Snakes and Ladders
illustration by: Kübrasu Yıldırım
To mark the beginning of a new decade, Mangal Media is launching a series of articles about nostalgia. These articles will question the relationship between identity and memory and what it means to feel nostalgic in the peripheral world.
Do you have any embarrassing pictures from your childhood? For the overwhelming majority of Turkish men, that picture is the one our parents took during circumcision. Believe it or not, I have one worse. It's me as a chubby teenager standing on a short podium with a microphone, wearing a historic military uniform and a fur cap known as kalpak. I am supposed to be Atatürk in this picture. It appears the founder of the Turkish republic has risen from the grave to rescue the nation and read a poem written by our Turkish teacher. It's October 29, 1998. The 75th anniversary of the republic. It's also a year after the Kemalist "postmodern coup" that toppled the government. For a long time, this photograph filled me with both guilt and shame...
Shame is at its most corrosive when the source is intimate. This is why teenagers are so deeply ashamed of their parents and their bodies. It is also why opinions we held in the past later become the most embarrassing ones. Now that my generation has come of age, I feel a similar embarrassment about the sense of nostalgia we are collectively slumping into. There is something deeply appealing about the saccharine reinterpretation of the historical period that has coincided with my childhood and adolescence. I get overwhelmed by a feeling of comfort each time I see that pink-blue Stranger Things colour scheme. It's like being wrapped in cotton candy. But just like real cotton candy, gorging down on nostalgia feels overindulgent and gluttonous. Are we doing some kind of injustice to the truth by being so sentimental about the past?
This is perhaps why there is a trend among public intellectuals to eradicate nostalgia entirely. Conservative mega-celebrity Jordan Peterson compares adults who yearn for childhood to Peter Pan. He argues that eternal childhood is undesirable because Peter Pan can't get laid and “ has to contend himself with Tinkerbell. She doesn't even exist... she's like the fairy of porn [...] she's the substitute for the real thing." But Peterson's aversion to personal nostalgia is somewhat striking since his social conservatism strongly advocates for a collective return to traditional values. This contradiction is not incidental but at the centre of his worldview. It advocates personal growth and progress for individuals (mostly straight white men) but stagnation, even a total reversal, for society as a whole. We see similar patterns over and over among critics of nostalgia. While they climb on their soapbox to deny one aspect of nostalgia, they also advocate for it in different ways.
Peterson’s fellow quack, Steven Pinker embodies a mirroring inconsistency. Pinker believes that humanity is "wired for nostalgia" and this holds us back from truly appreciating the wonders achieved by Western civilisation. According to his lobotomised optimism, our sentimental attachment to the past is like a neurological disease that's preventing humanity from advancing on a rational path. Pinker's general philosophical approach has already been criticised very thoroughly. What I find fascinating is how much the title of Pinker's book gives away his own appetite for nostalgia. It's hard to miss that the very words Enlightenment Now are a literal cry for instant gratification: What does he want? A revival of 18th-century European philosophy! When does he want it? Now! I thought my sweet tooth for vaporwave mood boards was an issue. But when it comes to nostalgia, Pinker is like a child who brings a canteen to the soda fountain.
Pinker is not the only best-selling author to articulate contempt for nostalgia. Elif Shafak, too, is worried, because "populism preys on rose-tinted memories of past glories and distorts it into something ugly." Shafak lists a series of truly alarming changes in Turkey and across the world, then lays the blame squarely on the shoulders of nostalgia-fuelled populism. What this approach succeeds in doing is to construct an extremely nuanced picture of the world, which can be summarised as Trump=Erdoğan=Putin=ISIS=Hitler. The only weakness of this paradigm is that it fails to account for how our current situation has come to be. The immediate past is acquitted of all blame. This approach paints a rosy picture of the ‘00s technocratic, neoliberal new world order as a wonderful time when erudite philosophers were holding the reins of the great unwashed. The masses knew their place and had no discontentment. Candy and marshmallows grew on trees etc...
But then, all of a sudden... the Orange-Cheeto-Monster with tiny hands burst out of a salty volcano and swallowed our miraculous gingerbread village!
Record Scratch, Freeze Frame: how did we end up in this wacky situation?
The first news I remember seeing on TV was the collapse of the Berlin Wall. My sister and I were not old enough to understand what was going on, but we figured it must be a big deal from the way our parents were glued to the TV set. It was about this time that the first McDonald's opened in Ankara. I was fascinated by a self-playing piano at the centre of the store. I must have asked how it works a million times. Each time I was patiently given an explanation about electricity and mechanics and pianos. "Whatever," I thought, "what do grown-ups know about magic anyway?"
