Kingsnorth (and Lewis) on nostalgia and progress

Last week Paul Kingsnorth, author of The Wake, one of my favorite novels from the last ten years,* posted a marvelous reflection on nostalgia on his Substack The Abbey of Misrule. He includes this personal note near the beginning:

We all recreate our preferred old world. Mine was—probably still is—an awkward melange of pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer culture and rural England before the First World War. Is it possible to wander the whited hawthorn lanes of Edward Thomas’s south country, the barrows intact up on the downs, smoke curling from the chimneys of the old inns, the motorways and superstores nowhere to be seen, whilst also hunting mammoths? Probably not, though it might make an intriguing backdrop to a fantasy novel I will never write.

That’s a charming way to highlight the hodgepodge quality of the imagined pasts that attract us, an attraction sharpened by the sense that every bit of this “melange” gathered from across the centuries is now equally lost. Maybe sometime I’ll describe some of my own hodgepodges. But Kingsnorth also drives deeper into the substantial appeal of nostalgia:

I’ve never been addicted to drugs or alcohol, but I have often been addicted to dreams. This is the lot of the writer. You become a writer because the world you encountered in the stories you read as a child is more exciting than the world you are actually living in. More exciting and, in a strange way, more real. Your world is school and suburbs and bus stops and breakfast cereals and maths homework and being forced to wash your dad’s car at the weekend and wondering how to talk to girls and listening to the charts to work out what kind of music it’s permissible to like. This is not Lothlorien, and neither is it Earthsea. The worlds created by Tolkein [sic] and Asimov and Verne and Howard are better than this, and there is no doubt at all that given a splinter of a chance you would prefer to live in them. Then, one day, you pick up a pen and realise that you can create your own.

Meanwhile, out in what is fondly called ‘the real world’ by people who often don’t know very much about reality, you are living in the Machine. If you have the kind of sensibility which prefers Lothlorien to Isengard, this means that you are a character in a tragedy rather than a heroic epic. Most of the things you like are fading away.

Further on, Kingsnorth engages the usual dismissive (and often deliberately rude) responses to wishing for a vanished—or, more painfully, vanishing—world:

Nostalgia is a curious thing. The love of a dead past is, on the surface, pointless, and yet it seems to be a universal, pan-cultural longing for something better than an equally dead but often less enticing present. This is something which its critics never seem to understand. ‘That’s just nostalgia’, they say, dismissively, when you suggest that a high street made up of independent shops might have been better than one giant superstore, or that folk songs around the fire in the pub might be better than Celebrity Love Island.

Spot on. Curiously, I have encountered this most forcefully in defending traditional architecture against the unsustainable and impractical eyesores of modern architecture. Calling Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall ugly or the Gherkin (aka the London Egg or the London Suppository) a blemish on the skyline or suggesting that church spires and Victorian market squares are in some way superior to what has replaced them makes a certain kind of person angry. This is strange to me because it seems like architecture, which as the late Sir Roger Scruton noted creates an aesthetic ecology we all have to engage with publicly, as a community, is the most straightforwardly concrete argument for the value of tradition and beauty.

But I digress.**

Kingsnorth goes on to suggest that nostalgia is often, in fact,

a rational response to a world heading in the wrong direction. Perhaps a practical response too. If the Machine is destroying so many things of value, from the home to the ancient woodlands that once surrounded it, then remembering those things is not only an act of rebellion, but can also be the first stage in an act of necessary restoration.

Which immediately brought to mind one of CS Lewis’s many reflections on “progress,” the ultimate God-term of the last century:

“If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road.”

— CS Lewis

We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be and if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. . . . There is nothing progressive about being pig-headed and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if you look at the present state of the world, it is pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistakes. We are on the wrong road. And if that is so, we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on.

That’s from Mere Christianity, which originated as a series of radio talks during World War II. Lewis knew whereof he spoke. And, writing now eighty-odd years later, I think it is pretty plain that the world has taken the pig-headed route.

To return to Kingsnorth, he reflects as well on the way “nostalgic” is used as an insult, a rhetorical cudgel, and how to defeat it:

[T]he fact that ‘nostalgic’—like ‘Romantic’, ‘Luddite’, ‘reactionary’ and any other word that suggests attachment to anything before progressive Year Zero—has become a term of mockery makes it a tempting label to embrace if you are conducting a personal rebellion against the Total System. Being called names is supposed to scare you into silence, but it doesn’t work if you wear the names like a medal on your chest. Romanticising the past, you say? Well, maybe I do. But it’s a hell of a lot better than romanticising the future.

