Thoughts on nostalgia

It can be a drug, and an unhelpful one at this particular time

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Distraction shows up fairly regularly as a point of discussion here at Precipice. The latest example is from a late-April post:

Entire industries are devoted to it. And every form of entertainment - any kind of sporting event, musical performance, experience in a movie theater, even a lot of church services - must be presented with maximum razzle-dazzle to keep the viewer’s attention from wandering.

What’s going on here?

I would venture that the root motivation is desperation. Having one’s socks knocked off by ever-more spectacular displays of sensory overload is effective for allowing us to avoid the question of whether the content we’re consuming means anything.

I think most people know how profound the changes in our society are, but contemplating it for any length of time is just too much to bear.

Sometimes the hunger for distraction takes simple, small-scale forms rather than razzle-dazzle. If one does have some form of community going - an exceptionally tight-knit family, a group of old friends who regularly break bread together, belonging to a club based on a common passion, bonding with pets, a cohesive church congregation - it serves as a comforting bulwark between the individual and a world untethered from humanity’s historic common assumptions.

Don’t let me leave you with the impression that my own ways of dealing with this are uniformly healthy and worthy of example. For one thing, the attendant confusion informs all decisions, big and small. As far as I can see, the only way it wouldn’t would be to sign up for one of the present moment’s tribalisms, which offer validation to those for whom other forms of community have been exhausted. We’ve seen how that plays out in social media comment threads.

While I mentioned a few types of distraction - from “ever-more spectacular displays of sensory overload” to healthy activities such as “ an exceptionally tight-knit family, a group of old friends who regularly break bread together, belonging to a club based on a common passion, bonding with pets, a cohesive church congregation” - one I haven’t specified merits some discussion.

That’s nostalgia.

I kind of touch on it when I write about music. Earlier in that post from last month, I excerpted from a piece I wrote for Ordinary Times in 2022 titled “Confessions of a Rock and Roll History Teacher.” I don’t want to confer more gravitas on my adjunct-lecturer-at-a-community-college position than it merits, but for twenty-four years, it’s offered me a window into changes in Americans’ relationship to music.

That’s the thing; not does the course examine changes from the mid-1940s to the beginning of the current century, another quarter-century of history has transpired while I’ve been teaching it. Most students now weren’t born yet when I began.

Over the course of their lives, and for some decades before, music has become more portable and easy to personally curate. People listening to WLS or WABC in 1965 didn’t have personal playlists. Music came in three forms for adolescents and young adults: what the deejays on such stations played, their parents’ record collections, and the appreciation for basics of rhythm, melody and harmony (and musical heritage) their teachers strived to inculcate.

One reason I got this gig many years ago is that academe had come to see the explosion in popular music during the twentieth century, and particularly the decades from the 1940s through 70s, as having a major impact on a cascade of sociocultural changes. Rightly so, in my opinion, although I think the work of discerning that impact has just begun.

Every spring, I see one of my main tasks as being to impart that impact to students. The challenge becomes more acute each year. Music no longer has such an impact.

However, something about the music from the days of impact has a quantifiable appeal to the contemporary consumer. This was the subject of a piece Ted Gioia wrote for The Atlantic titled “Is Old Music Killing New Music?”

Old songs now represent 70 percent of the U.S. music market, according to the latest numbers from MRC Data, a music-analytics firm. Those who make a living from new music—especially that endangered species known as theworking musician—should look at these figures with fear and trembling. But the news gets worse: The new-music market is actually shrinking. All the growth in the market is coming from old songs.

Source: MRC Data

The 200 most popular new tracks now regularly account for less than 5 percent of total streams. That rate was twice as high just three years ago. The mix of songs actually purchased by consumers is even more tilted toward older music. The current list of most-downloaded tracks on iTunes is filled with the names of bands from the previous century, such as Creedence Clearwater Revival and The Police.

In fact, decades are not so much considered sequentially by modern music consumers as they are as files that are handy for identifying sounds one prefers. To say one likes 70s singer-songwriter music or 80s thrash metal or 90s hip hop is to establish categories for one’s playlists.

This phenomenon hasn’t occurred in a vacuum.

As you know, I find Aaron Renn a sober and reliable chronicler of stages of sociocultural history. He established that cred with his First Things article “The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism”, in which he posited these stages in America’s relationship with Christianity:

• Positive World (Pre-1994): Society at large retains a mostly positive view of Christianity. To be known as a good, churchgoing man remains part of being an upstanding citizen. Publicly being a Christian is a status-enhancer. Christian moral norms are the basic moral norms of society and violating them can bring negative consequences.

• Neutral World (1994–2014): Society takes a neutral stance toward Christianity. Christianity no longer has privileged status but is not disfavored. Being publicly known as a Christian has neither a positive nor a negative impact on one’s social status. Christianity is a valid option within a pluralistic public square. Christian moral norms retain some residual effect.

• Negative World (2014–Present): Society has come to have a negative view of Christianity. Being known as a Christian is a social negative, particularly in the elite domains of ­society. Christian morality is expressly repudiated and seen as a threat to the public good and the new public moral order. Subscribing to Christian moral views or violating the secular moral order brings negative consequences.

In that April post cited above, I mentioned a recent Substack piece by Renn titled “There’s No Turning Back From Pluralism.” It’s kind of an exhortation for us as individuals to get over our alienation that breeds atomization and learn to live in the new reality.

