When we're in the office building, eating takeout after meal, looking at the gradually cooling grease on the takeaway box, is there a moment when you especially want to go back in time?
This "past" is very ethereal. It could be the yard of my grandparents when I was a child, they cooked on the stove, and the whole family sat around a round table to eat and chat. It may be that when you go to school, you excitedly carry your school bag back and ask your parents what to eat at noon today?
In the imagination, the past has been added with a layer of twilight filters, looking slow and peaceful, sunny and peaceful, in a world where the troubles of poverty, social controversy, and the separation of family life and death do not exist. It is a utopia recreated by adults according to their own current wishes, but this utopia has the outline of the past world, which makes people mistakenly think that such a beautiful world once existed.
The process of recreating utopia is Nostalgia. Nostalgia originally meant homesickness, referring to a person's great panic because of the longing for home, so nostalgia is often associated with nostalgia.
Nostalgia is not just the imagination of a foreigner drifting in the metropolis, as the comparative culture scholar Svetlana Boym puts it, in the 21st century, nostalgia has become a global epidemic, and in the age of de-historicization, people are eager to find a connection with the world of the past in a fragmented world.
Why is it that in such a high-speed forward world, more and more people will turn their heads and use the imaginary past world as a template to alleviate the real dilemma and soothe the emotions?
Nostalgia begins with panic over progress. In the development of modernization, people are obsessed with the theory of historical progress, believing that history is constantly moving forward and moving toward a better world, and all old problems will disappear with the completion of modernization.
In order to progress, people have accelerated the pace of production and created various progressive myths, such as social Darwinism, as if there is a "new god" who dominates the future and destiny of mankind, waving a whip, always reminding everyone: if you do not advance, you will retreat, and the survival of the fittest will prevail.
However, with the development of society, people have gradually realized that many problems in the economy, ethnicity, and country will not be solved together with the deepening of modernization. So, in order to avoid unpredictable storms, someone adjusted their posture, changed direction, and faced the immutable past.
According to the British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, nostalgia is a cause: the vision of individuality, freedom and happiness promised by globalization is collapsing. In an increasingly mobile world, people are constantly feeling panic about the future. The economic crisis that affects everyone indiscriminately and the chaos on the other side of the ocean has changed people's psychological state:
"The public has shifted from being so concerned with reducing the world's uncertainty and the apparent untrustworthiness of wanting to change the future to pinning their hopes on the past they still vaguely remember, the past they consider stable, trustworthy, and valuable."
In order to make this past look more fulfilling, people have driven "memory politics" to reorganize their past memories and histories to suit their hearts. For example, the past unequal state of human beings has been deleted, leaving only the harmonious and beautiful picture of small groups enjoying themselves; the historical stage of the barbaric struggle between people has been deleted, leaving only a primitive and romantic natural scenery; science and technology have been deleted, leaving only a simple and natural form of life.
A typical example is the "Li Ziqi Video" that has become popular all over the world. In Li Ziqi's short video, people are delighted to see an idyllic world destroyed by modernization. In this world, high-rise buildings are replaced by the original scenery of the countryside, information tools are replaced by farming tools, villagers seem to have no concept of money, and neighbors maintain relationships with each other by quaint feelings.
But this is, after all, a man-made utopia, a pastoral garden built according to the wishes of modern man. It deliberately ignores the inconveniences of the material conditions in the countryside, aestheticizes the complicated labor of people in the countryside, and provides an imaginative space for urban people to escape from reality.
These are the nostalgic imaginations that people used to fill reality after the myth of progress was shattered. But how does a molded utopia carry a scarred future? This is the trap of nostalgia and the dilemma that humanity has to face.