Theos-Talk Archives (December 2002 Message tt00607)

Hey,

Recently I read the first third of a book I'd been meaning to read 
for a while: The Future of Nostalgia by Svetlana Boym, Professor of 
Slavic and Comparative Literature at Harvard. She's an emigree from 
St. Petersburg, and the middle third of the book is about post-Soviet 
Eastern Europe. The last third discusses imaginary homelands in the 
literature of exiles. Part I is a discussion of the history of 
nostalgia, once considered a physical ailment and now part of the 
human condition. That was the part that interested me, after hearing 
her do an intriguing interview on NPR last year.

Some words from the intro: 
Nostalgia (from nostos-- return home, and algia, longing) is a 
longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. 
Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a 
romance with one's own fantasy. Nostalgic love can only survive in a 
long-distance relationship...At first glance, nostalgia is a longing 
for a place, but actually it is a yearning for a different time-- the 
time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams.

My comments: various spiritualities are explicitly linked with 
nostalgia. Theosophy talks about our having descended from spiritual 
realms, and therefore this earth is not our home, so we long to 
reascend. But it also envisions imaginary pasts, Lemuria and 
Atlantis, which became central motifs for the nostalgia in Cayce's 
esotericism. The Baha'i appeal to nostalgia is by claiming the 
status of early Christians, seeing Baha as Christ returned and 
themselves as second century disciples (or as early Muslims.) The 
internal struggles of contemporary Baha'is, which include vicious 
rhetoric against fellow believers, seem like manifestations of 
nostalgia for the fratricidal hatreds that rent the movement in the 
19th century. One could examine any spiritual movement as an 
expression of one or another form of nostalgia.

Boym makes a distinction between two kinds of nostalgia, reflective 
and restorative. The reflective kind she sees as innocuous and 
sometimes positive, that is nostalgia which recognizes itself as 
such. The warm glow evoked by historic tourist sites is of this 
nature. But restorative nostalgia is not aware of its nature as 
fantasy. It seeks to recreate a lost world of the past, whether it 
be Islam under the Caliphate, an imagined pre-Islamic Hinduism, the 
greatness of early Buddhism in Sri Lanka, or early Christianity as 
imagined by fundamentalists. Restorative nostalgia, by taking its 
vision of the past as factually accurate and striving to realize it 
in the external world, always ends up conflicting with actual reality 
and playing a destructive role. E.g., the Ayodhya mosque was "in the 
way" of restoring Rama's birthplace, and had to be destroyed. For 
the Christian Reconstructionist movement (with which possible Senate 
majority leader Nickles is associated), secular humanism, gays, etc. 
are obstacles to recreating an imagined Bible-governed world. Of 
course Osama Bin Laden is motivated by restorative nostalgia, and 
destroyed the World Trade Center as part of a scheme to return to the 
imagined glories of the Muslim past. Some extremist Jews want to 
rebuild the Temple, restore sacrifice, etc.

I mention the book here because nostalgia is a critical factor in 
HPB's writings, both for the Western occult traditions persecuted by 
Christianity, and the South Asian traditions suffering under Islamic 
and then Western invaders. There is nothing inherently wrong with 
the spirit of nostalgia, but in the case of Sri Lanka it inspired 
some ugly Sinhalese nationalism. And as has been recently discussed 
here, in the form of Aryanism it has had abundant unpleasant 
consequences in Europe. More positive expressions (reflective rather 
than restorative?) of Theosophical nostalgia have involved the Irish 
literary revival and the rebirth of astrology. 

KPJ