Hear hear.

I strongly recommend the essay in its entirety, especially the second half in which Kingsnorth examines three possible responses to the decline and fragmentation characteristic of the present age. Two, he notes, are traps. One is the unthinking acceptance of the Myth of Progress. The other—perhaps surprisingly if you’ve read this far—is nostalgia itself. While it is “vital” to be “guided by the past,” Kingsnorth is alert to the dangers of nostalgia, too: “[A]s we stand against the Machine, we need solid ground on which to brace ourselves. Neither Progress nor nostalgia offer that solidity.” Kingsnorth goes on to suggest a third way, one seasoned by both resignation and faithful hope, “to watch the great fall, accept its reality, and then get on with our work.”

An intriguing and profoundly challenging conclusion, one that jibes with things I’ve meditated upon for years but that confronts me more forcefully with what this kind of fruitful nostalgia must mean if it is to be of benefit to anyone. I have to wonder if Kingsnorth has read Jünger’s The Forest Passage. I mean to reread that soon. Food for thought.

Notes:

*The Wake is the first of a loose trilogy set in the distant past, the present, and the distant future of England. I have read The Wake, which takes places at the time of the Norman Conquest, and the second volume, Beast, but have not yet gotten to the third and final novel, Alexandria. Kingsnorth writes a good bit about what inspired it near the end of this Substack essay. I briefly reviewed Beast here last year.

**Let me here recommend Tom Wolfe’s clique-puncturing From Bauhaus to Our House and move on.

Reflections on two years of blogging

John turturro explores the lIfe of the mind In Barton Fink

Yesterday marked the second anniversary of the launch of my author website, which I still think of as new. When I was first setting the website up through Squarespace I almost deleted its blog function but decided to keep it. I’m glad I did. It’s far and away the most visited part of the site and—the reason I kept it at all—it’s become a great outlet for quotations, reflections, reviews, and other small writing projects. It’s helped me stay limber as a writer, kept the gears greased and the engine warm. 

I’ve also learned a lot from it, especially as I’ve tried to use the website to promote my books and tried to figure out the whole independent author thing. Here are a handful of lessons learned from the first two years of writing this blog: 

You can’t always predict what readers will respond to

Some of the posts I’ve put a lot of effort into have gone over like lead balloons. I work on one, sweat over it, post and share it and—crickets. It’s hard not to find that disheartening. I’ve learned to respond to this in two different but sometimes overlapping ways: 

First, drop what’s not working. I ran across this piece of advice in a book on social media for authors. Don’t spend effort on work that gets no result. This is the reason—or at least a reason—I dropped my Historical Movie Monday series. I didn’t have the time or the energy for the paltry response they got and decided to use my limited energies elsewhere.

Second, just keep doing your thing. I mostly write this blog for me—more public but less open than a diary, but serving much the same function. Alan Jacobs has called his blog a “commonplace book,” and I’ve certainly used this one as such. So even when something I’ve worked on and polished to a shine fails, the point has been the doing of it. I’ve gotten practice, I’ve grown at least a little bit. That alone makes it worthwhile. 

What readers do respond to will surprise you

Of the top fifteen most popularly visited posts on this blog, I might have predicted two or three of them. Those are ones I really spent time on and tried to make worthwhile to whomever might read them. Some others are notes or reflections I rattled off and posted and didn’t look back at. The rest are somewhere in between. The point is that there’s no telling what will find a readership and what won’t.

But if the results are as unpredictable as my first point suggests, you need to do your best on everything you put out there. You don’t want the post that finally finds a big audience—because of Google or a share in a newsletter or on Facebook or whatever—to be the post where you were neglecting the craft of writing. Not everything has to be as profound as Shakespeare, as rich as Dante, as insightful as Jane Austen, as polished as Evelyn Waugh, or even as funny as Dave Barry, but everything should be best of its kind that you can make it.

