Mohsin Hamid on the dangers of nostalgia: we need to imagine a

brighter future
Make America great again. Take back control... From politics to culture, we have
been gripped by a wave of nostalgia. Mohsin Hamid calls on storytellers to look
ahead with hope.

By Mohsin Hamid (The Guardian, 25th February 2017)

We human beings exist by being first in one moment, then in another, and then in
another, until we reach our end. Time circumscribes the human phase of the atoms that
make up our body. Our atoms once belonged to stars. Soon they will belong to the earth,
or the seas, or the sky. We recognize that with time every human being will cease being,
will only have been. And so we seek to resist time. We rebel against it. We are drawn like
lovers to the unreachable past, to imagined memories, to nostalgia.

As I travel the world on my phone and computer and by foot and aircraft, it seems to me
that nostalgia is a terribly potent force at this moment of history. Nostalgia manifests itself
in so much of our political rhetoric. Islamic State and al-Qaida call for a return to the
imagined glories of the early years of Islam. The Brexit campaign was fought with a
rallying cry of taking back control from Brussels, promising a return to the imagined
glories of pre-EU Britain. Donald Trump emerged victorious in the US election wearing a
baseball cap emblazoned with the words “Make America Great Again”, words chanted by
his supporters, envisioning a return to the imagined greatness of an America recently
victorious in the Second World War. In China and India, too, leaders seek a return to
imagined past greatnesses, usurped by foreign invaders, colonizers and barbarians. All of
these movements are, at heart, projects of restoration.

Nostalgia manifests itself in our entertainment and artistic culture as well. The most
viewed films of our time revolve around protagonists created a generation, or multiple
generations, ago: superheroes, super villains, super secret agents, super space
adventurers, super ironic symbols of super sexy pasts. And on television, where we are
told great storytelling happens, much of what we see in popular and acclaimed shows
comes situated in a past where characters can still plausibly be almost all white. I loved
Mad Men and my wife loved Downton Abbey; we and many of our friends in Pakistan
loved these and countless other shows so much that it has only intermittently struck us
that they are imaginative vehicles hurtling back and away from our vastly non-all-white
present-day planet. Even in Game of Thrones, the laws of physics and biology and
consistency allow for fire-breathing dragons and undead warriors and interminable
winters, but not for non-white people living in most of Westeros. The laws of race, it
seems, are immutable even there.
Nor is the realm of technology resistant to nostalgia. Quite the opposite. On our dominant
social networks we are pulled out of the present moment to constantly shape and examine
and interact with carefully curated pasts. Through technology the past is made real to us
in a way that it never has been before. I can see myself five seconds ago, and my first
girlfriend five hours ago, and my first child five months ago, and my first dog five years
ago, and my first smile in my mother’s arms five decades ago, and I can sift endlessly
through these archives of past moments, commingle them with present choices and likes
and filters, and craft new past-present hybrids, dancing across time, sometimes alone,
sometimes with others, commenting, watching, playing, mesmerising myself as the world
outside my screen goes unnoticed for increasingly long interludes. Those of us who
thought Jorge Luis Borges was a pioneer of magical realism were mistaken; he was a
pioneer of science fiction.

Why are we so strongly attracted to nostalgia today? In part, I think, because the pace of
change is accelerating. Despite our close relationship with technology, at this point in our
evolution human beings are still animals, and animals struggle to adapt to change that
occurs too rapidly. Given enough time, polar bears might migrate off the Arctic ice, evolve
darker coats, find a different diet and thrive in a new, warmer climate. But if the ice on
which they depend disappears in a few decades, they are likely to die. Our adaptive
capacity is far greater, but we too experience change as stress. The world my grandparents
grew up in would not have been that strange to their grandparents. Yes, the few cars on
the roads would have been striking, as would the few houses lit by electricity. But the
world my children are growing up in is far more disconcerting to my parents: a world of
wirelessly connected digital devices, roboticised factories, genetically modified crops and
daily flights from Lahore to Rio de Janeiro, to Sydney.

We are growing terrified of the future. Soon we might merge with our technology,
reprogramming our cells and adding computers to our neural circuitry, becoming in the
process ever more adaptive to change, and less stressed by it – but for now this prospect
offers scant reassurance. Instead we see upheaval and uncertainty ahead. At the same
time, the tools we have evolved to deal with upheaval and uncertainty, and with the
inevitability of our own mortality, are being undermined. Families are being scattered
across the globe. Religion is being repurposed for political gain and consequently emptied
of spirituality. Clan and tribe and nation are being challenged by hybridity.

Does a grandchild living half a world away offer a grandparent the same likelihood of
experiencing a love that transcends the self as does a grandchild living next door? Does a
religious discourse focused on conflicts with other religions, and indeed on conflicts
among subgroupings within that religion, offer the same likelihood of solace in the face of
the temporariness of existence? Does a tribe interbreeding with other tribes offer the
same possibility of an eternal identity into which one’s individual identity can be
subsumed? We are becoming unmoored just as the currents around us are growing
swifter.