I spent most of the ’00s as a rebel with a very precarious cause. I was waging perpetual semantic war against the school administration about exactly what constitutes a beard. Meanwhile, the Kemalist movement was reaching its high watermark. Our generation wasn't even done exploring our bodies when grown-ups burdened us with the nostalgic mission to revive Atatürk's legacy and protect it against dark forces: the twin dangers of political Islam and something called neoliberalism. The latter was one of the keywords of the era, claiming even more explanatory weight than "post-truth" does today. Neoliberalism offered a vision of a world without borders, run entirely by market forces. This paradigm argued that governance was just a matter of “fine-tuning” and that it could be decided by focus groups with minimal political engagement. In the ‘00s, commentators were worrying about political apathy and low voter turnout. It's ironic that today's high-level political discourse revolves around the perils of populism and comes dangerously close to suggesting that too many ignorant people are involved in politics.
The poem I read on the 75th anniversary of the republic was yearning for a past when international institutions like the EU and the IMF were unable to get involved in Turkish politics. The economy was closed off to the rest of the world and human rights abuses were left unchallenged. I cringe at this memory because as a young man who fancied himself "anti-authoritarian" I should have known better than putting on military regalia to eulogise a totalitarian single-party regime. It hurts my intellectual pride to remember that all my critical reflexes did not prevent me from idol worship. After twenty years of introspection and retrospection, I understand that the appeal of this ideology is deeply tied to vulnerability. You must have no dreams for the future to be yearning for something as hopelessly impossible as reviving the dead. You must have zero appetite for what lays ahead if you are too busy gorging on the past.
Our Turkish teacher was neither the first nor the last person to fantasise about a miraculous resurrection. This fervent nostalgia is so widespread, the Kemalist newspaper Sözcü, for instance, often mourns the anniversary of Atatürk's death by running a front cover fotonovela about what the great leader would do if he were to return to life. One of these frames even depicts him arbitrating a football rigging scandal in 2011. Such outbursts of devotion are so corny, it's painful. Beyond its soggy sentimentality, this ideology also has immediate harmful consequences; particularly when it comes to the way it is shaping attitudes against Syrians. The intellectual backlash against nostalgia has some very valid reasons, but what exactly is the best way to grow out of sentimental ideologies? Is it to denounce and attack them head-on, or to abandon them gently? Maybe to pretend they never existed anyway and just move on?
In 2003, I graduated from high school and was accepted to study in the UK. This transformed me into an entirely new person, or so I thought. That summer, while converting my CDs to mp3, I fantasised about peeling off my nationality, as if it were a piece of dead skin, and leaving the past behind. I wonder to what extent this fantasy was a product of the era. After all, we grew up as the children of the "new world order". We were told the free flow of capital was dissolving international borders. The rapidly increasing trend for global governance and technocracy was soon going to make nationalism obsolete. Even though I dismissed all these ideologies as “capitalist propaganda”, I still benefited from the general sense of optimism. Universities were respectable institutions. No one had ever heard of "cultural Marxism". No one pilloried studies of gender and race by calling them "grievance studies". New world order babies were raised in an environment where nostalgia was considered to be out of commission. The idea that we were living at the "end of history" had reached the peak of its 15 minutes of fame. It is no coincidence that younger people make fun of our generation's nostalgia by calling us "30-year-old boomers". Just like the original boomers, we came into the world during a very optimistic period in human history. And just like them, we are reaching middle age with a decade of incomplete revolutions behind us.
The mood music for the late ‘90s and early ‘00s was Bill Clinton on sax, Tony Blair on the guitar, unironically playing an instrumental rendition of It's a Wonderful Life, on loop. It seemed like the whole world was huddled in the Goldman Sachs elevator, persistently going in one direction: up. In this new and exciting world, I could become anyone I wanted to be. Neoliberalism taught us that we could evolve out of our parochial identities and reach a higher level of cosmopolitan consciousness. I believed in the fantasy that by transcending my identity, I too could magically become a "citizen of the world." The version of me I left behind was backward, ugly and best forgotten. I crawled out of a nationalist cocoon and tested my wings with the flatulent winds of bogus internationalism. The word “tolerance” was hurled around as a magical and new concept that can cure all social problems. With the sharp rise of identity politics in the following decade, we all found out that tolerance means nothing. It seems so obvious now that no one wants to be “tolerated” for who they are. We want to feel loved and appreciated. This is why, like a teenage David Bowie, I contorted my opinions to suit the changing zeitgeist and somehow convinced myself that this lack of political commitment was "true rebellion, man." I am just grateful there is no photographic evidence of all my subsequent phases.
