Why You Can't Debate a Conspiracy Theorist Back to Reality, Part II

The Seductive Danger of Nostalgia

Out on the road today I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac. A little voice inside my head said, “Don’t look back, you can never look back.” - Don Henley, “The Boys of Summer” (1984)

Gentle reader, please bear with me through the personal, memoiristic anecdotes that occupy the first labeled subsection of today’s essay. I promise they are related to the topic at hand, the reasons we find ourselves unable to argue conspiracy theorists back to reality. Just give me a moment to construct the contextual scaffolding for my analysis.

I would also like to apologize for the delay in getting this second installment in the series out. I’ve been under the weather since some time last week, but I seem to be very much on the mend now. I think I got whatever nasty cold was going around M.’s work; she and I both took COVID tests over the weekend, and they both came back negative. In any case, I have needed a lot of rest, and The Bugbear Dispatch is, for now at least, a one-person operation—so thank you for bearing with me through the occasional lapse in the weekly publication schedule.

If you haven’t seen my last post, the first in the series, you might want to start there. After today’s post, I can say that this series will continue for at least one more installment, and probably two, though I may take a break from the series before continuing it. Today’s topic is nostalgia, and if the connection between nostalgia and conspiracy theories isn’t immediately evident to you, it will be by the time you finish reading. Like last time, I’ll be citing and recommending further material you can read to go deeper into this topic if you would like to.

A Stroll Down Memory Lane

I spent most of 2015-2018 living in Tampa, Florida—first for two academic years as a postdoctoral scholar based in the History Department at the University of South Florida, and then for a third academic year as a visiting instructor in the Honors College. While at USF, I made friends with a classics PhD who’d done his postgraduate work at Stanford. We were there at the same time, in fact, connected by a single degree, but we didn’t meet until we both ended up at USF.

In the end, my friend—I’ll call him “Lance,” though that isn’t his name—actually caught the academic brass ring, a tenure-track job at a fine institution in New England. Not an Ivy, to be sure, but a lovely liberal arts college in a location many newly minted PhDs would kill for. To my mind, that’s actually better than an Ivy, because Ivies eat assistant professors for breakfast, by which I mean they have very low tenure rates. In other words, for most assistant professors at Ivies, it ends up being thanks for the five, six, seven years you gave us, and good luck finding a new job. Which is shitty.

Anyway, Lance and I lost touch when we ended up in different states, but from checking out his faculty profile, I can see that he now has tenure. My trajectory has not been the same as Lance’s.

Unlike him, I became one of the academy’s throwaway PhDs. After three post-PhD years in Moscow, Russia, and another three in Tampa, I was done chasing that elusive tenure-track job, which statistically I was highly unlikely to ever get despite being highly qualified. That being said, I don’t begrudge Lance the job he got after spending quite a few years in visiting assistant professor limbo himself. I’m happy for him, and I also look back with some fond nostalgia on the times we spent together in Tampa. Back then, Tampa was one of America’s okayest cities, whose main disadvantage was being surrounded by Florida. For me today, Tampa would be like one of the upper circles of hell as imagined by Dante, but only because of what Ron DeSantis has done to Florida since I left.

Believe it or not, I miss Tampa. But what I really mean when I say that I miss Tampa is not that I miss the city as such, though it has its good points. Rather, it’s a whole complex of things.

Photo by Laura Fuhrman, via Unsplash.

I miss walking around the USF campus and the great students I got to teach there, not to mention all the Muscovy ducks and ibises. I miss going to pub trivia with Lance and my other friends who also no longer live in Florida at the goofy German restaurant Mr. Dunderbak’s (where I also once met religious studies professor and now good friend Julie Ingersoll for a memorable lunch), and later at The Front Porch, an old mansion turned decent restaurant that has a bit of a gothic vibe and excellent seafood. I miss Lance’s hot takes on whatever TV show or movie was on his mind. I miss drinking beer at the little outdoor bar on the Hillsborough River downtown, and the happy hours spent with USF folks at Southern Brewing and Winery. I miss volunteering to serve beer at a festival with Lance’s girlfriend, who I was secretly a little jealous of (I secretly had a little crush on Lance, who was charming and boyishly handsome, and presumably still is).

Nostalgia is a fundamentally conservative emotional state.

If I went back to Tampa now—and to be clear, I have no plans of traveling anywhere in Florida any time soon—I could revisit these places and let the memories flow. And that might be nice (except for the part about being in Ron DeSantis’s Florida), but nothing would be the same. I’ve changed. Tampa’s changed. Florida’s changed—I mean, I thought Tallahassee had it out for higher education when I was there, but boy howdy do they have it out for higher education (and trans people!) now. Meanwhile, the old gang is scattered and unlikely to regroup in Tampa. And even if we did? We’d all be changed by time.

That’s how nostalgia works—it’s bittersweet, because the things that we’re longing for can’t be experienced again. Nostalgia attaches to constellations of people and places and events (both chance and regularly scheduled) that will never exist in the same relation to one another again. In addition, the further in time we get from those constellations, the more likely it is that our memories have been colored and idealized, that they’ve departed a bit from the precise way things actually were, so that it’s possible we could be disappointed even if we could travel through time. In any case, if we fixate on our nostalgic yearnings, get stuck in our feelings of desire for the unattainable remembered and imagined past, nostalgia can become dangerous.