Robin:

Hello, Agnes.

Agnes:

Hey, Robin.

Robin:

What should we talk about?

Agnes:

Nostalgia is on our list of things to talk about, so I thought today would be the day we do it. There isn't going to be any particular day that cries out, we're talking about nostalgia, so we might as well just do it. Are you nostalgic? Let's start with that. Are you a nostalgic person?

Robin:

I don't spend much time thinking about the past or differences of the past, and I don't even remember it as much as most people. So many people, maybe even yourself, just remember a lot of events from their childhood, and I don't. No.

Agnes:

I believe that you have a poor memory because I have many times told you that I don't remember almost anything from my childhood.

Robin:

Okay. So that we have that in common.

Agnes:

Yes. So I wonder if nostalgia, does that make you less able to be nostalgic if you have a poor memory? Or maybe you're more nostalgic because you cling to the objects that represent your past. That's your only access.

Robin:

Right. So when I have thought about the past, it seems pleasant. So we should just say right off the start, nostalgia is apparently a pleasant thing. And yet it's often criticized. It's an illicit pleasure sometimes, right? People are criticized for indulging in it too much or holding everybody else back through their nostalgia.

Agnes:

Right. Though, interestingly, the etymology is a pain. Algos is a pain. It's the pain of the return journey. Nostos is the return back, like the Odyssey, where Odysseus is going home, that's Nostos.

Robin:

I think it counts as bittersweet.

Agnes:

Okay. So it's one of these psychological states that combines pleasure and pain. There are many of them. Jealousy is another.

Robin:

Right, right. So, I mean, the content of nostalgia would be to remember a past time, remember ourselves at that time, We could, of course, remember all the things we should have done that we didn't do or the things we did that we shouldn't have done. And maybe we'll be proud of some of the things we did. I guess my main emotion with respect to nostalgia is sort of empathy for this poor person. who was me, who I understand, you know, and I guess I have a sort of a deep sympathy for this past person. And that doesn't excuse him from all the mistakes he made. And it maybe makes sad the fact that he had potential that wasn't realized or made mistakes, but it's an empathetic relation to that.

Agnes:

So when you think back on your past and your mistakes and stuff, you know, there were other almost, there's almost always other people involved in bad things that happened to you. You empathize with yourself more so than with the other people. Cause when I think back on my past and all the people that had to deal with me, I tend to empathize with them.

Robin:

Yes. So I think that is, If you think back on, say, conflicts you had with other people, I think from today's point of view, it's much easier to think that you were maybe in the wrong than you thought back then.

Agnes:

Exactly. Exactly. It was hard to see at the time. But now.

Robin:

See now all the ways in which you were oblivious and blind and selfish and you can see all the things they put up with. Because you can see all your faults now that you couldn't see back then. And so you realize how indulgent they were of all your faults.

Agnes:

Right. That doesn't seem to be captured by the word nostalgia, that phenomenon, though it is a revisiting of the past and it is a pain. I mean, in a way, it doesn't even feel painful to me. I just, I feel a kind of affection for people who put up with me in the past.

Robin:

Well, I think if you just miss them, say, that would be thought of as nostalgic. So a person, you would not see them in a long time and you remember them fondly and you miss them. That will be nostalgic. You just... Maybe attachment is the right word to be thinking about here. So there's this standard triple categorization of love. There's say, lust, and then there's, you know, romance, and then there's attachment. And attachment comes last, it comes slowest. But in the end, it's the strongest, but it's the hardest to see. So the idea is, you know, even after the lust has weakened or even the romance has weakened, attachment remains. And even if you lament the loss of those first two, you'll still stay together and stay attached because attachment is really strong. And I could think of nostalgia as just the attachment, remembering the attachment or feeling the attachment.

Agnes:

But I mean, attachment is paradigmatically going to be something where that you're still attached. And the whole idea of nostalgia is that you remember something that's no longer the case. So you remembering a time in your life when I like if I think back, the thing I'm maybe most nostalgic about is my early years of grad school, in which I discovered the concept of fun. Like, as a high school slur, I was just, like, very, very weird. As a college student, I was just studying all the time. And I got to grad school and, like, I was surrounded by other nerds. And so, like, I finally socialized and went to parties and, And I had a group of friends and we did fun stuff together and made scavenger hunts for each other and weird dinner parties where we painted the walls and all kinds of stuff like that. I look back nostalgically on that, on that time in my life. But it doesn't exist anymore. I'm not even friends with all those people anymore.

Robin:

Right, but is there a pain of the loss of it, is what I would think by the attachment. That's what I mean, is that you got used to it.

Agnes:

That's the absence of the attachment. The loss means you're not attached. So you're thinking back to an attachment you used to have. Is that the point?

Robin:

I'm thinking of the attachment as the force that draws you together. So rather than the, whether you're in contact, pulling. So, you know, we've got two magnets pulling to each other. They aren't next to each other. They haven't pulled all the way together, but they're pulling. And I was, I was thinking of the attachment as that force of pulling. You're feeling the force that would pull you back, even if you're not going back.

