Tip-Off #211 - Sore Truth
Constructive nostalgia.
Everyone's worried about truth these days—but mostly about Donald Trump's lack of it. The phrase "Truth Decay" surfaced again during the nationwide "No King's Day" protests.
Coined by the RAND Corporation in a 2018 report, the term describes a crisis in American public life. The phrase became a meme and gained traction as a label for problems many now see. It moves beyond "fake news" or "misinformation" to describe a broader systemic erosion of the role of facts.
RAND analysts identified four interlocking trends: widening disagreement about objective facts, blurring the line between opinion and evidence, an explosion of information sources—including those that monetize outrage—and a steep decline in trust in institutions that once mediated knowledge.
The concern, of course, is always about someone else's truth problem. Few ask how our own certainty amplifies the noise, particularly when we perceive ourselves to be defending someone else.
The COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 and 2024 elections displayed every trend at once; slogans drowned out data, and nostalgia for a simpler past rushed to fill the void. RAND called the phenomenon unprecedented because technology amplifies every slippage. Algorithms push headlines that match beliefs; cable chyrons treat speculation as news, and social feeds reward outrage over patience.
Harvard’s Svetlana Boym, in The Future of Nostalgia, distinguished between "restorative" longing, which tries to rebuild the lost home, and "reflective" longing, which lingers in the ache and asks what yearning reveals.
Reflective—or "constructive"—nostalgia accepts the shards of memory and turns them into critique, irony, and creativity. The biblical pattern is similar: Israel remembers bondage to live gratefully and justly ahead. Even the Ten Commandments preface law with thanksgiving: "I am the Lord your God who brought you out of slavery." (Exodus 20:2) That is not "Here comes the judge." Biblical law isn't a cudgel but a call to justice rooted in memory and acts of mercy.
Reflective nostalgia can be bracing. It keeps alive neglected stories—indigenous, immigrant, dissenting—that restorative nostalgia edits out. Trumpism, draped in New Right rhetoric, weaponizes nostalgia. Its champions invoke "timeless" natural law and promise to "reclaim the Almighty," as though God needed partisan guardians. Heritage's Project 2025 claims to be the nation’s rightful roadmap.
Cries of truth's demise predate any liberal or conservative slogan. Constructive nostalgia answers with humility. It echoes Lincoln's wartime reminder that "the Almighty has His own purposes," refusing absolute certainty.
A civic form of the idea keeps three virtues in balance: reverence without rigidity, memory that doesn't finesse hard times, and loyalty without exclusion. George Washington warned against "the spirit of party." James Baldwin urged America to "do our first works over" and confront history "plain." Ronald Reagan pictured a "shining city" open to "people of all kinds," bound not by sameness but by shared purpose.
For Washington, loyalty to the republic meant relinquishing power after two terms—a reminder that reverence without limits rigs the game. Baldwin's frank prose exposes the narcotic comfort of myth, yet his vision is hopeful: honesty liberates both the oppressed and the oppressor. Reagan's metaphor likewise insists that liberty grows only when the gates stay open. Whatever his record, Reagan's voice resonated with Americans who see the Statue of Liberty as our foremost symbol.
Together, these virtues resist cynicism, idolatry, and tribalism. They ask us to prize what is handed down without mistaking it for the whole story. They sift nostalgia—keeping the gold, discarding the pyrite (fool’s gold)—and widen, rather than shrink, the circle of belonging.
Unreflected nostalgia "breeds monsters," Boym warned. It can create a phantom homeland for which one is ready to die or kill. Reflective nostalgia can help us gather strength for the future by drawing on the past.
Truth decays when reduced to preference and personal passion. What we inherit as our "blessed tradition" is no fixed deposit of doctrine but a varied story—rich enough to function in different times and places.
The message from the past is not, "Repeat what we said!" but, "Do what we have done!" In our time, we, in turn, should look and listen for the truth our forebears glimpsed but could not store up for future use.
The form that "undying truth" must assume depends on the specifics of historical time—for, as Martin Buber wrote, every great truth begins as a vision, and every vision is true only when fulfilled anew.
Faced with the meme Truth Decay, Svetlana Boym might shrug: "We've been rehearsing for this."
Notes and reading
Svetlana Boym (1959–2015) was a cultural theorist, writer, and professor of Slavic and comparative literature at Harvard. Her book The Future of Nostalgia (2001) introduced the influential concepts of restorative and reflective nostalgia.
"memory that doesn't finesse the hard times" - In Boym's terms, this aligns with reflective rather than restorative nostalgia—confronting the discomfort of history rather than rewriting it.
Abraham Lincoln - Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865. Lincoln reflects on the Civil War and divine providence, stating: “The Almighty has His own purposes.” The full context contrasts the prayers of both North and South, emphasizing moral humility in the face of national suffering.
George Washington - Farewell Address, September 19, 1796: "…the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it." Full address at the National Constitution Center. (online)
James Baldwin - "The Price of the Ticket," in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Non-fiction 1948 – 1985 (1985), xix. Baldwin recalls a lesson from his childhood church: "We were counseled, from time to time, to do our first works over. Go back to where you started…examine all of it, travel your road again, and tell the truth about it."
Ronald Reagan - Farewell Address to the Nation, January 11, 1989. Ronald Reagan Presidential Library transcript: "…a tall, proud city…teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace… the walls had doors, and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here." (online)
Martin Buber (1878–1965) - Between Man and Man, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (1965), 16. Buber writes: "Every great truth begins as heresy or blasphemy, becomes a sect, then a school, then a dogma, and finally a superstition. But in its origin, it was a vision. It remains true only in so far as it is fulfilled anew in every life in which it appears." - Buber was an Austrian-born Jewish thinker best known for his philosophy of dialogue, especially the concept of I-Thou relationships.
The Art and Science of Certainty - Adam Kucharski (2025). Truth’s biggest obstacle is not lies, but trust—what to trust, and whom: the story of the ideas that have helped scientists and societies discern between truth and falsehoods, improving decision-making. The problem with methods. Kucharski is a prominent authority on probability and inference. He is a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
These Truths: A History of the United States - Jill Lepore (2023). Widely acclaimed, These Truths is praised for its “moral clarity and narrative sweep” by critics at The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. About the country's often tortured approach to political equality and natural rights—truths that were supposed to be self-evident. Lepore is an American historian and journalist (Harvard, The New Yorker).
Tip-Off #210 - Dancing on Quicksand
Tip-Off #209 - Authorship and the Ancient Debate
Thanks for your thoughtful comment here. Encouraging!
I'm finding benefits to sitting with this post for a while. I've been considering objectivity--truth, or one aspect of truth, anyway--as a good fruit of covenant, and I hope to develop that thought as time goes on. Here you view truth through the lenses of nostalgia, specifically through restorative and reflective longing. I've never heard of this distinction, and it seems promising. I never would have thought to have applied nostalgia to truth. It works so well. I look forward to reading The Future of Nostalgia.
I like how, at the outset, you refuse certainty's claim to a monopoly on truth. I'm taken with Buber's notion of truth as a vision, an idea on which you elaborate in your notes. It seems that the three "visions" you chose--republican virtue, the Baldwin Gospel, and international hospitality, well-represented here by Washington, Baldwin, and Reagan, respectively--demand action in the present day to remain true--or, rather, for us to remain true to the best of our heritage.