Sometimes it just takes time

I mentioned how I stopped putting together Historical Movie Monday posts because they didn’t get a response commensurate with the effort I had put into them. Well, guess what have proven the most popular posts on this blog in the last two years? 

Since first posting them almost two years ago, my critiques of Kingdom of Heaven, Hacksaw Ridge, The Winter War, and The Alamo have, via Google and other search engines, become the most popular things on this website, and it’s not even close. It just took some time.

That’s a good reminder of the value of patience and endurance. We live in a world of instantaneous results; if we can’t see the benefit immediately, it has no value to us, and nowhere is this more true than online. But patience is the key. No good thing is gotten without effort, and effort requires the patience and tenacity to outlast those who give up. This is a lesson any writer needs to learn—especially if you’re self-publishing—and the reminder has been good for me. 

Humility

So if your best efforts don’t get the readership you want, you can’t predict what will, and you just have to give it time while you put your back into it and slave away, the result should be humility—humility before the tradition and craft you practice first and foremost, but also a humility before the people who may (or may not) read your stuff and the forces that (fairly or not) bring your stuff to those readers.

Railing against failure is a failure of humility. It’s entitlement, perhaps the besetting sin of our world. (Cf the comments on instant gratification above.) And when you reject this kind of humility, refuse to adopt it as part of the necessary discipline of writing, the result isn’t just pride, it’s resentment.

Gratitude 

I don’t think we live in an age of wrath or fear so much as an age of resentment. What we desperately lack is gratitude, which is the best antidote for resentment. It’s something I’ve been working on personally for a long time, and I hope it informs my writing—both here and in my novels. Because if grateful people are also the most generous—as seems to be the case—a grateful writer is going to be most generous to his readers.

So for all the surprises, both good and bad, successes and disappointments, I’m thankful that I have this website and this blog and that I have readers. Y’all mean a lot to me.

It’s been a great two years. I look forward, gratefully, to many more.

A warning for conservatives

Abtei im Eichwald, by Caspar David Friedrich

While visiting home in Georgia this weekend, my wife and I went to my parents’ church. The sermon came from the Book of Exodus, but an aside from Ecclesiastes caught us both off guard and gave us a lot to think about:

“Say not, ‘Why were the former days better than these?’
For it is not from wisdom that you ask this.”

— Ecclesiastes 7:10

For my wife, this brought to mind changes at work, a difficult new generation of students, and a longing for years past, before present troubles. I thought immediately of conservatism—not the political position, but the attitude or temperament that is prior to any particular political idea: a disposition rather than an ideology, according to Michael Oakeshott; a state of mind, an instinct to preserve and maintain, to adhere to tradition and custom, to guarantee continuity, according to Russell Kirk; an understanding that good things are hard to create and easy to destroy, according to Roger Scruton. We could go on much further.

So while I am a conservative, both by temperament and because I agree with the above, I’m not talking about political conservatism, which is in bad shape in the United States anyway. I mean the general disposition, to which even self-described progressives are susceptible, and what I see as its besetting danger.

That danger is what is commonly called nostalgia now: a sentimentalized reverence for a past that—probably—never existed.

This shouldn’t be news—conservatives are accused of nostalgia all the time—but I do wrestle with a longing for a time without our present troubles. There were good things about the past, things it is good to preserve or recover, and there are serious problems at present, problems to which the past may—and I think often does—hold the solutions. But I have to remind myself that while the people of the past may not have had our problems, they had plenty of their own, and there were even then people like me who cast longing backward glances at their own simpler, more peaceful, less troubled pasts. It’s simpler times all the way down.

And there stand the words of the preacher. In the magisterial archaism of the KJV: “Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not enquire wisely concerning this.”

This is not, of course, a resounding endorsement of nostalgia’s opposite error, progressivism—“a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative.” And it is good to remember that Ecclesiastes is hardly a straightforward collection of proverbial wisdom. But this passage is a good reminder of the unwisdom of two related mistakes: assuming the past was necessarily better than the present, and using that assumption as an excuse to neglect the present.

Mea culpa. This is a tall order for someone who is both a conservative and an historian, and I’ve been mulling it over ever since.

Food for thought at an obsessively nostalgic time of year. To conclude with a warning against focusing obsessively on the future—a New Year’s warning, perhaps—here’s the Gospel of Matthew:

“Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”

— Matthew 6:34