"Every place that we ever knew was just a time we held on to."
The main problem with revival movements like the Tea Party and Christian Fundamentalism is their ultimately self-defeating objective of returning to a past time.
The yearning, often desperation, to turn back the clock is an unfortunate temptation of individuals and cultures. People look to the past in constructing their future. They try to recreate childhood memories, breathe life into long-dead relationships and remake times that they perceive to be happier-- all ultimately in vain. Whole societies put significant amounts of energies into returning to simple and perceived holier times. Leaders seize power or are elected on the premise that they will turn the society back to better times--again all in vain.
The problem with trying to returning to a past way of life is that it never works. In fact, for all intents and purposes it is utterly impossible. Civilizations have marched to their ruin in their attempts to march into their more glorious past. The chief lesson to extract from these societies, whether it is one of the plethora of states who have tried to relive the glories of Rome, Sassanian Persia or the American Great Awakenings, is that the attempts do not work.
They fail because each era in history, indeed each event, is a product of a complex, but completely unique, cause-effect relationship. The variables involved to create the Boston Tea Party took a while to gestate and still those background factors are a product of still more variables that came before. Historians and amateurs aren't even aware of the existence of some of these variables, and it is up to future scholars to uncover them.
Since a movement cannot possibly reconstruct the institutions, perspectives, and idiosyncrasies of earlier times, the most the movement can achieve is a recreation based on the memory of the past. One cannot bring back a past way of life, but only relive a specific interpretation of that past. The lessons of yesteryear should be cherished, but we should not pursue reliving the events that brought us to those conclusions. There is also something erroneously emotional about yearning to relive the past.
The emotion of nostalgia is truly a glossy lens by which to view the past. Those Americans who call for a radical return for the ideals espoused during the Constitutional Convention and in the Federalist Papers ignore the surrounding realities of why these events existed in the first place. The compromise, intrigue and sacrifice that went into both events simply do not live up to the glossy memory that some modern-day Americans assign to them.
That is due to the fact that they are making ignorant assumptions about the past fueled by their nostalgia. Great pangs of nostalgia tends to put past ways of life on a pedestal that it does not deserve. Are they chasing the past for concrete, logical reasons, or are they simply chasing the past in order to alleviate their negative emotions towards the present?
What these American conservative activists really mean when they say that they wish to return to the nation's founding ideals is this, "we are so frustrated by life now that we want to change things to reflect a time when it was better." Their analysis of the past is colored by their emotional reactions to the present. This is especially true for Christian Fundamentalists, and dangerously so.
Since, calling for a society to turn back the clock cannot truly be done, are revival movements the healthiest way to address the problems of the present? Human existence is a culmination of temporal cause-effect relationships that are in a constant state of flux. If this linear reality is true, then what advantage is there in trying to exist in the past?
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