Humans are paradoxical beings driven by nostalgia, fear and restlessness. We want to live in the past and future, we want change and for everything to stay the same. Why are we so indecisive? We all know, and sometimes say, the phrase that everything was better in the past. ‘Back in the days there were still real connections’ or ‘when I was little everything was so much easier’ are well-known sentiments that I also experience from time to time. On the other side of the spectrum is the sudden feeling that something has to change because we cannot go on like this any longer. Humans tend to handle the concept of time quite poorly, but why is our relationship with change also so dysfunctional?
Let’s starts with the past, often accompanied by nostalgia. How can we explain nostalgic driven politics? Romanticising the past plays a large role in its effectiveness. Seemingly, we tend to forget the flaws of history and focus on positive events. We don’t want to remember how we felt when our first relationship fell apart, rather, we want to remember the first time we fell in love. Additionally, nostalgia functions as a coping mechanism in times of social upheaval. When you feel existentially threatened, during times of social change, nostalgia gives you a familiar pillar you can hold on to[1]. Here, a link to conservatism is easy to make. Fearful of change, the stereotype conservatist feels threatened that their traditional values will soon cease to exist. However, nostalgia does not only belong to conservatists. I often find myself bound to the bitter-sweet emotion. A longing for my romanticised childhood seeps into me, while I do not care about traditional values or conservatism. Consequently, the emotion is deeply personal. This is of course a good emotion to use during political campaigns, because people are immediately invested; it makes politics personal.
Nevertheless, the feeling of nostalgia also illustrates that something in the present is lacking. The emotion is in itself paradoxical. Seemingly afraid of current change, nostalgic people want things to change, in order for them to be familiar again. People vote for parties that are not in power because they believe they represent those traditional values that they miss. However, change has to happen first to ‘get back’ to the past. Even though returning to the past is most probably impossible anyway as it has been romanticised too much; there is no such thing as ‘changing back’. Contrastingly, progressives might not be as driven by nostalgia, but also driven by their longing for change. This idea of change is much more focused on the future. They want to see change because the future should be better, brighter and fairer than it is now.
Does our difficult relationship with time, come from being discontent with the present? Maybe we pin our hopes on the past and the future, because of laziness. It is always easier to say that ‘it was’ or ‘it will’ be better, instead of trying to change things now. Perhaps we are afraid. What if we try to change things but it never does get better. Our perfect idea of how the world should exist does not translate to reality. Next to our complex relationship with change, we are not even sure if we are truly capable of it. If we want to believe the mathematic axiom of equality, then x=x, as famous ‘A Little Life’ author has stated. Applied to humans, that means that we are indeed incapable of change, as something in our core will always be x. That might explain why referring to the past and the future is so much easier, the notion that we might fail has been either answered already or remains unknown.
I think accepting change and accepting the notion of time is easier if we see time as a-linear. In modern and contemporary fiction the idea of time as a-linear is already present and tv series such as ‘Dark’ play with this concept as well. This means that the past, present and future all exist simultaneously. Deconstructing time in this way allows us to see the subjective notion of the concept. We measure time through beliefs that humans have invented, or as physicist Julian Barbour states: “Time is encoded in static configurations, which we see or experience subjectively, all of them fitting together to make time seem linear”[2]. Time then, is just an illusion. Concepts of past or future hold no relevance. However, that does not mean we are stuck in a limbo of change. Seen in both progressives and conservatists, in human emotions such as nostalgia and fear; change is the only constant. In our core (x), there is always ‘change’, which is in the end all that we humans can rely on.
[1] Murphy, A. (2009). “Longing, Nostalgia, and Golden Age Politics: The American Jeremiad and the Power of the Past”, Perspectives on Politics, 7(1): 125-141.
[2] Retrieved from: https://www.space.com/29859-the-illusion-of-time.html
Babette Helena 