The Dangerous Radicalism of Longing

Missing what we’ve never had creates a powerful push for cheap substitutes.

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(via Getty Images)

Dear Reader (including those of you who were right about the deep state all along),

In a recent episode of Daryl Dixon, the new Walking Dead spinoff, Daryl says, “You can’t miss what you never had.” And for some reason I keep thinking about it. 

According to the internet, this is originally a Hunter S. Thompson quote, though I suspect someone said it before him. This is one of those sayings that sounds profound and wise but isn’t actually true. Or at least to the extent it’s true, it really depends on context and the definitions of “can’t” and “miss.”

I think an enormous number of our problems come from people who miss things they never had. Just off the top of my head: Palestinians miss having a viable country, but have never had one. Lots of people who grew up without siblings, or fathers, or best friends miss having such people in their lives a great deal. People who had bad experiences in high school, or who never went to college, miss things they never had. 

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  1. Avatar photo
    James McDermott

    I like Montesquieu's diagnosis of personal happiness, but I believe that we are born to envy, and the idea of envy underlines the gloomy old Teutonic idea of Schadenfreude, enjoyment in the suffering of others. Comparison lies at the base of human interactions and our views of progress. I like to think that politics was a much kinder and nobler occupation in the past, until I read about the Jefferson-Adams Presidential race. and the war between the Federalists, called Tories or Royalists by their Jeffersonian Democratic Republican opponents. The federalists in turn believed that Jefferson supported mob rule in the fashion of the French Revolution he supported as Washington's Secretary of State. It was nasty campaign on both sides that rival today's debates.

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    1. Stephen Clay Settle

      Absolutely! I dare to suggest that you didn't learn this stuff in high school history, but rather were fed a rather cursory and saccharine account of our nation's wondrous founding fathers.
      (If in fact you did acquire such insight in high school, you are better blessed than most.)

      We are now and have always been a contentious lot, which brings into question one's definition of "greatness."

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    2. Stephen Clay Settle

      Whenever I hear the phrase "Make America Great Again," I want to ask, "Exactly when was that exalted period?"

      Was it in the years just prior to our revered revolution, when drunken mobs of miscreants calling themselves "Sons of Liberty" roamed the streets, looking to beat up on anyone they suspected of wanting to remain aligned with their mother country? If so, those good ol' days are back with a vengeance in the persons of ANTIFA, BLM, and Q-ANON.

      Or was America's halcyon moment concurrent with its westward expansion, when in the name of "progress" and "advancement" an entire race of indigenous people were targeted for extermination?

      Things were a'cookin' bigtime in the antebellum South so long as enslaved blacks were doing all the heavy lifting. It was a time of greatness to be sure, leastwise in the estimation of the plantation owners and their banker buds in the North.

      Little wonder that no more than two percent of the Northern population expressed any sympathy whatsoever with those horrid and uncivil provocateurs in the abolition movement. Not unlike today's anti-abortionists, they were a distraction, and a rather embarrassing one at that, to those who preferred to see nothing but happy times ahead for the Union and its gross national product.

      In the John Wayne film "Cahill: US Marshall," George Kennedy's bad guy character, Fraser, utters a line that applies all too well to America's penchant for cultural optimism, whether looking in the rear view mirror or down the road ahead. He says, "You ought to allow a man his illusions." A desperate desire to believe in America as morally and politically immaculate, aka, "exceptionalist," clouds our view of past, present, and future. It's endemic to the so-called Right, but it haunts the so-called Left as well, as obvious in the populist appeal of both camps. (As George Will has observed of late, the one thing the American political landscape will not tolerate is a "British" or "European conservative," i.e., someone who holds that there is an hierarchical order to the universe and that our social and political orders should reflect the same, thereby leading one to concur with Tsar Nicholas I: "The people are children, and they need a father to rule them.")

      In conclusion, when it comes to a question regarding MAGA-types, my response is that of Mister T: I don't hate the fools, I pity 'em.

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  2. Alan P. LaRue

    Kurt Andersen in “Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America” talks quite a bit about the politics of nostalgia. It makes a lot of sense.

