Nostalgia Kills Progress

We have to keep on movin' forward

Note: Apologies for the long wait for this first edition of Hold My Chalice. The muse and I needed sleep. And Christmas cookies.

---

If there’s one thing humans are good at, it’s nostalgia. We love to look back, to remember what it was like then and how we had it better (even if we did have to walk to school in a blizzard, uphill, both ways). We love to tell the next generation how soft they are, how unruly they are, how lazy they are (one that hit GenX particularly hard, especially when a major news weekly called us ‘slackers’ right on the front cover).

Every single generation has some disdain for ‘kids these days’ and longs for a simpler time, when we were young and discovering the things that would define us.

The problem with nostalgia is the layer of gauze that obscures the flaws – nostalgia reminds you of what was good but hides what was bad. And when nostalgia becomes “the way things are supposed to be” it is damaging. It denies problems. It perpetuates harm. And to those who hold on to it too hard, it becomes an alternate reality that’s nearly impossible to be shaken from.

We have seen this play out on the national stage with the so-called MAGA crowd; those who are convinced that a time gone by was the way things should be, and the only way to “make America great again” is to return to an imagined perfect moment – that only has room for those who buy into or fit that imagined perfect moment. What we know is that this imagined perfect moment is, for the MAGA crowd, a time when everyone ‘knew their place’ but which they imagine is how everyone liked it, until some uppity women, blacks, and gays got too big for their britches and ruined it for everyone. Forgetting, of course, that there’s always been progress, always been change, always been some new way of understanding who we are.

It's hard to say which imagined perfect moment most MAGAs think back to, but it’s often the one where they first learned about the world and their place in it. Someone born in the 1950s, whose school years were largely in the 1960s, has a different understanding of the world than someone born in the 1980s, whose school years were largely in the 1990s. Consider how much happened in those ensuing years – and how much has happened since. Wars, political scandals, natural disasters, major tragedies, terrorism at home and abroad, plus shifts in culture and technology, the progress of science, etc. Of COURSE the world has changed, and the imagined perfect moment of, say, 1961, or 1987, or even 2000, is… nothing more than imagined.

---

Now I bring up 1961 and 1987 in particular, because in those years, we saw major shifts to our own Unitarian Universalist faith (and we should have seen it in 2002, and 2017, but… well, that’s a story for another day). In 1961, Unitarians and Universalists consolidated into one Association , and out of that came a set of organizing principles the gathered covenanted to affirm and promote. The last time we analyzed and revised our principles was in the mid-1980s, and it was a good, welcome, and anticipated thing. Unitarian Universalists are pretty much allergic to anything approaching a creed or statement of belief, so changing it up now and then isn’t a bad thing.

So it says something that there is a group of people who think it is. People who long for the imagined perfect moment of Unitarian Universalism.

The imagined perfect moment seems to be 1987, after the last Article II change - the one that is reflected in the version printed in Singing the Living Tradition and Singing the Journey. (I don’t know what they think about the wording change to the second source that expands ‘women and men’ to ‘people’ - although I suspect some reject even that change for reasons.)

I say ‘seems to be’ because there is some confusion about which imagined perfect moment they want – but I think the clue is in how nostalgia works. I was born in 1964, so I join many of my leading-edge GenXers in remembering a particular set of cultural, historical, educational, and political markers. But I became a committed member of a Unitarian Universalist congregation in 2004, so I share an understanding of our faith with others who came in during the early-mid 2000s (or who were in religious education at that time). We were still using the original Welcoming Congregation manual, we were just getting the new hymnal supplement, and church planting was the big thing in leadership.

For those who want to go back to a different time (make UU great again?), the imagined perfect moment is the moment they came into the faith. What they learned when they first became Unitarian Universalist.

That’s the UU they know, that they hung their hat on. Maybe that version of our faith is what saved them (that’s real - this faith saved me, too). But instead of arriving at the waters edge and jumping into the river, they sat on a rock and there they shall stay. Right where they became Unitarian Universalist.

It’s as though that moment hasn’t just become the rock on which they sit, but that moment has become their creed.

It’s as though they forgot that everything we have gone through shapes us and informs us – all of us, individually and collectively.

It’s as though they want the gauze-covered image of who we are to never change, to stay perfect – forgetting that it was never perfect to begin with.

It’s as though they have fallen into the same kind of traps that the MAGA crowd and QAnon followers have fallen into - not just longing for but believing this alternate reality, and seeing anything that threatens it as wrongheaded or worse, conspiracy.

We are better than this.

We MUST be better than this.

This isn’t who we are. There is no imagined perfect moment. There is no progress in nostalgia, only traps.

As Pat Humphries wrote in 1984, ‘we gotta keep on moving forward, never turning back.’

The imagined perfect moment we are meant to be looking toward is in front of us.

It’s right there, waiting for us to see its possibilities and potentials.

---