Agnes:

I mean, one thing that seems very true to me is like, in those sorts of cases, it's very much rose-tinted glasses. I can feel that in my own case, that I'm remembering the best parts, and there was lots of misery in those years, probably more misery than any other time in my life. But there were these highs, and I just collect those highs together, and that's what I remember, so it's very appealing, but I don't think that for, if you ask me, okay, press a button, you can go back and relive that again. I'm not sure I would choose to do so. I don't know that I'm attached enough to do that. I think I enjoy visiting it from the safety of the future.

Robin:

But imagine you're at a moment in time where you're thinking about breaking off. So I say you're at school and you're thinking of leaving school or in a city and thinking of leaving city at a job, thinking of leaving a relation. I think in the moment of considering, should I leave? And you look back on this thing you've had and you ask, how valuable is it? I think you'll do a similar process of looking for the peaks and remembering the best parts of it as trying to give it its best shot at convincing you to say.

Agnes:

No, I think I would be judicious in that case because I'd want to remember both the peaks and the bottom, the low part. Whereas when I'm thinking back nostalgically, say my best friend and I, who I'm still best friends with, who I became best friends with during this period, we get together and we do this sometimes and we nostalgically remember the fun times of our youth in graduate school. We don't feel like we need to be judicious and also remember the bad times because there's no option of going back. And so we can indulge in nostalgia. And I think the nostalgia is quite distorted and quite different from what you would do if you had to... If you had to make a decision, yeah, you'd want to play at both sides.

Robin:

Well, then maybe it should be classed in with other cases where we want to look at the positives of something. And we might ask, when do we want to only look at the positives of something and hide on the negatives? Uh, maybe if we're, you know, selling somebody on our children or something, uh, it's, it's kind of a sales mode in some sense, or an aspirational mode where we were, you know, a mode where you're looking at the best and Even if people know you're looking at the best, there apparently is a value sometimes in looking for the best in something.

Agnes:

The question would be why, that is, why would you go back to some time in your life that you can't return to and try and tell yourself that it was really good, in fact, better than it actually was? I mean, one reason might be in general, you want to be able to tell the story of your own life as having been a good story, like I've lived a good life. you want to be able to tell that to yourself. Maybe that's part of what keeps you going. And so you want to be able to look back and see all the positives from the past parts of your life.

Robin:

So when we discussed the sacred before, we discussed this idea of, on the one hand, you can bind yourself to a group by together seeing something as valuable the same way. And then you could also bind yourself across time by, at different points in time, seeing the same value together. And that lets you feel the sacred you and be more committed to long-term plans and long-term, you know, sacrifices. You make it some time to get benefits at other times because of you seeing this unified you. And so in order to do that, you have to find the things that you across time see together the same, and then maybe nostalgic things are sort of the, the iconic examples of those.

Agnes:

So, I mean, one thing that seems right about that is if I think, I think that by nostalgically remembering this period of my life, I'm connecting to a fun loving part of myself that isn't always at the forefront of myself. And I'm telling myself, I'm still her. I'm still the fun person that I was. The weird thing is I'm also saying I'm not, because I'm like, remember when I tell the stuff that I don't do anymore?

Robin:

But you saw the value, you see the value of it would be the more fundamental thing. And you see it the same way she did. That is, what she saw as valuable in herself then, you now see as valuable in herself then and in yourself now. And she could have then had the hope and expectation that her descendant self would all continue to see the value in the things she most valued. And that was important to her in order to be feeling identified with her future self. And now you can identify with your past self.

Agnes:

it sort of speaks to the sacredness of the self.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

The idea that the self is a thing, like a substance that continues through time and connects all these various person stages of you, that I really am a person, I'm not just, you know.

Robin:

Right, although with the group, you could talk about the sacredness of the group, but the whole concept of the sacred is that we don't usually do that. We usually feel tied to our group not by explicitly thinking of the group as a unit, but by seeing the things we see together and having that pull us together. And so we might say that's how we bind ourselves across time. Instead of seeing ourselves as a thing, we see the things that we across time have always seen together.

Agnes:

Good, though I think a lot of it, so we've been sort of talking about personal nostalgia. Like I have this, well, even there, right? I would mention my best friends and how we're both nostalgic about the same period. And I think when we first raised this topic, we were interested in things like nostalgic foods. Like there's certain foods we eat on certain holidays or Ben, my ex-husband is really, he has a set of foods that are nostalgic foods for him from his childhood or whatever that we have to eat. Um, and, um, and, and so there's stuff from your childhood where it also connects you like to your family, to your, you know, um, not just to the old you, but to a whole set of people.

Robin:

I'm also thinking that maybe we actually can have nostalgia for past things that aren't in our lives, like a story from our parents' lives, or grandparents' lives, or even our nation, like the American Revolution or something. I feel like Americans are taught to have nostalgia for the American Revolution.

Agnes:

Remember you once posted about, I think it was a response to something in the New York Times about all these Hallmark movies and they all have these lists of traits, like Christmas movies. It has to be like a girl from the big city visits the small town and there's a guy who runs the candy shop and whatever. They all have this structure And you were asking about that, like, what is it about the structure that appeals to us? And maybe one answer would be somehow we have nostalgia for this, for this like small town America, even though most of us have never lived in it. How does that happen?

