Cultural Claustrophobia and the Worship of Ruins

Why are we so entranced by the past? Probably because we live in a shoebox.

“’Now, can you think what the Mirror of Erised shows us all?’

Harry shook his head.

[…]

‘It shows us nothing more or less than the deepest, most desperate desires of our hearts. […] Men have wasted away before it, entranced by what they have seen, or been driven mad, not knowing if what it shows is real or even possible.”

--Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, pg. 213

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I.

A common sentiment among those who could be considered dissidents of the Woke Marxicisst Regime, is that the pinnacle of civilization existed sometime before most of us were born. We have this sense of being trapped, culturally; buried alive, our only friends the corpses around us. As the world shrinks day by day (in a trend that shows no signs of slowing), thanks to the long arms of technology and bureaucracy, the only place we can think to look for something different—something better—is the past.

And was the past better? Perhaps. Undoubtedly, in certain aspects. Decidedly not in others. The Mirror, though, only shows us the fragments of the past that feed the deepest longings of our hearts: to be free.

But why is the worship of ruins so magnetic? Oughtn’t we to think of the future?

A simple answer I’ve seen suggested is laziness; nobody wants to do the work to create a better world, so instead, we just fantasize endlessly about the past, a doomed trough of moaning apathy and paralyzing inaction. And I suppose there are some grains of truth to this, but it’s not so simple. It isn’t that people don’t want to build a better world; it isn’t that they’re afraid of facing fiction and discomfort to do it—it’s that there’s a growing sense that the world has become a shoebox, and where would you go? Across the ocean in a matchbox ship to settle a new continent? Across the prairies and over the mountains to the wild, open frontier to stake your claim and forge your own destiny? I’m pretty sure that, if these options were on the table, you’d have no shortage of people lining up to throw their hat in the ring—to take their chance with fate.

And it isn’t even that such places no longer exist. There is a lot of unsettled land in the world, despite eight billion people living here. It’s that somewhere, a horde of fat-cat bureaucrats is waiting to ensure that you’ll snag against some kind of red tape and find yourself stuck like a fly on flypaper should you ever try to access any of it. And, of course, everything has a record now. Nobody is truly private or anonymous. You can’t vanish and start a new life on some frontier because the eye of Sauron can always find you.

Naturally, in the face of this bleak reality, we can’t help but dream of a time when the world was too large to be held in the greedy, grubby fists of such dour, impotent hacks.

II.

This sense of deadly, suffocating entrapment has affected not only our vision for our practical lives, but our creative ones as well. Culturally, we’ve stagnated—and no wonder. With the world ever shrinking into the dimensions of a black rectangle, what wide open frontiers are left to capture the imagination of the artist?

Space, perhaps. Science fiction has become an increasingly popular genre, on the rise since the mid-twentieth century—and I can imagine this is, at least in part, because, by that time, other frontiers (and the vastness, intrigue, and possibility that went with them) were drying up, but people’s desire for stories about “boldly going where no man has gone before” wasn’t. Plus, we had just landed men on the moon, and people were excited. Maybe a new frontier—and all of the brilliant future possibilities that went with that territory—really did exist!

And yet, now…it’s been over fifty years since a human being has touched the lunar surface. Why?

Artists and storytellers are inspired by possibility, and, like it or not, the most immediate sense of possibility many people feel is that of being crushed inside the Star Wars trash compactor.

As our world becomes more and more technological, technology is losing its seductive veneer, instead shedding its skin to reveal the metallic skeleton of a well-oiled machine working at the behest of an evil empire to herd humanity into fifteen-minute prisons to feast upon bugs forever. Perhaps this peek behind the curtain is what has led to the rise of the darker visionary genres of dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction. Even a lot of science fiction has recently turned away from the bold, colorful vision of Star Trek and taken on a grimmer, more blackened patina as the sense solidifies that the future, while it may be filled with possibility, is almost certainly bleak—and probably inescapable.

III.

This should be the part of the essay where I come to a neat little conclusion, where I offer up some sage, articulate wisdom for how we ought to solve this problem, because, as Dumbledore cautions Harry with regard to the Mirror, “It doesn’t do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.”

But to say such a thing in this context feels trite, like some silly motivational quote following an announcement that, “You may all proceed to the fallout shelter now.” Sounds good, doesn’t help.

“The worship of ruins” receives a lot of criticism, but the truth is that I’m not sure it’s deserved. After all, the only truly hopeful vision for the future—a vision where humans are free—is one that resembles the past, at least on a certain, fundamental level. Because right now, everything in Modernity has us hurdling at lightspeed not toward the majesty of space (unless you’re Elon Musk and are worth more than the GDP of some countries), but toward the pods and the bugs, and if what they call “progress” isn’t merely stopped but reversed—well, let’s just say the future won’t be getting any brighter for the average Joe.

Perhaps this deep-seated intuition is why more and more of the younger generation are holding out hope—think of it, hope—that there will be some sort of cataclysmic collapse, ushering in a post-apocalyptic landscape where things may very well still suck, but at least men will be free. At least then, we’ll have a frontier and a future once more.

Of course, what we know of the Mirror is still true: men have wasted away and been driven mad before it. Whatever we do, while our visions of the past may (and arguably should) inspire us, we must tread carefully with an eye toward the present, lest we meet that same pitiful end.