Meanwhile, the intellectual environment in Turkey was adapting to global changes. Revisiting public debates from this period feels like being caught up in a dinner table argument. The coolest Gen X intellectuals had just reached adulthood and developed shiny new tools to demystify and deconstruct the past. They were rolling their eyes and crossing their arms in passive-aggressive defiance against the tenacious nostalgia of their parents. This was the rise of a new post-Kemalist trend so articulately described by İlker Aytürk. He points out that in their zeal to bury the elitist status quo, this generation of intellectuals contributed to creating the populist trend which is haunting us now. Another very insightful analysis is Esra Özyürek's Nostalgia for the Modern. It gives a thoughtful and intimate portrayal of this generational rift, with an emotional candidness I have rarely seen in academic writing. Özyürek also reveals how contemporary Kemalist nostalgia contradicts its own nationalist ethos, by grafting itself on to neoliberalism and its consumerist forms of self-expression. These two ideologies are ostensibly adversarial but also profoundly interdependent. Just like a real family, we were so busy condescending each other that we took our facades of consistency for granted and completely ignored the ways in which we might be similar.
Personal and global histories reflect each other in unexpected ways. No matter how embarrassed we are of our outdated tastes in music or our cringeworthy haircuts (I had a rat tail at some point), we still can't help but be nostalgic for our youth. Just like us, each period of history has its own version of rebelling against grown-ups and taking a clean break from history. Atatürk himself is the prime example of this. In July 1918, he visited the hot springs in Karlsbad while recovering from liver disease. His diary at the time records a conversation with other Turkish elites at the dining hall of Hotel Imperial. While watching the ballroom dancers from afar, his dinner companions lamented the unattainability of a Western lifestyle back home. To this, he responded with thinly veiled fury (translation my own):
I always say this, and I will repeat it on this occasion: If I ever were to obtain great power and authority, I believe that I can implement the desired revolution in our social life with a single 'coup'. Because unlike others, I reject the suggestion that this work can be done slowly, by changing the mentality of the people. My soul revolts against such an idea. After receiving so many years of education, after observing civilised life and society, spending my life and my years to obtain my freedom, why should I descend to the level of the ignorant? They should be like me, not me like them.
It wasn't just Turkish revolutionaries who spent decades in a dark swamp of self-loathing, fantasising about a violent overthrow of a system they considered crude and outdated. Atatürk's desire to disassociate from his "ignorant" compatriots is mirrored all over the work of Chinese author Lu Xun. Before becoming the recognised founder of modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun studied medicine in Japan. In a famous essay, he recalls his professor showing slides of his countrymen being executed by Japanese troops during the Russo-Japanese war. As his Japanese classmates cheered on the executions, Lu Xun took a crucial decision:
I no longer believed in the overwhelming importance of medical science. However rude a nation was in physical health, if its people were intellectually feeble, they would never become anything other than cannon fodder or gawping spectators, their loss to the world through illness no cause for regret.
Such moments of dispassionate enlightenment are typical for the towering figures of early twentieth-century politics. Revolutionary leaders of this period were so enraged with the system that came before them, they were prepared to burn everything down just to start anew. Experiments to uproot a nation's entire cultural heritage often have dire consequences, precisely because they value enlightenment over compassion. The vindictive quality of Lu Xun's philosophy made it particularly suitable for justifying the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. It is deeply ironic that in spite of their virulently anti-nostalgic, anti-sentimentalist dogmas, the cultural upheavals in Turkey and China have both become veritable fountains of dewy-eyed reminiscence. Nostalgia is not the kind of monster that can be brought down by the pitchforks of an angry mob. Like the mandatory plot twist at the end of a horror movie, it crawls out of its grave to haunt us over and over again.
Nostalgia-Lite
If we can't just crawl out of nostalgia by prohibiting and burying it, maybe we need to understand it better. But what does it really mean to miss something? Is the giddy sensation we get when we watch old cartoons the same thing diners feel at cultural revolution-themed restaurants? At what point does nostalgia become a problem? Scholarly debate about nostalgia highlights the contrasts between individual and collective dimensions. Psychological studies indicate that nostalgia functions as a "benign mechanism through which people affirm valued aspects of the self." These researchers confirmed that in our moments of loneliness, we dig into our past to excavate self-affirming moments and anecdotes. Nostalgia also allows us to feel part of a larger community that shares the same past. For cultural historians, nostalgia serves a more sinister purpose. Researchers on this end of the spectrum are concerned with demystifying specific memories. For example, Stephanie Coontz reveals how harmful to women misguided American nostalgia for the idealised 1950's family is. Derek Hook argues that the healing power of nostalgia is often tied to the whitewashing of brutal injustices like the South African apartheid. Let’s formulate the question in all its brutal honesty: “So, is nostalgia good or bad?”, just so we can give the most predictably disappointing answer: “Well... it depends.”
