwhelming that I have trouble believing anyone who has studied the historical evidence can deny this very rudimentary claim. It may be that the sense that people have that our contemporary way of remembering (of thinking in terms of generations, of becoming nostalgic as a cohort ages, etc.) is natural and universal suggests something about the provincialism of our own time and culture.

I won’t here try to draw out the empirical evidence, but to note one fact about boomer nostalgia that is important to their memory (This is not exclusive to the boomers, but it is certainly important to them). To get the clarity necessary, let me offer this in the form of rather different ages. Boomers, who grew up with what Daniel Boorstin aptly called “the graphic revolution,” are saturated with images that are shared nationally or internationally. Not only did they participate in a consumer culture that provided them with a common but national experience, but now as they see pictures of Woodstock, of civil rights protests, of Vietnam, or Beaver Cleaver, they often accept all of these as “their” experiences, no matter how distant they were from the events. Clearly a similar generational memory was impossible for those born in the middle of the 18th century. This obvious difference is hardly the only one. But the larger point is that the particulars that foster, shape, and constrain memory for any group of people is much more important than an easy generalization about humankind as such.

As to Grammar’s critique, we can certainly agree that we see things differently. Beyond that, I find so many confusions in these comments as to require more space than I should take here to clarify. I will, instead, only note that I offer no “paradigm” and I do not harken back to a slower time. Insofar as there is an underlying claim about humans, it would be as follows. 1. Humans are alienated or homeless creatures. 2. The degree to which humans feel or experience this alienation, AND THE MANNER THEY EXPERIENCE IT, is far from constant. 3. While change is a human constant, its nature and pace is not—and it doesn’t not necessary have a clear trajectory. 4. In modern times, speed has allowed humans to experience life as given—to have moments when we can forget that we are a part of history. 5. When speed creates such temporary forgetting, it also tends to produce nostalgia, and this nostalgia emphasizes that the recent past is largely dead as a form of instruction for the unfolding present. 6. Therefore, nostalgia, in this context of speed, has at least (perhaps more) one important quality—it reminds us of our existential condition as alienated cultures.

No paradigm. No harkening for any given time.

That said, I must concede that the sixties did have an identity tied up mostly with the Vietnam War and with drugs. However, as has been already observed, I find the most interesting thing about the sixties is the fairly potent antagonism it gets from so many people born later. The traits that seem to draw the downright malevolent reactions are its (frequently foolish) optimism and Faith.

I find the antagonism towards boomers by the generations that follow us to be intriguing – blogs nowadays are full of screeds about those wretched boomers – especially about our nervy desire to actually collect that social security.

But in the interest of some facts here – as someone who has a very enterprising young one in the family who is selling nostalgic items online and makes a salary that exceeds what what her Dad and I made the year she was born ( making me wonder why we are spending gobs of money on her tuition when it seems hanging out at garage sales with an eye towards what to buy can earn one a fine living)- the market for nostalgia is not us no good boomers but rather the 20-30 year old group. Boomers are getting rid of their stuff as they downsize – and discovering that there isn’t much of a market for those Howdie Doody lunchboxes. You wanna make money in the nostalgia market nowadays – Strawberry Shortcake, He Man and My Little Pony is the way to go.

As to the state of the modern, I’d suggest the change isn’t so much a philosophical one as it is a conditional one. Our species is undergoing what is likely the greatest change in its history since the invention of written language, and we are left not knowing how to react. The centuries of tradition handed down to us only partially address the world we see today, and we have not yet developed new philosophies to deal with them; it’s as if we’re stuck in limbo, and postmodern “philosophers” throw up their hands in defeat under the illusion that if the old ways don’t work, nothing else will either.

I suspect we are not so much “moderns” as we are “transitionals”–we are still in the throes of technological revolution, and it remains to be seen how we will come out of it.