Robin:

Well, I guess there's a, you know, in the Hallmark movie, there are moments when the characters see something of value in their lives and then in their world. And we can see it too. And we feel identified with those characters by seeing it the same. We see them as in our tribe by seeing the same value in the same way. And but it's nostalgic because it's events supposedly in the past or at some other past period. Now, maybe some homework movies are taking place in the center current, but I certainly think for like historic, famous historical events like, I don't know, D-Day or the attack on Pearl Harbor or the American Revolution, like there's a sense of which. we look back on that moment and we have imagined that the emotion of those people and how they saw that event, what, how they reacted to it, how, what values came to their mind for in response to that event. And we see that we share those values and we feel tied to them and we feel they are then us. And then, you know, Americans have existed for centuries and say, you know, we have an American spirit or something that, That would be a way in which maybe nationalism or patriotism can be anchored in events where we see it the same. I mean, so many civil rights movies, I like this, I saw one recently called Rustin, but there's a whole genre of movies that goes through famous events of the civil rights era. and, you know, evoke this strong feeling of sympathy toward the people then who, you know, we're fighting for values that they suffered for and other people around didn't see it the same, but we see it the same as them presumed to. And we are then tied to these people. And we then are proud of our history to be the descendants of people who saw that value then that we now see the same. And that's where we anchor our sense of who we are and where we came from.

Agnes:

So I'm trying to remember. It's one of those times when it's really annoying about embrace the bad. As an aside, I wonder, my husband has a really great memory. He just remembers everything. If he saw a movie when he was 12 years old, he knows the plot now. And he reads really, really slow, and I read really fast, and I remember nothing. And I've wondered about whether those things are connected. Possibly, yes. I'm just not storing anything. I'm taking it really fast. Anyway, remembering this paper that I read by Jerry Cohen, philosopher Jerry Cohen, the Marxist philosopher. It was really good, and it was about a defensive conservatism of a certain kind. Of course, he's a famous Marxist, so it's weird to hear him defend conservatism. Conservatism? Conservatism?

Robin:

Marxism? Marx is pretty old by now.

Agnes:

Yeah. This is still, this paper is a while back, but he's dead now. But, um, um, um, that basically he talks at the beginning of the paper about this eraser, like a pencil eraser that he has in his office, right? And, uh, that he's used for decades to erase things and how he wouldn't be happy if it was replaced with just a brand new one that was full. Like it's only half there, whatever. He's attached to this eraser. that he has been using for so long. And he doesn't want the better one, he wants that one. And then he goes on to like, you know, certain like, I don't know, Oxford colleges or whatever. It's a hypothetical example, but it sounds like how you might not want to take an Oxford college and like tear it down and replace it with something better. Even if you get something better, we might like the old thing. And he describes that as like sort of the fundamental principle of conservatism is sometimes you want to keep the old thing just because it's the old one that you've already got. And you don't want a better thing instead of it. And like on some level like this is crazy. It's like a way of arguing. I don't want a better thing. I want a worse thing. And a lot of you know what you might call like NIMBYism and stuff, right, is grounded in this thought, in this conservative thought, which is like, I like the way my city looks now, and I don't want a big tall building showing up. You might mess it up if you change anything, so let's just keep it the way it is. So I'm interested now to think about whether nostalgia is just part of this basic conservative mentality, this conservatism that we have about some things. We arbitrarily decide, oh, I'm going to be a NIMBY about all these things, but then the pencil eraser, You know, I gotta keep that. I don't want a better one. I want the old one. I want the one that I've had. That at least about some things we're going to have this attitude of, I just want the one that I have. And I don't want a better one.

Robin:

Now, there are often moments in your life where you change and you say, yes, it would be more comfortable if I stayed where I am, but I'm going to pay the cost of change. And I see some value in that, but it's going to cost me for a while. And then you do achieve value. And now you can look back nostalgically on the moment when you decided to pay that price and make the change. So nostalgia isn't necessarily going to recommend not changing things. It's going to be the ability to see the same as the person previously making that choice and see it together with them. But it might be a choice to reject the eraser and pick the new one.

Agnes:

Well, as long as you can sort of hold on to the memory of that choice, then yeah, now you can, but what if someone's like, yeah, okay, but you can be Agnes, and you can forget most of the things that you did, and then always be getting new things, and be reading new books and stuff. I mean, it's hard to see how there's gonna be a nostalgic argument. If I can guarantee you, you're not gonna remember, then you can't even, that's the only way to store it.

Robin:

I mean, immigrants have this interesting combination, where they fondly remember the old world, and then they remember leaving the old world and coming here and how hard it was. But they often have a lot of nostalgia for that whole process, not just the place they left, but the cost they paid to come here and the early adjustments. And all of that they are nostalgic about.

Agnes:

Yeah, I'm so curious whether my parents are nostalgic about their first years. in this country, which were very hard. They never talk about it. But then they don't really talk about that so much in general. So. But I could sort of imagine somehow there are times in your life where it just feels like a lot is happening. And then, yeah, you can think back. during quieter times and be nostalgic. Because when you're nostalgic, you get to be picky. And you can just remember when a lot is happening, then there's both good and bad, and you can remember the good stuff. When things are pretty calm and everything is fine, but nothing amazing is happening, then you would turn back to nostalgia and refresh those peaks.