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  3. Betsybowditch

    Over the weekend, I saw the movie “The Holdovers,” which has been described as a love letter to 1970s Massachusetts. Movies set in the past are common but Alexander Payne, the director, went beyond just setting his film in the pasr. The credits’ fonts are the ones used in that era, which makes you appreciation the passage of time. I was like, "Were they really that clunky???" It was also filmed the way a 1970s movie was filmed. No drone tracking shots, for example.

    In two weeks, I am going to a Taiwan film retrospective. I lived in Taiwan from 1982-84 and it so much influenced the person I became, though I didn’t appreciate it at the time. So while I am watching, I will be filled with a sense of awe for having experienced the world through Taiwan, then under martial law which no one would want to restore, four decades ago.

    I have been back many times. Whereas in my era we were largely cut off from the outside world, students today can call up their email anytime and text anywhere. It is a completely different experience not to mention a different Taiwan. It makes me more grateful for my experience.

    After demonstrating I was serious about studying Mandarin, I received an ROC government fellowship. Having arrived a few years after the US switched recognition from the ROC to the PRC, the authoritarian government offered these fellowships to build up a constituency of foreigners sympathetic to Taiwan. They didn’t know who would become a diplomat or a scholar but they wanted to instill a sense that this place mattered.

    After democratization, these fellowships went away because the Taiwanese taxpayer didn’t want to fund foreigners’ Mandarin study. Fair enough but I hope I have been able to repay them.

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  4. Meverest

    I know Jonah is a big fan of "Chesterton's Fence." His installment today reminds me of "Chesterton's Shipwreck.":

    "And last, and strangest, there had come into my mind a vague and vast impression that in some way all good was a remnant to be stored and held sacred out of some primordial ruin. Man had saved his good as Crusoe saved his goods: he had saved them from a wreck. "

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    WJHEsq

    Listening to the GLoP podcast, the description of someone offering to hide their friend and significant other in the attic, only to fall in love with the s/o and plotting how to get the friend arrested sounded like the plot to a bizarre mash-up of 'Seinfeld' and 'The Diary of Anne Frank'.

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  6. Richard Kennedy

    Ah, Mr. Goldberg, should you get TFJ to come on The Remnant again, it would be a good subject for discussion that she list what she would have you write about, book or essay subject while she discusses the possibility of My Husband, The State.

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  7. Avatar photo
    David.Cann1

    Jonah, you may be interested that this column was featured this morning in my UCC church service sermon. The pastor discussed a few passages, including “can’t miss what you never had”, longing and regret, preaching on an epistle of John on how people who do not know God cannot love, since God is love.

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    1. Kalo

      With due respect to your pastor, I would submit that if God is love, then anyone who loves does, in fact, "know God," even if that person doesn't subscribe to the Judeo-Christian notion of God or proclaim it in that way. I would go further and assert that anyone who claims to know God but does not love his neighbor, does not know God at all.

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    Hawks Law Office

    Homer understood the negative power of nostalgia. It was what the Sirens were actually singing about in The Odyssey. https://jeffwills.blog/2015/03/08/the-siren-song-of-nostalgia/

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  9. Dougrhon

    "I look fondly at my 1970s childhood, but it would be ludicrous for me to think such fondness was proof the country was doing better. When Americans say things were better 50 years ago, do they mean the runaway “stagflation”—high inflation plus low growth? The lines to buy gas? The Vietnam War? Watergate?"

    I don't think many people look to the 70's with nostalgic longing. I think many (including me) look at the 70's as a cautionary tale of a period we seem to be slowly returning to. Personally I am nostalgic for the 90's. Possibly because it was the years of my young adulthood when I graudated school, began a career, married and began a family. But also because it was a time of optimism when things seemed to be getting better on almost every front (Even if some fronts were illusionary) and even the things that seemed so vitally important (Monica Lewinsky, The 2000 election) seem silly in retrospect.

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  10. Avatar photo
    Khalil Spencer

    “I always wished Scott Norwood had not been wide right.”

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    1. David Burse

      Missed it by that much.

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    2. Avatar photo
      John Lewis

      Everything would be different 😀

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