While that liberal critique of conservative may have some merit in its limited scope, the nature of nostalgia as a basic human emotion is a much larger playing field, and there are some deeper issues to cover.

I think the best way into this discussion, for the moment, is via some personal confessional.  Currently, I live in Boston, Massachusetts (I grew up in Western New York, and moved to Boston about 15 years ago).  My mother in law lives in Hull, a coastal, peninsular community on the south shore of Massachusetts.  My wife and I also lived in Hull for a couple years, before moving back into the city.  Hull is a fantastic little town, kind of a mini Cape Cod, with beautiful stretches of beach, fantastic views of the city from atop its many hills, and some classic beach community small businesses.  For the last few years, over the summers, my wife and I pack up our gear on Thursday nights, work half days on Fridays, and then shoot down to Hull on Friday afternoons to get full weekends on the beach.  It's like having a dozen or so mini-vacations every summer, and it's awesome.  

As we descend further into the New England winter, the familiar nostalgia for summers in Hull is really starting to take hold.  Walking across the frozen park grass every morning on the way to the bus, travel mug of hot coffee in hand, I long for the beach, more and more so each passing day.  By the time February rolls around, I fully expect to be in a kind of nostalgic trance -- like the Chicago SuperFans from the Saturday Night Live skits: only instead of my thoughts being "Ditka....sausage.....Bears.....Ditka,"  they'll be, "Beach.....sun......beer.....beach."  

Now, you might be saying, "big deal, so you think about warm weather when it's cold out -- join the club."  I'm sure feelings like this radiate across Buffalo, Minnesota, Alaska, and anywhere else where there are real, sometimes brutal seasonal changes.  But when I reflect on my own feelings towards summer weekends in Hull, I realize that it's not primarily about sun, sand, and surf.  What I really long for is the power of the place itself, its scale and appropriateness for human activity, and the community feel that springs out of a summer gathering place.  

First of all, Hull is small, less than 15,000 residents, and only about three square miles of land area.  It has a high population density, with streets and packed in close together.  Because of its small size, it's an ideal walking and biking town.  In the area where we stay, there is a small business district within a 5-minute walk, including a grocery store, pharmacy, bakery, hardware store, and multiple restaurants.  A little further, maybe 15 minutes by foot, is a liquor store and another convenience store.  And with a 30-minute walk, we can be in the main commercial district in town, where there are coffee shops, many restaurants and bars, and multiple art galleries. Very often, once we park the car in the driveway on Friday afternoons, we don't drive again until Sunday afternoon, to go home.  We can walk the entire weekend, and have full access to many amenities, without using the car at all.  This small scale just feels right; it feels very human.  We are so car-centered in our culture that we forget how dehumanizing it is to have everything spread out across vast vistas of asphalt.  To have to drive everywhere, for every economic and social function, is profoundly dehumanizing.  Our weekends in Hull are poignant reminders of just how pleasant small-scale, multi-use, walkable places can be.  

The other thing that drives my nostalgic longing for our beach weekends is the camaraderie that emerges in the house itself.  As I mentioned earlier, we stay at my mother-in-law's place, which is just a couple blocks off the beach.  My wife and I show up on Fridays, and we are usually met by my wife's cousin (he takes many Fridays off to get to the beach early).  Later, his girlfriend shows up, after she gets off work.  Sometimes, my sister-in-law is free to come down for the weekend.  For part of the summer, my other sister-in-law comes to stay from Chicago, with her three kids.  And other folks make frequent appearances throughout the season: aunts, uncles, friends, cousins, co-workers, etc.  With these many comings and goings, a kind of group consciousness emerges.  It's hard to describe, but a lighter way of living takes shape.  Meals get prepared, grocery store trips happen, dishes get washed, the lawn gets mowed -- but it all happens fairly effortlessly.  Tasks are interspersed with leisure and other parts of daily life, all in a relatively ad hoc but still effective way.  It reminds me of an Amish barn-raising, where the many hands make for light work, but the meals and other social aspects are just as important.  And with this larger group of people, I find myself doing fundamentally simple things to pass the time: listening to the Sox game on the radio, sitting and reading a book for hours at a time, playing catch, chatting with people over a cocktail.  We end up spending lots of time just enjoying each other, instead of rushing around to buy stuff and "do things."  

So sure, when I'm plodding through the half-frozen slush in mid-January, I am thinking of how awesome it was to wear nothing but flip-flops for days on end, with my biggest worry being reapplication of the SPF 45.  But what really drives the nostalgia, what really gets that melancholy longing for weekends in Hull going, is the desire for an appropriately-scaled place and the vibrant but easy pace that comes with group living.  Being social primates, these are the kinds of settings that people are evolved to be in.  Sociobiologists call it our EEA, our  Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness.  We long to live in groups, in tight tribal settings with a myriad of intimate everyday interactions.  Our psyches are not designed for vast distances connected only by high-speed petro-travel, so the compact nature of a walkable town feels intrinsically right to us.

In essence, our weekends in Hull are deeply human and satisfying, not because of the beach, but because the physical place feels right and the quasi-tribal social dynamic feeds the need for community intimacy.  My nostalgia is thus a kind of longing melancholy, a lonely protest against everyday arrangements which squash out our deep-seated desire for community.  I think this protest, this longing for a different way of living, is what drives most manifestations of nostalgia in our culture.  People sense that there is something basically unsatisfying about the nuclear family social form we have created, with its awful, undergirding suburban infrastructure of shopping mall sameness and strip store ugliness.  We try, in many ways, to paper over this unsatisfying nature of our current arrangements: hyper-consumption, escapist entertainment, ideological extremism.  But the simple truth is that a melancholy nostalgia may be the most genuine response to our contemporary situation.  A lonely longing for small towns, meaningful places, old-timey family holidays, and "traditional values" might seem to some like just the disgruntled sighs of the old and the backward.  But the desire for different kinds of places and more communal patterns of living is actually a cry from our deepest biological selves, a pole star that can guide us towards an appropriate way of being.

The One Person-One Job/One Family-One Dwelling social form, as we have noted in many previous posts, has run its course and will have to be replaced by something else.  The bad news is that it will be incredibly difficult, since the present economic, physical, and psychological structures are so firmly entrenched.  The good news is that almost all of our current difficulties have been caused by our over-consumptive, ecologically reckless, economically disastrous social form itself.  So if we can create a more communal, decentralized, human-scaled way of living and working, this new social form itself will attack every problem at once, and the healing can begin fairly quickly.  The biggest challenge will be accepting that the old way, the American Algorithm, is not coming back.  Our desires for the future have to be for homes and communities that embody the features of those summer weekends in Hull.