He has a new piece up with a similarly bracing title, “The End of Bourgeois Values”:

America was 98% Protestant at the time of the founding and deeply embodied an Anglo-Protestant, Calvinistic culture. While Weber’s Puritans were the English Puritans, not the American ones, his analysis does broadly describe the austere, self-controlled, industrious, energetic, and expansionistic American culture that tamed the continent and perhaps more than any other built the modern world we live in today.

These values and behaviors were ultimately rooted in religion. As that religion dissipated, so did those values. French writer Emmanuel Todd views this collapse of Protestantism as a crisis for the West. I previously wrote an essay that went into some detail on his views.

You’ll find yourself chewing on it for a while after reading it. He cites a French writer, Emmanuel Todd, who comes up with a framework similar to Renn’s three-worlds formulation:

Todd divides the story arc of religious decline through three states: active, zombie, and zero.

• In the active state, people still attend church and practice Christianity, living out the habits and values of their religion.

• In the zombie state, regular church attendance and genuine belief are lost, but the habits and values of religion remain.

• In the zero state, not only do people no longer believe of practice religion, but the habits and values of religion have disappeared.

Todd does not give specific dates for America, but implies that the active state ended by around 1900. The zombie state lasted from around 1900 to 1965. Then there was a transition phase from zombie to zero state that ended in 2015. Todd identifies the legalization of gay marriage as the definitive sign of our arrival at a religious zero state.

Seen in Todd’s framework, bourgeois values are the values of zombie Protestantism. They are post-religious but continue forward the habits and values of American Protestantism. It’s notable that the period in which Wax says bourgeois values reined supreme, the late 1940s to the mid-1960s, fits well with this framework. (Church attendance was high in the 1950s, but religiosity was shallow).

It should not be surprising that as we’ve transitioned towards a religious zero state, bourgeois values have decayed and finally collapsed.

Renn then goes on to cover ground first plowed by James Burnham:

Apart from religio-cultural changes, there was also a profound change in the economic structure of the country. This is related to James Burnham’s idea of the managerial revolution.

As I said, the bourgeois economy was a capitalist economy, but it was pre-managerial, dominated by business owners. Prior to the advent of the railroads, and especially the boom of the second industrial revolution, the American economy was dominated by homestead type agricultural households. Other business was almost exclusively in the form of small sole proprietorships or partnerships that were linked together via market transactions.

After the Civil War there was a revolution in size and scale in America. Large industrial concerns replaced much of this small scale infrastructure. This led to the development of modern management (bureaucracy) as we know it. Cities exploded in size as well. Big corporations and big cities meant government got big and managerialized as well.

Still, until the early part of the 20th century, the large industrial concerns that emerged were still in many cases run by a founder or controlling shareholder. And America still had many smaller, independent businesses such as shops. Until 1920, the majority of Americans also still lived in rural areas. The “family farm” was still arguably the way a plurality of Americans lived.

All of these people, from industrial titans to small shopkeepers to farmers, were a kind of bourgeoisie. They owned their own business or livelihood, of whatever scale. This began to breakdown in the 1920s, through the Depression and then the war. In the post-World War 2 era, America had transitioned from being a nation of people who worked for themselves, to a nation of people who worked for others. While this was a slow gradual shift that can’t be dated to specific moment in time, I’d argue that there’s a significant difference between in 1920 (still primarily or heavily bourgeois) and 1950 (predominantly managerial).

Even though we (mid-20th century Americans) had to a significant degree handed our destinies over to large bureaucracies, and even though our religiosity was shallow, we were anchored to something.

When, in the course of social media scrolling, I come across a post inviting all comers to have some fun naming their favorite - oh, I don’t know, guitar solo, or band name - it has the feel of a desperate desire to look away from the desert that is our current cultural landscape. And, with the ubiquity of digitized film footage, Jimmy Page can look 27 whenever we want him to.

It’s why, while I have attended most of my high school reunions, I’ve done so with mixed feelings. Music plays a big part in those events. In fact, I’ve played in a reunion band at some of them, doing covers of stuff that was on the charts when Johnson and Nixon were president.

The plain fact of the matter is that we’re not going to be able to go back. There’s been an irreversible readjustment of what each of the two major political parties represents. Legacy news outlets are in free fall, and they’re not being replaced with anything that has had their centrality to our being informed. Religion? Well, see what Renn and Todd have to say above. Global alliance among nations are being jostled and are probably going to become more conditional and less values-based.

Nostalgia makes for an undeniable dopamine shot in such a milieu.

The problem is that, like all such balms, it is of no help in addressing the world in which we actually live.

It’s not just music or the arts by any means. The populist right’s fixation on bringing manufacturing jobs back onshore and bestowing a renaissance on the Rust Belt is an example of that yearning for stability.

Final thought: without a strong institutional foundation and a common notion of what ought to be central among our preoccupations, we have no basis for agreeing on what is important to do.

That can be a real liability at a time when our executive branch is riding roughshod over the legislative and judicial branches, taking a crowbar to long-standing global alliances, coarsening our discourse and otherwise transforming our nation.

Can something be done before that transformation makes it unrecognizable?

Not if our heads are in the clouds of a fantasized yesteryear.