There’s much to be said for nostalgia

Michel Barnier, the chief negotiator for the EU Commission, called Brexit an expression of ‘hope for a return to a powerful global Britain, nostalgia for the past’ – a mood that ‘serves no purpose in politics’. Popular historians have echoed his view of nostalgia as a syndrome which affects declining societies such as Great Britain. The yearning for a happier past got Donald Trump elected and may re-elect him; it breeds xenophobia and locks societies into a doom loop of reruns, remakes and Facebook feeds of photographs from olden times. Or does it? Two new histories of nostalgia are sceptical about how pervasive or dangerous it really is.

Agnes Arnold-Forster’s shrewd, digressive book is the more accessible of the two. A historian of medicine and emotion, she is primarily interested in when and how we have pathologised emotional attachment to the past. Her story begins in 1688, when the physician Andreas Hofer coined the term ‘nostalgia’ to diagnose the craving for home that prostrated and sometimes killed Swiss mercenaries. This very physical disorder was an inverse form of altitude sickness. One of Hofer’s successors proposed to cure it by erecting towers which patients could climb for restorative bouts of height. Nostalgia soon crossed the Alps, and Britain’s patient zero was a Welsh soldier who, in 1781, rose from his sickbed only when promised that he could have leave to visit his beloved mountains.

The feelings of severe dislocation, now called nostalgia, became endemic in Britain and other imperial societies which uprooted millions of people and sent them to distant parts of the world. Arnold-Forster, who has a low view of medical professionals, suggests that doctors often greased the wheels of colonial exploitation. Those who investigated the ‘parting pang’ that sickened enslaved Africans and indentured Asian labourers did so because they worried about the interests of capital, not humanity.

By the time an American soldier in France became the last recorded fatality of nostalgia in 1918, the syndrome’s diagnosis was passing from physicians to psychologists. These argued that nostalgics were not otherwise healthy people disordered by abrupt changes of environment, but sick souls, whose feelings were stuck in childhood or even in the uterus. Arnold-Forster stresses the biases behind such theories. Nandor Fodor, a leading psychoanalyst of nostalgia in the 1950s, had lived a roving life that took him from Budapest to London and Manhattan. Supremely mobile himself, he naturally interpreted any dwelling on past scenes as a kind of infantile regression.

From the 1960s, nostalgia became a social phenomenon rather than a personal malady, not least because there was money in it. The Don Drapers of Madison Avenue connected their brands to the vanished youth of consumers. Cultural commentators argued that societies as well as individuals could have midlife crises. The concern for heritage preservation, the retro styles of popular music and the American passion for re-enacting Civil War battles were manifestations of a ‘nostalgia wave’ sweeping western societies. The British left condemned the public’s penchant for historical movies and Victoriana as a ‘masturbatory fantasy’, which prepared the way for Margaret Thatcher.

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Arnold-Forster follows Raphael Samuel, the ebullient historian of ordinary people’s enthusiasm for the past, in denying that it is necessarily reactionary. Nostalgia boosts many kinds of politics. In Britain, it has strengthened attachment to the National Health Service, whose frontline staff miss the times when matron rather than managers ran hospitals. After the Brexit vote, the sorrowing of Remainers over Britain’s diminished status revealed that it was they, rather than Leavers, who were haunted by visions of vanished imperial glory. Arnold-Forster scours online reviews and message boards to conclude that people who take part in the most obsessive engagements with the past – putting on medieval jousts or carrying out genealogical research – do so because they find them diverting or satisfying, not because they pine for lost times.

Tobias Becker combs through much similar material, with a sharper eye for French and German sources, and also comes to forgiving conclusions. Notwithstanding its deliberately zappy prose, his Yesterday is a rather heavy contribution to a very German kind of conceptual history, which systematically traces how ideas come to structure the experience of reality. It is less a history of nostalgia than a deconstruction of ‘nostalgia critique’: our urge to label entire activities and even societies as nostalgic. Becker links it to a slow revolution in perceptions of time, which intellectuals came to view as single and linear – an arrow flying from the past into the future. Having subordinated everything to clock time, they were alert for efforts to put the clock back. German sociologists, who viewed modern life as a process of relentless acceleration, consequently saw nostalgia as a flight to ‘islands of deceleration’.

The hunt for defectors from modernity’s faith in progress loomed largest in political life. American right wingers from Barry Goldwater onwards faced allegations of pining for the racist days of old, while German leftists attacked Helmut Kohl for living in the 1950s. Yet Becker’s diligent examination of the rhetoric and policy of conservatives suggests they exalted the values of the past without wishing to revert to it. The schmaltzy Ronald Reagan promised a ‘better tomorrow’, while even Trump’s promise to ‘make America great again’ boasted of future prosperity. Becker would like to banish nostalgia from our analysis of politics precisely because it has become such a charged and often inaccurate insult.

Historians might then deliver us not so much from nostalgia as exaggerated dread of it. Arnold-Forster’s survey of bad medicine warns us against using fashionable theorems to stigmatise other people’s feelings. Becker thinks that if we developed more flexible and open notions of time, then we could celebrate the creativity with which musicians or fashion designers play with memories of the past. Both authors gratefully cite modern neuroscientists who use MRI scans to interpret nostalgia as an ‘emotional armour’, which protects ageing brains against unexpected changes. As western societies get ever greyer, nostalgia may turn out to be a cure, rather than a disease.