Robin:

Now, according to my theory here, The thing you'd have to be focusing on is some way in which in that past you saw something a certain way, and now you're still going to see it that way. So for example, for your parents, it might be the first years they're struggling and they're asking themselves, should we give up and go back? And they say, no, this seems to be worth it. We're going to stick with this. And they're holding in their mind, the value of sticking with this. And then you could, they could look back on said, yeah, that was the right choice and identify with their past person, you know, feeling committed to it, that choice and making that choice and approving together back with that choice. That is under my story. It's, it's about looking at something the same.

Agnes:

Yeah, I guess that doesn't quite seem to fit either my parents' case. I mean, there was no option of going back once you leave communist Hungary illegally. But, you know, the Jerry Towing case of the eraser, I don't think there's some values that his younger self had. It's just that he had it, and that was him, the person who had it earlier.

Robin:

So that fits more with my attachment story that some, a big part of the emotion of nostalgia is just feeling the attachment, feeling the strength of pulled toward a thing that you've been with for a long time. and that can be, you know, a spouse or a house. So you're talking about attached to old things, you know, in the, in property rights or property taxes, there's this very basic question that as, say, you live in a house and the area around your house is getting built up, And now if we tax your house in proportion to its value, you're going to be paying higher and higher taxes. And then people often say, well, this isn't fair. I bought the house, but I can't afford to pay the taxes to live here. And we economists say, well, that's the signal the world's telling you that your property could be used better by somebody else for something else. But you think, no, but I want to keep using it, but I don't want to pay for it. There's some sense in which you feel an entitlement to your nostalgic attachments. And maybe that's an interesting question when people think that because they feel nostalgia, they are entitled to keep some things from changing.

Agnes:

Okay, I'm once again, even though I led us down this road with the eraser, I'm once again thinking, I really do think there's a difference between attachments we have to things that we continue to have, and nostalgia, which is about the impossibility of going with, like, you can't go home again. That's the thought of nostalgia, right? Nostos is homecoming and algos is, like, sorrow. And it's the sorrow of the impossibility of going back. You remember that time, but you can't go there. And so we're indulging in this activity where only part of the story, the whole story can't be I'm connecting to my past self and saying we're the same one and we value the same things because there's a pain there. What's the pain? There's also the sense that I've lost that person, that she's not me anymore, that I kind of wish I could go back to if I could press a button, I wouldn't press it. But I have something like a wish to go back that is being frustrated and that I'm kind of enjoying that pain. That whole twisted set of things is actually kind of now I'm thinking kind of different from the simpler case where you have some stuff and you want to hold on to that stuff, or you have some people you want to hold on to those people. That's not mixed with pain. That's just attachment.

Robin:

I wonder how different it is to think on your past self than, say, a past associate. Say you once had a past lover and then it broke off, but you could remember your fondness for them at the time and maybe some fondness now. but mixed with the regret of knowing how it's gonna go wrong or knowing how you mismanaged it?

Agnes:

Yeah, I mean, I think you could be... So I don't think that the pain of nostalgia is going to be the pain of how you mismanaged it. that will be additional to the nostalgia. The pain of nostalgia is that there's a positive thing you're remembering in the past and you're experiencing pain because it's not in the present. That's it. That's what the pain is. You can't go back home. So if the thing you're remembering is painful too, then that's just like an additional pain over and above the pain of nostalgia.

Robin:

There may just be several kinds of nostalgia or different words or something. I think I think you can look back on a time that you wouldn't want to go back to with nostalgia yet.

Agnes:

Well, I actually agree. when you feel nostalgic, you're insulated from the demands of having to deliberate about whether or not you would wanna go back there. You know you're pretty safe, you're not going back there. And so you can long to go back there, even if you would definitely not press the button that would take you back there. And I guess I do think nostalgia involves a longing to go back there, even if you would actually choose otherwise.

Robin:

So when I think about like a physical space I'm in or something, like even like this office I'm in right now, I must be attached to it because I'm used to it. I've been around for a while, but I don't feel very strong emotion about it. But if I remember past offices, I feel like more emotion comes to my mind.

Agnes:

Right. That's nostalgia.

Robin:

Right. And so there's this sense in which I care more about places that are no longer around than the place I'm in.

Agnes:

Right. So so that's OK. I still I think we haven't gotten to the core of what is mysterious about nostalgia. And I think this is the mystery is that. We call up for ourselves. these past scenarios or things or people or whatever, often they're not actually times we would want to return to if we could, but we experience them with longing as though we would have wanted to return to them even though, because we don't, we're not faced with the test. Um, and we kind of enjoy the pain of longing for this thing that we can't have. That's weird.

Robin:

The longing pulls us toward it and identifies us with it. So certainly, if you think of expatriates, people who've left a country and go off to another country, they have nostalgia about their old country, and that nostalgia may well bring them back sometimes. So there's a sense of which nostalgia on the margin functions as something that might pull you back.

