I suspect that you live in a community where most people are politically more liberal than you. I have the impression that nostalgia is a harder-to-detect bias than progress, probably because I live in a community where most people are politically more conservative than I. For many, many people, change is almost always suspicious, and appealing to the past is rhetorically more effective than appealing to progress. Hence, most of their false beliefs are justified with nostalgia, if only because most beliefs, true or false, are justified with nostalgia.
That’s a valid point when it comes to issues that are a matter of ongoing controversies, or where the present consensus was settled within living memory, so that there are still people who remember different times with severe nostalgia. However, I had in mind a much wider class of topics, including those where the present consensus was settled in more remote past so that there isn’t anyone left alive to be nostalgic about the former state of affairs. (An exception could be the small number of people who develop romantic fantasies from novels and history books, but I don’t think they’re numerous enough to be very relevant.)
Tyrrell_McAllister:
That’s a valid point when it comes to issues that are a matter of ongoing controversies, or where the present consensus was settled within living memory, so that there are still people who remember different times with severe nostalgia. However, I had in mind a much wider class of topics, including those where the present consensus was settled in more remote past so that there isn’t anyone left alive to be nostalgic about the former state of affairs. (An exception could be the small number of people who develop romantic fantasies from novels and history books, but I don’t think they’re numerous enough to be very relevant.)