Svetlana Boym’s classic book The Future of Nostalgia discusses exactly what it depends on. Boym first reveals how the word nostalgia was coined by 17th-century physicians to describe the condition of homesick Swiss mercenaries and unravels the ways in which modern enlightenment problematised nostalgia as a medical disorder. Steven Pinker's diagnosis about the human brain being "hardwired" for nostalgia reveals that this tendency is still alive today. 17th-century physicians were prescribing opium, leeches and a visit to the Swiss Alps to chronic nostalgics. Pinker's cure, on the other hand, is to sedate the patient with statistics until it induces a lobotomised sense of optimism. But the plague of nostalgia is far too tenacious to be surgically sliced off from the human mind.
Boym is keenly aware of how deep-rooted attachments to the past can be. In The Future of Nostalgia, instead of surgical removal, she attempts to make the Gordian knot more manageable by splitting it into two halves. Boym argues that nostalgia can either be reflective or restorative. The former is a largely passive and introspective state, capable of examining the past with a critical lens. The latter involves an active attempt to reconstruct old glories. It is only this restorative form that's associated with reactionary politics, with slogans like "Make America Great Again." Slicing nostalgia in half this way creates a dichotomy between a reasonable, progressive nostalgia and a deeply irrational, reactionary one.
By creating a guilt-free Nostalgia-Lite, Boym's approach classifies the intensely sentimental Nostalgia-Classic as a public health hazard, on par with high fructose corn syrup. Those sucking on the fuzzy end of the nostalgia lollipop are characteristically deceived by the past. They are infected with deluded fantasies, like reviving the dead and returning to a homeland that never existed in the first place. But it is unclear how these two types of nostalgia are separated in practice. Name a thing you miss from your childhood, like a cartoon or a toy. Can you identify problematic aspects about it that make it awkward today? If yes, then you just engaged in reflective nostalgia. Does the jingle immediately start ringing in your head? Are you finding it difficult to resist opening a new tab and going on a youtube binge? Then congratulations, you may have just dipped your toe in restorative nostalgia.
Boym's idea of splitting nostalgia in half has been appropriated to become standard Hollywood practice. Disney has discovered that there is a goldmine in resurrecting old cartoons with a ‘woke’ twist. These reincarnations cherry-pick conspicuously problematic aspects and sprinkle “girl boss” themes on top to make them appetizing to contemporary palates. While the quaint nostalgia for cutesy characters and enchanted countries remains, these reincarnated fantasies are detached from the social values that once animated them. Like the self-playing piano at McDonald's, they prance around mechanically in suspended animation. Disney's mission is not to challenge harmful social values, but to make money from overly health-conscious millennial kidults who want to have their guilt-free nostalgia and eat it. Discarding toxic content before reviving the aesthetics is a risk-free compromise designed to satiate our desire for relaxing entertainment. But if we desire a more fulfilling engagement with nostalgia, we need to take the risk of engaging with it. Restorative nostalgia does precisely that. It carries the past into the present so we can reach into our collective memory and make crucial decisions about what we did and did not like about it.
No Funny Business
Anthropologist Renato Rosaldo points out how active agents of imperialism often acquit themselves through pre-colonial nostalgia. Pierre Loti’s literary descriptions of Istanbul are a prime example of this phenomenon. Orientalist nostalgia tints everything Loti did, from his novels down to his condemnation of French imperialism. Loti’s depictions of a pitiful, innocent and ravaged Orient must have hurt the pride of revolutionary poets like Nazım Hikmet, who calls Loti a “charlatan”, a “typhus-infested louse” and a “bourgeois pig”, all in one single angry poem. Much like Lu Xun, Nazım was a revolutionary writer burning to obliterate all traces of the primitive past. It’s a typical demystification approach: “You thought Pierre Loti was an anti-imperialist ally, but actually… he’s a typhus-infested charlatan bourgeois pig.” Rosaldo suggests a different strategy. Instead of demystifying nostalgia, which will only launch a predictable vicious cycle, why not allow nostalgia to run its course "until it gradually crumbles under the weight of its own inconsistencies"? What that means is that sometimes we have to allow nostalgia to rebuild the past, so we can see exactly what was wrong in high-definition 3D.
