Nostalgia: the God and the Demon
What Sunny D seltzers can tell us about the state of American culture.
In “The Four Loves” C.S. Lewis, rephrasing a quote from Denis de Rougemont, writes that love, “begins to be a demon when it begins to be a god.” Love, Lewis argued, becomes an evil in one’s life when it becomes all-consuming. Whether it be love of a person, a pet, an object, or something more abstract–one’s love of country, for instance, or love of art–the moment that love becomes all-encompassing in someone’s life it stops being a virtue and begins to be a vice. Lewis’ observation of this fact was in the context of how people should properly orient their worldly loves in relation to their love of God, as well as explaining how people should understand the notion that ‘God is love’. Standing alone, however, his re-interpretation of Rougemont’s quote is profoundly true. As individuals we are always at risk of being subsumed by our worldly loves. Obsession is inherent to human nature, and if we let our loves overrun us completely they stop being acts of divine will and become demonic. This is true on a societal level, too, and it is a societal instance of this that I address here today.
A few months ago I was tasked by an acquaintance on Twitter/X to write about the seeming prevalence of a “poverty kitsch” in American society. What I mean by that (or, rather, what the nice Twitter person meant by that) is the romanticization of the way people in the past lived as somehow more authentic than modern society. We nostalgize the hovel, thinking its small and quaint nature as something more fulfilling than the large houses we build for ourselves today. We gaze upon images of the village peasant, or the urban proletariat, or the 1950s suburban family, and reminisce about ‘simpler times’. Some of this is, of course, natural to human nature. The world is more complex than it has ever been, so looking back fondly on a time when things were simpler is understandable. Whether or not the past was actually better (spoiler alert; it wasn’t, at least not financially), the idea of it often seems better than the reality of today.
Fortunately for my acquaintance, I was intrigued by the idea of writing about the pervasiveness of nostalgia across American society. Unfortunately for him, I was so intrigued by the idea that this piece will speak to American culture broadly, not just house sizes.
Some examples of nostalgia in American life are so obvious they barely merit a mention. “Make America Great Again” has been used and abused as a political slogan for decades, but Donald Trump has taken it to new cultural heights. Other examples are less clear, but just as indicative of a growing problem. Take, for example, the explosion of remakes and sequels in Hollywood the last decade. It is unclear to me whether anyone asked for a Matrix movie 20 years after “The Matrix: Revolutions” was released, but one was produced anyway. Even more bewildering was “Bill and Ted: Face the Music,” which featured two old actors re-embracing roles not played in 30 years (in both cases Keanu Reeves was paid a lot of money to make nostalgic, but bad, movies. I won’t hold it against him). Much has already been written about the shallow pandering of female remakes (think Mythbusters, or Ocean’s 8), but such movies also speak to a profound lack of creativity in American life. Our inability to write new stories drives us to obsess over the old ones, and to rehash them again and again in increasingly worse ways. Our past cultural achievements become ever-more celebrated and re-piped because we become ever-more unable to craft original stories worth telling.
Another nostalgic trend in American society that speaks to a deeper sickness is the alcoholization of childhood drinks. The example that comes to mind is the release of Sunny D vodka seltzers. I vividly remember drinking Sunny D as a child. It was to me what Tang was to my parents' generation (there’s some nostalgia for you!). Now, as a 22-year old, I can buy my cherished childhood drink for a fun Friday night. The nostalgia at play here is the point. Sunny D saw an opportunity, brought about by our deep craving for our past, and took it. My personal feelings on the matter aside (making a children’s drink alcoholic seems irresponsible on the part of Sunny D), the existence of a market for drinks like this reveals a cultural nostalgia that has gone beyond a healthy appreciation for the past into something negative.
As a conservative I would be remiss if I did not say that a love of tradition, and reverence of great things in the past, are both key to maintaining a healthy society. But such feelings can go too far, and in America today we have taken our nostalgic feelings to heights detrimental to our culture. The past should be revered for what it adds to the present, not as a replacement for it. Making nostalgia a cultural god makes it a cultural demon, and if we are not careful it will consume all that is good and true about the present. We can appreciate the homely nature of homes from the past while recognizing much of that was driven by the financial constraints of poverty. We can borrow from great cinema of the past to tell new stories great in their own right. And, if someone really wants a vodka orange juice, they can make it without stooping to putting vodka in a drink meant for eight year olds. Nostalgia need not be a demon, so long as we don’t make it our god.
Scott Howard is an alumnus of the University of Florida and executive editor of the Freemen News-Letter. His work can also be found at National Review and The Dispatch.
“We can appreciate the homely nature of homes from the past while recognizing much of that was driven by the financial constraints of poverty.”
Bravo. My thoughts exactly. I feel similarly about tradition and nostalgia. My father grew up in the 1950s in a middle class home and he says they ate canned food for dinner sometimes and rarely ever went out to eat. And his dad was an engineer. Most Americans at the time didn’t have family members who were engineers or lawyers or doctors. Yes, a family could live on a factory worker’s salary. But that’s because they lived in a small house and ate inexpensive food and didn’t buy luxuries. Still, romanticizing poverty is a very old, and very sad, trend in human life.
The Four Loves is my favorite book by CS Lewis. Including all the Narnia books and Mere Christianity, the Abolition of Man, and the Screwtape letters.
My first two observations are: 1) This dials home the cross-generational reality of being born in the late '80s, as I drank and enjoyed both Tang and SunnyD, and 2) Are we going to see Capri Sun Shot Pouches next!?
All kidding aside, as a very nostalgic person, it often bears reminding that this impulse can very easily be taken too far. Not only can we sugarcoat the past, but we can also infect it with the stains of the present. From vulgar and violent comic book movies to alcoholic recreations of children's drinks, there seems to be a human desire to have the innocence of child products shattered so that we can cope with the shattering of our own innocence.