Agnes:

I now remember the thing I'm most nostalgic about in the whole world more so than my grad school experience. It's my grandmother's, my father's mother's house in Kispest in Budapest. And I, like, know the layout of that house incredibly well. It was very old. I mean, most people would not find it to be very nice, but I spent, like, you know, my young years of my life there, plus, like, in the summers after we came back to U.S., once we were American citizens, we'd go back, and I spent a lot of time there. I'm definitely never going back to that house because it's been sold and I'm sure it was totally redone because it was very, it was the sort of house that should have been redone 60 years ago. Anyway, I don't, I don't think that, like, this is going to be a very motivating kind of nostalgia, but it feels somehow impossible to me or unthinkable that I've lost this place. I have, definitely. But I'm like, how could I have lost it? And I think to think back on it is to somehow feel like it's so close to me. I can remember, I can walk through the apartment, the house, so well. I can walk through the path in the rose garden. I can tell you where everything is. And in that way, it's so real to me, and yet it's completely gone.

Robin:

So as a social scientist, you know, when we ask what the function of some capacity or behavior is, one of our first questions is going to be, well, what does it change? How is the world different as a result? And the most obvious answer for nostalgia is the world is different because when you're nostalgic for things, you're more likely if possible to actually go back. You, you work, it makes you less willing to leave more willing to go back or willing to retain whatever it is, like the eraser things you had nostalgia all on the margin, make you reluctant to let go.

Agnes:

except a lot of people like I think the dominant um that sort of manifestation of nostalgia is for times, past times in one's life. And I'm, like, I'm remembering a house that isn't there anymore, not in the form that I... I can't go back to it. And I'm remembering times, like, my grad school period. Like, it's really typical for nostalgia to connect us to something that we cannot act in relation to.

Robin:

I mean, if if some function or behavior sometimes has effects and behavior and other time it can have no effect. Then we can still understand its overall effect in terms of the places it can have an effect here.

Agnes:

But what I mean. I guess the question would be. What percentage of nostalgia is not actionable? And if it's a really high percentage, then it's hard to believe that we've gotten at the essence of it with your theory.

Robin:

Okay, let me offer a different theory, which is the idea of culture. That is, culture is something that we not only grow up with, but we become attached to, and we become likely to reproduce and realize later in our lives. And nostalgia is this direct mechanism by which we're trying to make our future worlds like our past worlds, i.e. retain culture. So, if there was something about this house that you liked and you were building a new house, you might try to have that feature in your new house like this feature of this old house you remember so fondly. It's going to just keep the world, you know, somewhat perpetuating itself. It's going to keep the world not changing as much as it otherwise might because of your attachment to the world you grew up in and the world you previously had. And that makes simple cultural evolution sense. That is, the way cultures perpetuate themselves has to be through some way in which, when you're imprinted with a culture, you are then less reluctant to change it. More reluctant to change it, sorry. And so nostalgia is just this feeling of my culture, my world, me, and it shouldn't be lost. I don't wanna lose it.

Agnes:

Okay, so then I guess we do come back to conservatism, that it's basically just a conservative instinct where, in general, when there's some value, we wanna preserve it. sometimes even at the cost of having more value overall.

Robin:

Or more apparent value, that is. So, I mean, one of the main ideas of conservatism and certainly cultural evolution is this idea that things that are valuable in our behaviors and cultures aren't things we know why they're valuable. We can't reason through their, you know, why they're valuable to figure out whether to keep them. culture is in part a system by which we just retain what we have because the fact that it exists implies some degree of value. Cultural evolution in the past selected this thing and it bequeathed it to you, and you don't know why it's valuable exactly, but the fact that it exists is a reason to presume, to some degree, that it does have value. And this is, you know, for example, when conservatives says, you know, we're making divorce too easy or something, right. They say, look, I know you have arguments about why it would be better to make divorce easier. I know those make sense, but we've had this practice for a long time of divorce being hard. And here we are, the successful culture, and we don't know exactly what made us successful. This could be one of them. Don't be too quick to throw away what we are because we don't know which parts of what we are brought us to where brought us to be here.

Agnes:

Right. So, I mean, I guess you're constantly coming up against this argument with all of your different sort of innovations that want to tear down everything we have in value. And so, you know, a question you must be faced with is like, how does one select what, you know, which pieces of nostalgia to lean into and which ones to lean against?

Robin:

I mean, I would recommend that what we do is we try out new ideas on small scales and measure and test them to see how well they work and then spread them as they seem to consistently, you know, give value, not simply throw away old things and replace them wholesale just because we have some thoughts in our head.

Agnes:

So, like, wouldn't you recommend that Jerry Cohen, he's dead now, but, you know, just take another eraser and just, next to, not throw away the other one, but, you know, just try, here you go, here's an extra, and maybe you'll end up liking it more.

Robin:

Put several erasers on your desk, new one and old one.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

And then when you're in a rush, which one do you grab for? You grab for the new one, sometimes you see how it works.

Agnes:

But I just think you're not a real conservative there because the conservative, the true conservative might say, no, I don't, that's already threatening my, like, it's important to me that it be the one and only eraser. And, you know, that I be committed to it.

Robin:

And like getting a second one is just a third of the way to... Until 400 years ago, pretty much the entire world was very conservative in this sense. And that change was slow and most changes weren't welcome unless, you know, unless you go out trying to conquer your enemies or something. But, um, and then in the last 400 years, we've had all these innovations and changes. And then I think the world kind of learned that the ones who allow and embrace innovations have been winning. And if you don't do that, you're going to get left behind and become a loser. And the world has learned you want to. at least modestly accommodate and pick up new things, otherwise you're going to lose out. And that's the modern world. But of course, we only do that for a limited range of things in our worlds. We do it for production technologies, say, or military technologies, et cetera. But there's other sorts of things like the social innovations that I want to consider. We don't have as much of a habit of changing and expecting that they will change, and we have to be open to them. But this is one of the things I worry about in a coming downturn in the next few centuries, is that innovation will brandew a halt, and then many of these social pressures to liberalism will go away.