My least flattering moments in life often make for the most productive nostalgia, because they remind me of the distances I have crossed. Which in turn reminds me of the road that still lies ahead. This is why I can't stop rubbernecking myself reading patriotic poems in a military costume. The car crash of my past identity helps me remember the lessons I learned on the way. This type of reckoning with the past is a familiar experience for millennials from peripheral countries. We grew up watching the same cartoons, nagging our parents to buy the same toys and observing the world around us shrink at the same pace. Most importantly, we all had a moment when we thought this new and exciting shared global culture would make us all equal. When it didn't, we ended up experiencing the same sense of disappointment. All the cultural capital we acquired to fit in just made us look more suspicious. Whitey gawped at our ability to speak his language as if we were an entirely different species that miraculously learned to communicate through speech.
It is only through actively reconstructing the past that we can remember why we had to knock it down. And when it comes to knocking shit down, the last decade has been epic! The ‘10s was the decade we turned the internet into a makeshift time machine. We dove into the past and came back gasping for air, just to report "Remember that thing? Well, it turns out..." and dive back in again. We have amassed a collective encyclopaedia of everything toxic in global popular culture. We raised the bar for how movies should be made and how books should be written. This was the decade we fell out of love with our heroes. For me, the greatest fall happened in the world of comedy.
In the wake of the 2003 occupation of Iraq, the UK activist scene was full of feigned outrage. Local chapters of socialist and anarchist movements were mostly filled with white kids in dreadlocks and tie-dye shalwars, who were preoccupied with petty rivalries and gossip. The leader of a student organisation I approached responded to my email by saying: "How do I know you are not MI-6 or something?" The 2005 G8 protests in Gleneagles was a particularly eye-opening experience. When the 7 July bombings took place in London, I learned that condemning terrorism was a greater priority than social justice, climate change and global poverty combined.
The punk scene was a little more welcoming. But as soon as the mosh pit ended, I was punched in the face by the fact that I did not belong there. I was desperate to assimilate and my encyclopedic knowledge of English comedy was the one thing I counted on. I thought if I could display my exhaustive knowledge of Monty Python punchlines, I would surely be greeted with open arms. I was fascinated by how back in the day Monty Python's Flying Circus scratched the surface of the British stiff upper lip, through irreverent surrealism. When I revisit their sketches today, I feel like I’m sharing a train cabin with an ecstatic neckbeard, who insists on re-enacting every episode of his favourite anime in a screeching voice. John Cleese's refusal to retreat into graceful retirement and be fondly remembered for his uncontroversial slapstick moments makes it even worse.
By the time I landed in the UK, a new generation of comedy shows like The Office, I'm Alan Partridge or Ali G Indahouse were turning their cringe dials up to eleven. I had never seen comedy being used as such a brutally effective tool before. It felt like the society that was hosting me was capable of observing itself from an outsider’s perspective - from my perspective. The racism I experienced behind the thin veneer of liberal civility was exposed. This level of self-awareness gave me the sense that, unlike my compatriots, the Brits were at least civilised enough to acknowledge their problems. But as times changed, I realised the spectacle of self-awareness only adds another layer of sophistication to the veneer. As the years went on, I started to notice that this type of cringe comedy serves to clear the viewer's conscience. My white classmates would watch Ricky Gervais put an Asian employee in an awful situation, then pat themselves on the back for not being as blatantly racist as he. Each time I see him at the golden globes with his impish smile, acting like he is some establishment hero, I feel the cringe wash over me like hot tar. While I applauded Sasha Baron Cohen at the time for unearthing buried prejudices, I had not stopped to think that he did so by adapting the minstrel show for the twenty-first century. Now that his outrageously offensive televised stunts are eclipsed by a new media, it's hard to tell if he is really concerned or just envious.
The rationalist quest to deconstruct nostalgia operates on the same logic as cringe ‘00s comedy. They both aim to reveal problematic aspects of contemporary culture by demystifying them. There is something satisfying about 'deconstructing' things, of course. Challenging your own perception about something you like can be exhilarating. And let's be honest here, when you first learned about how much of the culture we consume is toxic, it felt like a new superpower, didn’t it? It was a real rush to put on the outrage cape and swoop in to fight against the monstrous mediocrity of popular culture. But who really wants to be Captain Smarty-Pants forever? I am not saying that call-out culture has done too much damage and that it has to be stopped. On the contrary, it hasn't done enough. Jeering the people on the stage is a good start, but the next step is to get up from the spectators’ seats and step into the limelight. If we are going to distance ourselves from the past, we need to know where the past is. If we are going to tackle nostalgia in a meaningful way, we need to start all over again. From square one.