Tagged: memory

Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot — Please!

Nothing typifies New Year’s Eve more than the image of crowds drinking alcohol to excess. And nothing typifies social drinking more than the desire to forget. To forget moral restraints, frustrations and heartaches, concerns and fears, people and events — all the things that one ought to remember, the remembrance of which gives life its depth, its texture, its motivations, and its pathway...

Nostalgia as Politics

So much of the ruin of modern civilization, with its once-noble attempt to realize practical liberty, may be traced to the gradual calcification of democratic political institutions into freedom-stifling tunnels of partisan loyalty. This hardened devotion to a group or tribe eventually entails little or no demand that one’s party exhibit any of the characteristics or impulses that originally attracted one to it;...