Agnes:

And I think much of... But on the upside, there'll be lots of conservatism. It's hard to know. That's the thing. It's hard to know what's the upside and what's the downside. Because if you're going to buy into at least some of this stuff, then that's a great world full of conservatism where we get to keep everything. Maybe there's no divorce in that world.

Robin:

Well, one of the things that people are most engaging of for change is the idea of social mobility. So in ancient worlds where you just inherit your position in society, that if you're not very high, then you got it. You're kind of stuck there. And people today tell themselves they really hate that and that they really like a world like today where your children or grandchildren could do much better than you. And the world where that change is possible is only possible in a world where, you know, we don't have maximal conservatism. We will allow that.

Agnes:

I don't think people really like social mobility. I think they like it while they're moving up and then they want to entrench themselves because they don't want their kids moving down.

Robin:

Right. But the idea if we just freeze everything where it is now and nobody moves, I don't think most people would approve of that.

Agnes:

I mean, I think a lot of elites pretty much say that's what they want in a lot of different ways.

Robin:

But it's still a minority.

Agnes:

Because they were able to move up and they're like, now freeze. Now keep everything where it is now that I made it to

Robin:

Right. I still think would be a minority of population who would say that. I think most people would say we should allow continued mobility. But.

Agnes:

I don't know. I mean, I think that. Like. I don't know to what percentage of the population is mobility so important. I don't know.

Robin:

Well, it's certainly something we give a lot of lip service to. So, I mean, for example... Right.

Agnes:

A lot of the people at the top are people who worked really hard and got there. So they are really... Okay.

Robin:

But, for example, consider democracy. I, you know, as opposed to monarchy, monarchy is a system where, you know, the king or queen gets to pass on their position to their kids. And instead we want the possibility of people competing for office and us being able to choose many different possibilities for office. And that's change that I think, you know, overwhelmingly people would support continued democracy over monarchy.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

And of course, if you think about elite college admissions, the idea that they should all just be legacy admissions, I think most people wouldn't approve that idea. They like maybe a small minority of legacy admissions, but they want most admissions to be on meritocratic grounds of various sorts.

Agnes:

I mean, I guess the fact that England still has a royal family is some kind of nostalgia, right?

Robin:

Right, but it's limited, right?

Agnes:

It's very limited in what they can do politically, but still... People do kind of like kings and queens. We don't want them to do much, we want them to be there, right? Like Sweden, I think Sweden has a queen or something. I only learned this recently. A princess. So, like, we like stories with kings and queens in them. pictures of kings and queens. So I like, yeah, we like democracy, but there's a lot about kings and queens that we are a bit nostalgic for.

Robin:

So you've seen the Lord of the Rings movies. Yeah. I guess in the second movie, maybe there's this description of Gondor, which is this big white city on the hill against a hillside as a place where the leaders care more about the memories of their past than their current world. laid it as a criticism of them. So there's this cultural idea that we have of the possibility of going too far in respecting the past, or even the idea of the Renaissance. Just before the Renaissance, everybody just cared about reading Plato and Aristotle and revising the past. But the Renaissance came on and said, no, we're going to set aside that nostalgia and look at new ideas.

Agnes:

Some of us are just really attached to that previous. We're still just reading Plato and Aristotle. You're not going to get somebody from those Renaissance ideas. No, there was plenty of reading Plato and Aristotle in the Renaissance too. Thank goodness. Right. I mean, maybe it's just like, to quote Aristotle, that we want some kind of a mean, like not, there's a Zola novel about a town in like, you know, these novels are all around like, I don't know, 1870 or something, et cetera, 1870, but it's a medieval, like it's still living in the medieval period in this town. It's not even that far from Paris, but it's just, it's like the town lost in the mists of time and they're super into their religious embroidery and, And nostalgia, basically, it's nostalgia town. And so maybe there's some kind of an idea that you can be too nostalgic or you can be not nostalgic enough, and then there's some right amount of attachment to the past that you can have.

Robin:

So here's where I think nostalgia comes under the most criticism. So, you know, I'm 64 years old. I've lived across many decades of life. Some of the things I'm nostalgic for are features of the entire world at the time, not just my house or something, which have changed and many people think rightly should have changed. And so if I look back on those fondly, I'm looked at suspiciously. So for example, we've greatly raised our standards of how much attention should go to child raising. And so I could look back on my childhood where I was left for many hours to wander dangerous canyons and wild places, and I enjoyed it. And I might look on that nostalgically as what a nice time to grow up, and other people today would look back on that somewhat horror as my parents at the time were not being as careful and protective of me as they are of being their children.

Agnes:

So there are- Weirdly, I think actually most people are super nostalgic for that time, even though we're all super protective of our kids.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

Everyone's like, wasn't it great when kids were just able to do whatever they want? Including people who are in the parenting trenches now. They're nostalgic for that, even if they never went through it. So I actually don't think you'd be looked down on for expressing that nostalgia. I see that nostalgia expressed all the time on Twitter.

