This Is Not Liberalism

On Nostalgia, Leon Wieseltier, The New Republic (figures that he wrote on Lionel Trilling--if not a conservative, Wieseltier will make others conservative, although the comments on the article really make me think that he's talking to the wrong crowd. His readers ask for systematic arguments, while Wieseltier argues poetically, in an Oakeshottian fashion):

I come from a tradition that cultivates nostalgia, yet I am quite certain that the re- building of the Temple in Jerusalem would not fulfill my religion, but ruin it. And yet nostalgia, or so I am beginning to understand, is not only an escape. If it may represent a collapse of critical thinking about the past, it may also represent a birth of critical thinking about the present. One method for exposing the inadequacies of the present is to hold it up against the past. (And against the future, which is of course much less constraining. The future is never inadequate, is it?) And in the event that the present should be found lacking in comparison to the past, this is not nostalgia. It is critique. A longing may contain an analysis. In a society whose watchword is "new and improved," new and unimproved is a heresy. But the religion of my homeless ancestors really was richer and deeper than the religion of my housed contemporaries. And I do not see that American life will be improved by the absence from it of second-hand bookstores, or large movie screens, or patience in journalism, or privacy. The view that everything is changing for the better is marketing propaganda--Google progressivism.