Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment
By Charles Taylor
Belknap Press, 640 pages, $37.95
Reject modernity. Embrace tradition. So goes a beloved motto of the online right that is frequently accompanied by a kitschy aesthetic and recommendations for lifestyle self-help. At their crudest, these calls to abandon modernity seem a lot like mere nostalgia, a kind of barely thought-through instinct that the past must have been inherently better than a debased present. The easy thing to do, therefore, is to just go back to the past. Like a lot of easy answers to complex problems, “RETVRN” is easy because it’s lazy and wrong.
Thoughtful conservative scholars recognize this. In his 2009 essay “Progress and Memory,” the Notre Dame political theorist and Compact contributing editor Patrick Deneen diagnosed “nostalgism” as a form of “temporal fragmentation that constitutes one of the features of the landscape of modernity.” Deneen noted that the nostalgist makes the same mistake as the “progressive” in being “hostile to the lessons of history” through a kind of “willful forgetting.” The nostalgist sees historical developments as nothing more than a litany of “human failure and misery” and ignores the genuine advances modernity has achieved over premodernity.
While Deneen was surely correct in diagnosing “RETVRN” politics long before they took on that label, there is a more thoughtful rejection of modernity, long popular on the right, that can’t be reduced to instinctual nostalgism and the paradoxical projection of utopian hopes onto a past that is to be restored as our future.