Our reaction is predictable. The kind of futures we would like to inhabit seem unlikely to
occur. The futures that we suspect are likely to occur, meanwhile, fill us with anxiety. And
so we are left stranded: unstable in the present, being dragged from the past, resistant to
the future. We become profoundly angry, vulnerable to the dangerous calls of charlatans
and bigots and xenophobes. We become depressed. And in our depression we become
more dangerous, too. A suicide bomber is someone killing themself, after all.

When I was nine years old, my family moved back from California, where we had gone so
my father could complete his PhD, to Lahore, where I had been born but had not visited
since I was three. The jarringly total nature of this shift is perhaps difficult to imagine
today. In 1980 there were no email accounts or social media or text messages. The post
was slow and unreliable. International phone calls had to be booked in advance and cost
a fortune. I never saw, or heard from, a single one of my friends again.

I had left one world and entered another. People looked different. The smells were
different. Food tasted different. The languages were different, not just Urdu, which I had
to relearn from scratch, but also English, where a Lahori form now presented itself as
standard, and functioned often in sharp contrast to Californian. There was only one
television channel, broadcast for only part of the day, with only one or two shows a week
that I felt any desire to watch. And so I turned to books.

In particular I turned to fantasy. I read The Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis. The idea of
children passing through a wardrobe into a strange and magical land seemed entirely
plausible to me. I read the Middle-earth novels of JRR Tolkien. The importance (and
intricate navigation) of clan, family, history, honour and formality, even as practised by
hobbits or elves, must have been a useful education to this until recently California boy
now finding his way in Pakistan.

I had always been a daydreamer, and I whiled away long hot summers in Lahore playing
make-believe, by myself, or with my cousins. But I also began to do something strange. I
became fascinated by atlases, with their gorgeous multicoloured maps, their different
icons for settlements of different population sizes, their snaking, undulating contour
lines. I became fascinated by almanacs, with their brief descriptions of countries: a
snapshot of history, demographics, chief exports, climatic conditions. And I began to
make countries of my own.

I would mark out their borders in pencil on my maps, sometimes claiming this peninsula
and that island for my new nation state, sometimes that mountain range or valley. I would
write out their histories in a few paragraphs, what goods originated there, what languages
people spoke. At first, these countries were scattered archipelagoes of discontinuous
territory, part of the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, joined in nationhood with
Lahore and its surrounding districts.

Later, though, I began to create countries on non-existent islands that I would conjure up
from the sea. These places were geographically unified but demographically varied.
Lahoris and San Franciscans were often among the inhabitants, but equally often there
were people from other places, from China, Kenya, Brazil or France. These islands sat in
the middle of the Indian Ocean, or in the Pacific, but if one could travel to them and see
their people, they might well look like the people of New York or London today.
The worlds I was creating, and the stories in them, were a starting point for what would
become my present profession. I began my first novel 25 years ago, when I was not yet 22.
I have been writing novels for more than half my lifetime. But I had already, before I
began, been depending on storytelling to navigate an otherwise baffling world for more
than half my lifetime before that.

Stories helped me unite parts of my existence that might otherwise have seemed
irrevocably split by geography and time. And stories helped me find a future in which I,
such a mongrel, could be comfortable. I do not inhabit an island in the Indian Ocean with
a population as diverse as that of London, nor a nation composed of bits of Pakistan and
California. But I have over the last three decades lived first in America, then in Britain,
then in Pakistan. And I do spend many weeks in America and Britain each year, and many
weeks in other places, and correspond on most days with friends and colleagues on
multiple continents. My life might be peculiar, but it suits me. It flows directly from those
first worlds I imagined as a child. Without my stories, without the journey and direction
implicit in them, I might never have found it. Perhaps I would not even have looked.

Since well before the dawn of history, human beings have gathered together around
flickering campfires to tell and listen to tales. We still do, even if the campfires are now
more often glowing screens – in cinemas, on television sets, or in our hands. There are a
great many reasons for this: fictional narratives offer us so many things. But in our
present moment it is worth remembering one reason in particular: storytelling offers an
antidote to nostalgia. By imagining, we create the potential for what might be. Religions
are composed of stories precisely because of this potency. Stories have the power to
liberate us from the tyranny of what was and is.

Those of us who write fiction are free to create what we wish. We are the startups of the
storytelling world.

We are all creators of fictions, and we all have a role to play in imagining our way out of
the nostalgic traps strewn around us. But there are special opportunities open to those of
us who create fiction for a living, and above all to those of us who are writers, because we
are freer to create what we wish, without requiring funding for our projects, as a film-
maker might. We are the startups of the storytelling world, the crazy solo inventors in the
R&D department of humanity’s narrative imagination.

We should be glad for these opportunities. The future is too important to be left to
professional politicians. And it is too important to be left to technologists either. Other
imaginations from other human perspectives must stake competing claims. Radical,
politically engaged fiction is required. This fiction need not focus on dystopias or utopias,
though some of it probably will. Rather it needs to peer with all the madness and insight
and unexpectedness and wisdom we can muster into where we might desirably go, as
individuals, families, societies, cultures, nations, earthlings, organisms. This does not
require setting fiction in the future. But it does require a radical political engagement with
the future.
Take back control? Make America great again? Restore the caliphate? We can do better
than these. Storytellers, now is the time to try.