Robin:

Right. There was only three networks and only three kinds of shows you could watch at any one time. And then they all sort of agreed mostly on most news and things like that. And now we have this very fragmented world of news and entertainment. And you could look back with some nostalgia on when we all saw things the same. And when we all knew what the major show on Friday night was and we'd all watched it and we could all talk about it when we came into work Monday or something. And you could be nostalgic about the world of unity of sorts, but you could also admit, yeah, but that came at some substantial cost.

Agnes:

Anyway, it seems to be- This is why people tend to not express nostalgia publicly, but they tend to express it with a group of people who are their co-nostalgists about that particular thing. So you could get together with other 64-year-olds and talk about the three networks and all of you could empathize and vent and whatever about this wonderful, glorious past and be shielded from the criticisms about like, yeah, but there were costs to that. I think nostalgia, maybe more than anything, it's like a bubble where you're allowed to just only remember the good things. You're allowed to not worry about the costs. You're just, it's, it's a form of self-indulgence.

Robin:

Well, except there's this very common thing, which is whatever the new thing is, is, you know, taking us all to hell. So, you know, in the last 10 years of social media and previously was other things, you know, it was video games at one point or cable news or videotapes or, you know, uh, Novels, you know, a whole way before my time, but yes. So, you know, when there's a new thing and then some new thing is going wrong in the world, you could think nostalgia is part of the force behind being suspicious of the new thing and wondering why we couldn't just stay with the old thing. Why did we have to bring in this new thing and whether we should maybe rein it in and take, go back a bit. that's often an intuition about these new things is they're, they're, you know, they're coming in too fast and too easily, and they're going to cause problems. And why can't we slow this down? And shouldn't we have some more review and cautions? And that's often about, you know, I grew up fine. So what my world must've been fine.

Agnes:

Right, I guess. But still, it seems to me, even when nostalgia is sort of motivating you to resist something... the mindset that it induces is not like a kind of careful cost-benefit analysis. Because you might be like, well, look, I grew up fine. Like, here were the good things about how I grew up, and then here are some other, you know, risks that I maybe didn't notice I avoided or whatever. And like, when I add the total package together, we should keep it the way it was. No, nostalgia doesn't do that. It just says like, the past was good, so why would we want to change it? And so it is still a bubble. It's a way of thinking about value that a little bit resists adding things up.

Robin:

So it might be worth contrasting this past-looking bubble with future-looking bubbles of hope and aspiration. So when you think about your future self, you can't imagine them in as much detail as you can remember your past self. But we still are very motivated by these images of our future self and working toward them. And they're often pretty hopeful and perhaps even, you know, neglecting downsides. That is, people hope they will become an actor or musician or athlete in ways that you look, well, that looks pretty unlikely, but we encourage those hopes and just seeing the good side of your futures as a reasonable approach to planning for the future. We don't want people to have dreams, we call them. So dreams aren't realistic assessments of the future any more than nostalgia is a realistic assessment of the past.

Agnes:

Right, so maybe nostalgia, one way to describe nostalgia, though this doesn't pick it out, this will capture some other things, so just idealism about the past. And then we can say, okay, there's also idealism about the future. And it's actually kind of annoying that we don't have a set of words that pair those things very neatly. Because, yeah, maybe it's going to be like dreams.

Robin:

The rose-colored glasses, I suppose.

Agnes:

Rose-colored glasses, yes, right, okay. So the rose-colored glasses, but you can look at just like another human being through rose-colored glasses and only see the good in them, and that has nothing to do with either. So I think it's, you're right that it's particularly easy to look at distant times through rose-colored glasses because you don't see them very clearly. So the distant past or future. Though even trips, I think, like, when you're gonna take a trip, it's always very exciting, like, when you're setting out for your trip, and you're packing your bags, and then when you think back, you might think fondly, but like, when you're just on the way home, you're just like, ah, oh, vlog. Yeah, thank goodness that's over, whatever. And, It's a relief to be done. And so there are these optimistic moments, which is before the trip and then like quite a bit after the trip. And then there's when you're just in the slog of it.

Robin:

So I feel like the way to channel Agnes Callard in this context is to point out just how hard it often can be to see the value in things. And notice the value of this particular way to see value. saying, look, if you don't even know what the point of your life is, the point of anything is, how are you ever supposed to see value? Well, one reliable way is to let yourself see a little nostalgia. Remember some past times and you will see value that you will have this emotional feeling of attachment and that something was precious there. And you will see the value in your past world and your past self and your past associates. in a way that's often hard to see. And that's important.

Agnes:

I guess the thing that's a little odd to me is that quite often when I'm, if I'm nostalgic about that house that I told you about, I wish I were nostalgic about the love of my grandmother or something. Right, no. But there were these cushions where you had to fluff them before you sat down, and I just loved that, that they were filled with something, yeah. And then you could sink into them. And there was this bed that had these blankets that they were just very old, and so they were extremely heavy. And it is still covering. I think they were just bad blankets. But I'm nostalgic for these things, for these details, where I don't exactly think that they were so valuable. It's more like by remembering those details, I'm connecting to this. past place rather than like seeing the value.

