Nostalgia ain't what it used to be - Past Times 1986-2012 (or, The ebbing of the Intellectual Soul)

The UK retail company (shops, and later a mail order web site) called Past Times, was very much a phenomenon of the 1990s and early 2000s. 

It was a kind of gift shop that specialized in nostalgia; and it did a pretty good job of both fuelling and supplying it; with modestly priced reprints and facsilimlies of old books, pictures and prints, replicas of old toys, artefacts, jewellery and the like. 

Around the millennium it was a prime browsing place to get presents (including for oneself), and seemed like a permanent fixture in the high rent zones of the city high street. 

Yet in 2012 Past Times went bust and was wound up altogether the year later. What's more it was not replaced. Nostalgia stores became a thing of the past...

 

As always there are multiple potential explanations; but my spiritual interpretation is that Past Times was the last gasp of Original Participation - of the ancient and early childhood experience of spontaneous immersion in the world - of belonging; which has gradually dwindled down almost to nothing through the centuries, and especially in the modern era. 

In its commercial way, the shop was providing a secular equivalent of the robes, rituals, music and poetic words of the churches; providing a kind-of "system" of symbols; via which individuals could relate to reality - as had happened so effectively at the peak of the middle ages.  

This medieval consciousness is termed the Intellectual Soul; and it worked by the individual learning (or being socialized-into) and then assimilating; the correspondences of a symbol system to particular aspects of the spiritual life. After which, the symbol will reliably, and powerfully, "trigger" the appropriate spiritual response.

Well nostalgia-systems, such as that provided by Past Times, did something analogous with the childhood memories of an earlier (and childhood) world where life had automatic purpose and meaning, where there was an almost unconscious sense of security and stability.  

Nostalgia continued to be effective for a while after the effectiveness of religious symbol systems had become a tiny-minority phenomenon; on the basis of common childhood experience having changed less, and more slowly, than the adult world. 

But childhood changed, people changed, consciousness changed - and nostalgia lost its instant-magic. Also, the Establishment stepped-up its subversion and suppression of nostalgia; to the point that now the past is assumed to be evil. 

In the mass media and among the ubiquitous bureaucracies of this era; "the past" is at-best apologized-for (e.g. those disclaimers before broadcasting old films, about the attitudes they embody being "worng now, and wrong then!"). In the mainstream; the past is edited, invented, and rewritten for "modern sensibilities.

And increasingly the past is hidden and destroyed. 

Symbol systems are weaker, little wanted, and are disappearing, everywhere you look: in religion, and in the social institutions generally. 

The "medieval-type" Intellectual Soul consciousness is almost extinct in The West: we are all alienated now. 

The Past Times era was therefore a particular phase in the development of human consciousness, and of Western secular materialism - the final ebbing of the medieval mind-set. 

It could not last, and it did not last; and enjoyment of past times has now become a secret and guilty niche pleasure - or a defiant act of socio-political resistance. 

NOTE ADDED: Lest I be misunderstood; I am not saying that the Intellectual Soul is utterly obsolete, nor that symbol systems ought to be eschewed; but instead that we cannot (therefore should not) expect too much from them. Symbol systems are much weaker than in the past, and also modern Man is far more aware that the medieval consciousness was always a compromise, a half-way house and transitional, and entailing considerable residual alienation. It is unideal, after all, for Men to relate to ultimate realities only and always via intermediaries. And especially when the intermediate symbol system is regarded as the sole and mandatory way to relate to ultimate reality; as with medieval churches. This never was true, although it was a good approximation in some times and places. But now, it is clearly false, and assertions to the contrary are incoherent and (ultimately) made in bad faith. In sum; I see Intellectual Soul symbol systems of various kinds as retaining a potentially helpful role in the Christian life - few can dispense with them, and certainly I can't! But going back to medieval consciousness cannot be the way forward from here; any more than the (sixties counter-cultural) attempt to return to the the un-conscious spontaneous and immersive spirituality (Original Participation) of tribal hunter gatherers.