Some ideas stick with you. I have a couple of ideas from philosophers that always come back to me in my own thoughts. One of them, probably the one I go to the most, is Fredric Jameson's idea about nostalgia for the present. This is Chapter 9's title in his magnum opus Postmodernism. How I understand and read this idea is that we yearn for some fictional idea of the past in the present. That is, we have a romanticized idea of the past to which we yearn. Or in other words, our present self wants to live now in a previous era that we think was better. I think we all (from a western society) have had this idea at least once in our life: I would have loved to have lived in the times of Da Vinci, or on an ancient Greek island in the times of Greek proliferation, or whenever in the past. But the harsh reality is that those times were plagued by wars, sickness, violence, and the lack of most luxuries we today take for granted.

This is always a fun thought for those who yearn for the past. I myself, because of the poet inside of me, yearn to sit in a tree in the 17th century writing poetry. Or, I yearn for the days when people traded food with food, where food wasn't commodified and where money did not cause problems...

Okay but wait!

This is where I pull myself from these daydreams and I ask myself the simple question: was this ever how life was? Before attempting to answer this question, (A) I sketch a brief scenario of what I mean, (B) I then muse/think about history and how we are losing our own history, and (C) how this leads to what I use from Jameson, nostalgia for the present. (D) I conclude by viewing this through the lens of "Losing touch with reality" as a symbol of our times which I feel we need to critically engage with unless we fall even further into what I will call a "fictionalized present".

In short, I think we are "forced" to forget our pasts. This leads us to fantasize about a past that never was, and this has some dangerous consequences (at least psychologically) for us modern people. I link this with the modern craze for herbs and the general herbalist movement. (All my cards on the table, I am for this and I am practicing it myself.)

| Basil Leaves |

(A) Setting the Scenes: A Herbalist Scenario and a "Fictionalized Present"

In some sense, we live in what I call a "fictionalized present". What I mean by this, in some sense, corresponds to the idea of Jameson and others who write about our collective memory loss of the past. I take the idea of forgetting the past just a bit further with the idea of a fictionalized present. That is, I contend that we are currently living as if we never had a past. Various western countries are fraught with histories they would rather "forget" but also, by forgetting the past, in general, our present becomes one with a "given" nature. What I mean by this is simply that we as a collective and global society, in some sense, think of ourselves as "how history just played out". In other words, we take ourselves as examples of what history aimed at.

This is a rather heavy claim to make without much backing it up. I will return to this idea.

Take the following scenario. I walk in my garden and see different plants that can be classified as "weeds" or "herbs". I pick a bunch, maybe some basil or dandelion leaves, or amaranth leaves. The thought pops up in my mind:

This is food. Moreover, this is and has been medicine!

A further idea pops up in my head:

Why are we not farming these so-called quick-growing weeds? Why are we not using it medicinally but also culinarily?

And then the idea that spurred this post:

I wish we could go back to a simpler time where everyone grew these plants and used them for food and medicine.

But this idea, resting on various assumptions, got me thinking: when were these plants ever used in the way I fictionally thought about it? And then the kicker: I lost touch with my family's history of herbal usage, my dad never had any of that knowledge, his dad neither, and so on. Where did all the "history (read: knowledge) go?"

(B) Losing Our History, or Our Lost History

One can entertain sinister ideas: Our collective history is erased because it makes it easier to sell products to us/turn us into vapid consumers. Reading Jameson and his fellow philosophers, one might get these types of depressing/dystopian ideas. And at some times it really feels this way. It feels like capitalist systems want to turn us into mindless consumers that obey the laws of consumerism. Or, we might believe the old idea of "capitalism helps create a problem that was not there before but it then also sells us the solution!" What a bargain.

But there is a real worry to this losing our past: Knowledge is getting flushed with it. We might hold the sinister type ideas as I mentioned above, but what interests me is rather this idea that we are losing faith in science. (Even our language is imbued with religiosity when we talk about this!) I think this loss of faith in science goes hand in hand with our loss of history.

And I am a victim of this as well. Many a time I find myself skeptical of a medical intervention when I think there is a more natural and herbal solution. (Note: I am a philosopher, not a medical doctor, and when I voice my opinion in this regard, it is always in a dialogue form with a family member.) I immediately feel this pang of skepticism regarding the financial gain of the other parties, and so on. Sometimes it is good to have this mentality ("follow the money trail") but it is not always productive. Mainly because it will form an "either-or" or false dichotomy. And this leads to where we started: the idea of a nostalgia for the present.

(C) A Nostalgia for the Present and Herbalism

Science cannot do everything. It is not some type of magic. Neither are herbs. Our modern times are becoming all the more polarized. Even in my country, the divide between let us say red and blue is becoming all the more evident. And in some sense, this is fueled by this false dichotomous thinking. I link this with the loss of our past and loss of knowledge. Sticking with herbalism and modern medicine, we are living in unprecedented times in which we "trust" a faceless system with our health. But let us be careful here to not run into the trap of "big pharma = bad". This is not the argument I want to make here. What I want to claim here is far more serious: We are losing "practical wisdom".

And this loss of practical wisdom leads, in my own thoughts, to a nostalgia for the present. More explicitly, I fall into the trap of thinking that herbalism in the past was more valuable than our modern medicine. This sounds worse than it is, but simply what I want to claim here is that with our loss of practical wisdom, and our loss of kind of faith in the sciences, we yearn for a past (in the present) that leads to dangerous territories.

| Basil leaves |

(D) "Losing touch with reality": A Dystopia with Controlled Herbs

South African author Alettie van den Heever wrote a dystopian novel titled Stof (translated as "dust"). The main plot of the novel is that most seeds cannot grow anymore, big corporations own the only viable seeds that are also dying, and one person who inherited a bunch of seeds needs to bring it to a "promised land" area. I like these types of novels, but this always paints big corporations in a bad light and "noble heroes" as saviors. Is this not similar to the false dichotomy today between modern medicine and herbs?

In any case, I think this leads us (or at least I think) into dangerous territories: we are losing touch with reality. By forgetting the past, and by yearning for a fictionalized past now, we are losing touch with reality. That is, reality being that modern medicine and herbalism cannot be compared, or put in an either-or relationship. I am guilty in so many aspects in this regard. But with this convoluted and voluminous post, I have tried to come to grips with why I think like this. And long story short, I link this to the loss of practical wisdom in general but importantly regarding herbs. Soon we will be in an era where, for example, all the local South African people living in the coastal region in the Fynbos biome will die with all their knowledge. Countless thousands of years' knowledge will die with the elderly because we did not trust in them but we trusted in the faceless system that looks after our health.

Again, this is not to draw up a false dichotomy between big pharma and herbalism. This is rather a call for the two to work together. Again, losing our history (read: knowledge) can lead us to yearn for a past before, say, big pharma and to see it as better. But this, as I also mentioned at the start, is not as ideal as most would think. Again, the call is rather for the two to work side by side.

This post is already too long. I am going to stop for now! Phew. If you read everything, thank you! If you skimmed over it and ended up here, hello! In any case, the musings are mine unless credit was given to someone else. And the photographs are also my own. This was a rather long Friday afternoon musing-rambling under the mask of philosophy! I hope you enjoyed it. Stay safe.