Robin:

Okay, but if you were at risk of feeling very depressed and seeing nothing of value in your life, this would be seeing some value.

Agnes:

So, an interesting question. Does depression motivate people to be nostalgic? That is, do people try to get out of their depression by thinking back nostalgically? My guess would be no. I would be surprised if that were true.

Robin:

Maybe the depression disables the nostalgic.

Agnes:

Right. Well, then the nostalgia is not going to function that well for this particular purpose.

Robin:

In that context, right.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

Like, so it's a common thing that Christmas movies, et cetera, nostalgic. It's common that we get together as families at, at the holidays in order to bond together as groups. And part of the way we see value in each other is to remember our past as families say, and then Christmas movies, et cetera, help put us into the nostalgic mood or our world and our families. And I, you know, I think the holidays are in fact, nostalgia holidays in substantial part. You know, you put up the decorations and sing the songs and eat the food and you remember past holidays fondly and you have nostalgia. And part of what you're trying to do in some sense is to recreate that. I think, for example, part of why parents want to share holidays with their children is they have nostalgic memories of themselves when they were a child in holidays and they want to share that with their kids.

Agnes:

So one distinction that my husband likes to make a lot because he taught a whole course about it is like, two modes of being one of them is sort of being in the moment and the other is like seeing the moment a certain moment of your life as like part of a story so um um and um One thing it seems to me that nostalgia is part of the narrative approach to life. In telling you about these nostalgic things, I was able to tell you some stories about myself. Your nostalgia does allow you to tell stories. It makes you feel like your life is a story. And that might be of value to you. Um, and, and a story has to have details. And like, that's the thing about nostalgia is you have these details like about the pillows or whatever that are, that become important to you. Not because they're valuable, but maybe because they're there, they furnish the story.

Robin:

Let me remind you of one of the correlates of the sacred in my sacred analysis was that abstract sacred things can become concrete through some touching contact between abstract things and concrete things. And then those concrete things can help us see the sacred through their concrete examples. So that's a love letter, a flag, an old home, The idea is that, you know, the key idea of the sacred of my story is that we see the sacred from afar to see it the same, but then we lack the close, direct connections that we crave for things we care a lot about or want to be close to. And so this process by which some particular things can become sacred through their association with something sacred allows us then to have direct concrete connections. So your memory of this house and the pillow allows you to have a closer connection to this generally sacred but heart-elusive thing, which was your childhood in that area, And now you can more respect and connect to that whole thing through this concrete case, which is then accessible for a story.

Agnes:

But what does that have to do with the story? What does anything you've said have to do with the story?

Robin:

Well, that is stories are sequences of concrete events.

Agnes:

I see.

Robin:

I see. And so in order to and so the way that stuck, I mean, in some sense, like a story like sorry, the like, you know, the Christmas story, a Christmas carol, say, right? The stories themselves become sacred because they are stories told in association with sacred things, and then they are full of these details we can latch on to. And you could say at dinner, God bless us, everyone, and everybody will recognize the allusion to Tiny Tim wishing his family well and the Christmas story, and then we can all feel the connection.

Agnes:

Okay, but I guess I actually feel like I do want to understand better the relationship between the sacred and narrative. So stories have more, I mean, they have details. They also have a structure. They're easy to remember. And when you tell people stories about yourself, I guess you feel like they can connect with you in some other way than without the story. But it's not clear what that is.

Robin:

I think there's a brand promise with certain kinds of stories that they will, in fact, reinforce our ideals. when you get to the end of it. I think if you tell a story which has a terribly cynical conclusion, people will feel you've cheated them. Especially if you presented it as a nice church story or Christmas story or some ideal story, even a story about the virtue of college, right? I think that part of the brand promise of a story is that this set of details will make sense within some larger sacred concept or concepts. It will reaffirm them, even if they'll be, you know, obstacles along the way that will make you doubt whether it will be affirmed. And then you can be all the more satisfied at the end when they are finally affirmed or somehow affirmed. So, for example, the recent movie, The Holdovers, you know, this teacher sacrifices for a student. And so we might think the ideal answer would be that the teacher gets rewarded, but the teacher doesn't get rewarded. But nevertheless, we could still approve of their sacrifice, still approve of them having been a good person doing the right thing. And some says the brand promise is still upheld, that it's a uplifting story.

Agnes:

Right, I guess uplifting stories perform something like the function of nostalgia. Some uplifting stories are just nostalgic, but. Right. And I guess that that goes along with your thought about they're supposed to reinforce a certain way of being, a certain way of acting, but now that you've seen that, now if you were ever a teacher or whatever, you'll do the thing that's good for your student,

Robin:

I think we've been talking a little over an hour?

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

And maybe someday we'll look back fondly on this particular conversation. What do you think?

Agnes:

I think I'm going to forget it.

Robin:

Well, yeah, and then you'll be reminded of it again someday. Now you wonder, see, then the question is, the feeling you had at the moment, how will that compare to the feeling when you look back on it? Can you anticipate how it would feel to look back on it? But it'll feel different, right? Being in the moment will feel different than looking back on it. And that's the whole point of what's different about it, nostalgia. Anyway. All right. Bye for now.

Agnes:

Bye.