Our Threatened Freedom

What’s Wrong With Nostalgia

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Political Studies

Lesson: 50-169

Genre: Conversation

Track: 050

Dictation Name: Vol. D - Part 11 – What’s Wrong With Nostalgia

Location/Venue: Unknown

Year: 1980’s – 1990’s

[Dr. Rushdoony] What wrong with nostalgia? This is R.J. Rushdoony with a report on our threatened freedom.

When it comes to nostalgia, I plead not guilty. I want no part of it. I’m sure there were a great many good things in the past, but I like today better, and I shall enjoy tomorrow even more. I know we live in troubled times, and I expect very serious troubles in the years just ahead. But I believe that God is on the throne of the universe, and I like His government.

One of the things which irks me every winter is also the happy and silly nostalgia about horse drawn sleighs. At Christmas we hear about sleigh bells in the snow. I visit somebody, and he almost reverently shows me a recent buy at an antique shop, authentic sleigh bells. Usually some magazine in its winter issue will include a romantic painting about happy singing people on a sleigh ride.

Now let me tell you the truth about sleighs. I know them first hand, from some years back, from life in the high mountain country. Sleighs are one of the most miserable ways to travel man ever devised. Nothing can chill you more than a sleigh ride; you were open to the cold freezing air. And it cuts you like a knife as you go dashing through the snow. You have a choice. If you go fast, the cold air cuts and chaffs your face in a hurry, and leaves you gasping for air. The air is ice cold, and your breath leaves little icicles on your nose and eyebrows. If you go slowly, then in spite of all your clothes and robes, you turn slowly into a human icicle, numb and cold.

There is no hearty ho-ho left in you. There is much worse. Dragging a sleigh through and over snow covered roads and fields is very hard work for the horses, particularly hard work. Among other things, it makes the horses very gassy. Now as you handle the reins, your nose is on the same level, and directly behind, the horse’s rear ends. I leave the rest to your tender imagination.

The one question in your mind is this. Will I die of asphyxiation, or will I freeze to death? There must be, you tell yourself, a less painful way to go. No, no nostalgia for me. Give me a good, well heated automobile to drive; with my wife by my side, I feel far more romantic and much more a free man than I ever felt in an ice-cold sleigh with my nose under a horse’s rear end.

I like progress, and I want more of it. It gives me freedom, and I like freedom. I can wax very romantic about freedom. Freedom is the air I want to breathe. This is why I prefer the present and the future to the past. I want to make the present more free, and the future a good and free one for my children and grandchildren. I cannot do so by perpetuating silly and romantic myths about the past. For all our problems today, the preferred world for me is the here and now. This is where I am alive.

This has been R.J. Rushdoony with a report on our threatened freedom.