Culture and its relation to invoking nostalgia during stable times

Unlike animals, human psyche is a paradox. We continuously learn new things culturally and at the same time carry a strong feeling that new things are related to past. We justify them as an extension of the glorious past. The affection for past is unique among humans. Our past becomes stories of the present and continue to grow with generations. However, we don't carry along all the stories from past, we develop new stories and drop old or irrelevant ones. With time we get organized with family, friends and community which becomes a tradition leading to culture. Every community organizes itself differently so that their cultures also become different. As culture keeps changing with generation and locations, one culture can be better than others depending on the people in a particular community. Culture too is nothing but nostalgia. Culture translates from one generation to another via human social traditions based on their memories.

We all started with the search of resources and migrated from one part of the world to another. Our numbers kept increasing and populations settled along their way. To protect our resources we created boundaries and attacked on different territories. Many territories maintained their resources and others looted accessible areas. Hunger for better resources is still making people to migrate from one country to another. As we migrate, our cultures also migrate which generates a new set of culture as it mixes with others. As a larger group we might be following one trend but if we look into different cultures, we are divided into different sections. Today we see racism, fascism, casteism and communalism. These are derived from pride in culture. We developed fire, shelter, transportation and started growing our food. But the pride in culture which developed with human evolution kept us divided.

With time we gained stability which earned us free time. As a result, we started going down the memory lane more frequently. We also started focusing on other issues not necessarily related to human survival. Germany of the late 1930's, USA of 21st Century, India post liberalization, all are relatively more stable and affluent and hence more prone to nostalgia. In the absence of an absolute sense of danger, nostalgia reaches its peak.

With the Church getting all powerful, came inquisitions, with brahminical supremacy came bloody sacrifices and feudalism, with the rise of German industrial supremacy, came Hitler's holocaust, with crude oil economic boom, came Arab wahabism, with the post '91 liberalization boom came BJP, and with the post unipolar US hegemony over world came Trump. World over, cultural supremacy ideology's fulcrum has been invoking nostalgia in the garb of culturalism. And right wings invariably thrive only in stable eras. 

Conversely, the governance model of supremacists is so flawed that the same stability which ushered them into power turns into chaos because of its fundamental contradictions.  Chaos then leads to instability, to unrest, finally onto confrontation, by which time supremacists have absolute power at their command.

The colossal historical events which defeated these masquerades were either the use of force aka WW II, Afgan invasion etc or through renaissance which was but a redefinition of classical Greek philosophy. Hermits such as Buddha, Mahavira, Shankaracharya simply redefined existing ideology without overtly criticizing, in fact borrowing heavily from the old ones.

Point is simple...history shows that although a society under slavery can be liberated politically -ala American revolution, societies that buy onto the illusion of glorious past are either shown their physical worthlessness by an external aggressor or are demolished by simple scholastic men propagating an ideology which validly claims to symbolize an older glory, capturing an essence further back in time.

This blog is written in collaboration with Siddharth Sharma.

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