Nostalgia Work Camps

I have been arguing about whether or not the past was better than the present with my friends and family for years. To be clear on my point of view: I think now is the best time to be alive for the vast majority of people alive today and I think this is obviously true. (See below for a bit more of an explanation.) And I get frustrated when people argue the past is better.

And I have been exasperated with people on the internet - mostly social media - for years. So many people online romanticize the past, usually a past they have zero experience of because it occurred before they were born.

But now, perhaps more than ever, it feels like nostalgia has grabbed hold of politics. And that’s a big, big problem.

It’s a big problem for us all because we can never go back to the past, especially one that didn’t exist. It’s a big problem for us all because in order to try to get back to this non-existent past, it’s going to harm a lot of people.

But it’s also a big problem for me personally because, to paraphrase someone on Blue Sky, these nostalgic people are going to turn me into a Maoist.

You think the past was so fucking great? Well then you work on a farm or in a factory. Don’t inflict this on the rest of us.

Nostalgia Work Camps

If I was Dictator, we would have hobby farms and factories and laundries and any number of other fun workplaces (with accompany housing) from different times throughout history. Each would be rich in period detail. For example:

• Roman/ancient Greek/ancient Chinese/ancient Indian manual labour

• Foraging for rare proteins (bird eggs, sea creatures, what have you)

• Medieval guild

• Farms at various points in history

• Early industrial factory

• And so on (the worse the conditions the better).

Anyone who advocated a return to the past on social media, or in any article on the internet, or in TV appearances or in public speeches too many times in a fixed period (a month or even a week if it’s bad enough) would be granted the wonderful privilege of spending a month in one of these places. Advocating for piecework in a factory? Guess where you’re going for the next month? And you’re not going to be a supervisor.

Now, I’m a civil libertarian in reality and pro free speech so I probably wouldn’t be comfortable doing this even if I somehow had been given ultimate power. So instead I would do grants: the government will pay you some large some of money to explore your interest in piecework in a factory but in order to get this money you get to work in one of our hobby factories. (The problem with this less draconian idea is so many of these people are rich and don’t need this money.)

I say this because I know that 90-something per cent of the people advocating for the return of manufacturing to the United States, or the return to a “simpler” pre-industrial or pre-computer age life do not imagine themselves actually doing this work. They imagine others doing it. And they imagine they will maintain their 21st century standard of living with all its various perks (unfathomable to 99% of all humans who have ever existed throughout history): smartphones, streaming, delivery of everything, easy and fast international travel, and on and on and on and on.

Honestly it seems like the only thing that might change their minds is actually having do to the “hard work” they celebrate. It’s like the people who cosplay at war but have never been in a war one in their lives. The only way they will ever be disabused of this is to have to actually do it. So I’d make them do it.

They’re Maoists Anyway

I don’t feel particularly bad about thinking that people I disagree with, who want to inflict their values on others, maybe ought to be throne in work camps because The Right in North America is basically turning into Maoists, anyway. But they want everyone else to be the victims (of course).

This is just Maoism! (And it’s only the most prominent Tweet or interview clip of Republicans endorsing Maoism.) But it’s, like, weird right-wing techbro Maoism. If they’re going to adopt Maoist ideas without recognizing it - because they don’t ever want to learn anything - maybe the rest of us should just inflict Maoism on them whenever they suggest it.

To be clear: I am joking. But I am very frustrated by a) the rampant nostalgia for a shittier past (whether or not it existed) and b) Right Wingers knowing so little about authoritarianism that they think that the only way to be “free” - to force everyone to be free - is to become authoritarian.

Addendum: Why I’m Not Nostalgic for a Past That Never Existed

By way of more of an explanation for why I do not worship the past, which was definitely worse than my life right now (or your life or the lives of most people in Canada or the United States):

All my adult life I have been skeptical of nostalgia. I have no idea what caused this - but growing up listening to Oldies radio probably had something to do with it - and it certainly wasn’t present in my childhood.

It’s not that I didn’t love history. I loved history as a child and teen and my career goal at 18 was to be a professor of history. But somehow I knew pretty quickly that even though I loved learning about history and dreaming about the past, I didn’t want to live through it.

At first, it was mostly just nostalgia in the arts that I was really skeptical of. When I was in my late teens/early 20s, I sneered at band reunions, and most new albums by older artists and bands.

At some point, I started to apply my skepticism of nostalgia to other areas of my life. I read a quote once, I believe it was from someone like Richard Hofstadter, that really captured it. I’m paraphrasing (I’ve never been able to find it again) but it was something like “Conservatives seek to return to a recently departed past which never actually existed.” When I read that a lot of things became clearer in my mind and I became even more skeptical of any political or social movement that seeks to return to the past.

But I always felt like this was a little bit of a bias in me. I became more nostalgic about music and movies over time and started to actually like band reunions. (I have now been to many shows by reunited bands.) I wondered if maybe there were things about the past that were better but I was blind to them because I really hated nostalgia.

And then I read The Better Angels of Our Nature and saw more and more data all around the internet about how now is the best time to be alive. And I realized that the past being worse is a fact, not just my personal bias. Sure, there are ways in which the past was better for some people some of the time. But, at the macro level, there’s never been a better time to believe. I’m not going to lay out the case here. If you don’t agree well you’re wrong. There are mountains of data to prove it. You just have to be willing to look for and at it.