What kind of modernity is this, and what kind of nostalgia is that?

The idea that the world or humanity is in a continuous process of progress or evolution is one of modern man's greatest ideologies. Progress constantly suggests that today is better than yesterday and the future will be better than today. For this reason, that what we will see as we go back toward the past is an evil or a primitiveness is the logical, not empirical, consequence of this idea.

In the same way, our designs of the future too rest on logical inferences rather than on realistic inferences, in the light of the real data at hand, about what we may live. The idea of evolution is therefore proved at the logical level rather than the empirical, because the premise we accept at the outset, logically, is that the world, the further back one goes, is always more primitive, worse or simpler.

When we accept this premise without questioning it at all and thoroughly adopt it, all our conceptions of the past and the future are inevitably shaped accordingly. That is why we are very surprised when we happen to learn the technologies developed by some people who lived in the past, the far past, because we have been conditioned not to attribute to the ancients this much intelligence, this much complex behavior, knowledge or depth. In fact, the whole discourse of archaeology works, on the one hand, to make us marvel at the aspects of people who lived in prehistory that shake our assumptions.

The amazement and admiration directed at a brilliance we see in people of the past, nonetheless, ultimately stems less from admiration for them than from admiration for ourselves. We admire ourselves so much that, upon a brilliant idea or action we see in our ancestors that resembles ours, we send the appreciation and acknowledgment peculiar to the great.

THE LIFE OF THIS WORLD IS NOTHING BUT A DELUSION (ILLUSION)

This self-admiration of modern man, his placing himself at the center, his putting his own time, place and self at the center of everything, in fact rests, in succession, on an arrogance toward the accumulated heritage of the past and on a delusion, a pride, that also feeds racism, ethnocentrism and nationalism.

Gurur in Turkish usage is an expression of man's self-aggrandizement as a human disease, but its Arabic root denotes error, illusion and delusion. In the Holy Qur'an too, when it is said that the life of this world is "nothing but the enjoyment of delusion," the word that expresses "delusion" is "gurur."

Taking oneself very seriously, supposing that the world or everything entrusted and granted to him belongs to him, is man's greatest gurur, his delusion. The way to give thanks for this bounty is first of all the deep awareness that nothing belongs to him. Instead, going the way of inflaming this pride is the typical condition of man in loss. Racism is the deepest form of this pride, this delusion.

THE PRIDE OF NOSTALGIA AGAINST THE PRIDE OF PROGRESS

Another facet of the harm and damage caused by this pride is, though it seems paradoxical, the feeling of nostalgia that develops against what the dizzying speed of change of the modern world carries away. A significant part of modern literature too, while exalting the past, speaks of everything experienced today going to the bad. A handicap of the feeling of nostalgia that develops in modern life is that it quickly turns into an utterly modern object of consumption.

Perceptions of the past and conceptions of tradition are reinvented and sanctified with today's viewpoint and motivations. While they are deployed against modern life, it is not even noticed that they have turned into a tool that feeds modernity.

Under modern conditions, the claim of a life or tradition that does not belong here also turns into another pride. A pride both in the sense of delusion and a pride manifested in a superior language and stance toward other ways of life. Yet Ibn Khaldun's realism has sufficiently taught us that there is nothing in the past, merely because it is the past, to be sanctified or seen as better. The past resembles the present exactly, as much as water resembles water.

Therefore nostalgia can perhaps be understood in individual lives as a longing for a person's youth, for healthier times, but it cannot form a justification for a historical pessimism that everything is going from bad to worse historically.

WHAT BUSINESS IS IT OF SOCIOLOGY?

When one sees those who today, when they open their mouths, can easily say that everything in health, the economy, education and law in Türkiye is going bad, it is impossible not to marvel at how people who have lived through the same things could reach diametrically opposed ideas and states of mind. But all astonishing developments also have an explanation.

In the last twenty years in Türkiye a dizzying development has been recorded in health, the economy, transportation, education, urbanization, industry and production. When these developments are expressed in figures, the picture is as clear as day.

Twenty years ago health services in Türkiye were among the lowest levels in the world. Today Türkiye has become a destination for health tourism. Even this is a sufficient indicator. A number of universities that has risen from 76 to 207, a number of university students exceeding 8 million (whose separate drawbacks and negative side effects need to be dwelt on separately), a self-sufficiency rate in the defense industry exceeding seventy percent, institutionalized social services, an extremely high-quality tourism infrastructure, etc.

That all these developments do not stir the same feelings in every segment of society is precisely a subject that creates important work for sociology, of course the sociology largely freed from its ideological chains.

It is entirely natural that all these developments do not satisfy everyone to the same degree, but what is the situation of those whose outlook and views have changed because their state of mind changed after seeing and being satisfied with all these developments?