When we look back at our lives, or at the trajectory of mankind itself, what do we think? Paradoxically, every generation believes they are solving old problems and making life in their time better, and yet for many of us a reappraisal makes us long for what we have left behind. We have to wonder: what is the point of this nostalgia and why does it have such a hold on us?
Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion is an attempt to dive deeply into this slippery feeling, to assess how we feel about it right now. Author Agnes Arnold-Forster sees nostalgia all around her – from the US campus demonstrations against the war in Gaza echoing the anti-Vietnam actions of the 1970s, to remakes of fondly remembered TV series such as Frasier and Sex and the City, to the trend for retro versions of 90s fashions, all big shoulders and wide trousers.
But nostalgia certainly ain’t what it used to be. The term “nostalgia” dates back more than 300 years, and was originally a medical term describing an illness that could, and did, kill people. In 1688, Swiss medic Dr Johannes Hofer coined the word, derived from the Greek nostos or homecoming, and altos or pain. He built up a body of evidence for the existence of “a kind of pathological patriotic love, an intense and dangerous homesickness”. Symptoms ranged from continuing sadness, disturbed sleep, “stupidity of the mind” to diminished sight or hearing, fevers and a lack of interest in food or drink. If this sickness continued for too long, patients died.
People who were affected had left their home village or country; the original subjects for study were Swiss mercenary soldiers, but it spread to young people sent to foreign lands to work. Hofer, like many doctors at the time, believed nostalgia was dangerous and blurred the lines between illness and “the passions” – as emotions were then known, Arnold-Forster notes. His treatment was diet, warm baths and change of circumstances. More rarely, he suggested bloodletting, purges and arsenic. If all else failed, patients would simply be sent home, and immediately be cured.
By the early 19th century, scientists were linking the maladies of nostalgia with colonised people in territories controlled by European rulers. In 1803, a British doctor in Sierra Leone claimed nostalgia “affects the natives of Africa as strongly as it does those of Switzerland … and often impels them to dreadful acts of suicide”.
“Nostalgia” was also the term cited by the British abolitionist William Wilberforce to describe to Parliament the “passionate desire [of slaves] to revisit their native land”. As Arnold-Forster says, that might seem “jarring” and “flippant” to a modern reader, who thinks of nostalgia as more bitter-sweet and even self-indulgent. But the deaths attributed to nostalgia can also be seen as a testament to “enslaved people’s grief, acts of resistance, righteous rage, and their desire for freedom and self-determination”.
Among white colonists, it was commonly believed that the nostalgia of non-white people, whether enslaved or not, was a marker of “their inferiority”, and helped to enforce rigid racial and imperial hierarchies. “They saw people of colour as constitutionally weaker, more emotionally unstable, less able to do the kind of adventuring that 19th-century Europeans had grown so used to,” says Arnold-Forster. “They believed that leaving their homes and making their fortune elsewhere was a sign of the white man’s strength.”
And yet, when colonists encountered their own feelings of homesickness, they saw them as quite understandable signs of sophistication and patriotism. With a laugh, Arnold-Forster points out the hypocrisy and inconsistency. “But a lot of justification for empire is similarly flawed. Nostalgia is often something used to lambast others, while your own nostalgia is sensitive, a sign of your good life, or past. ‘What I am nostalgic for is rational and fits in with the correct world view’ would be their opinion.”
Storied family
It seems apposite to ask Arnold-Forster what drew a 33-year-old academic historian (she has a PhD and is currently a lecturer at Edinburgh University) to write a well-received book on this subject. Her previous publications were firmly in her field as a historian of medicine, but with this one she was signed to a major publisher and it received glowing reviews in the Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Spectator and the Times Literary Review on its UK release in April.
Arnold-Forster comes from a long line of eminent names in British cultural, scientific and political history. Among them are the woman regarded as the doyenne of Scottish literature (her great-grandmother Naomi Mitchison), and scientists who came up with the ideas for everything from staged decompression when diving (JS Haldane) to gene maps for haemophilia and colour blindness, as well as zoologists, physiologists, journalists, critics and artists.
On visits to her grandmother’s large converted barn on the outskirts of Cambridge, Arnold-Forster revelled in the old-fashioned children’s books designed for kids several generations earlier, like Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie and those by Enid Blyton. As she writes in the introduction to Nostalgia, this extended to begging her parents “to divert me from my 1990s London primary school to a boarding school in 1950s Cornwall. My pleas went unanswered so I went to my uniform-free state school every single day in pleated skirts and white blouses, desperate to return to a world I had never inhabited.” Clearly, she was just the person to humanise in non-jargon prose the complex history and ideas around nostalgia.
Nationalist nostalgia
By the late-19th/early-20th century, nostalgia was coming into the realm of psychologists and psychoanalysts, moving it from a disease to a feeling, or psychological state. “For them, it was a dangerous emotion, a kind of troubling emotional tendency. They were generally dismissive, believing it was an emotion that affected tradition-bound, working-class people rather than cosmopolitan, educated people who would not be nostalgic.”
Hungarian-born Freudian psychoanalyst Nandor Fodor, who lived in London and finally emigrated to New York, was typical of this thinking. He also believed that nostalgia “could infect entire countries … with the home replaced by the ‘mother country’, and political nostalgics would fight tenaciously to keep themselves away from the rest of the world”.
As Arnold-Forster writes, many psychologists and analysts were Jewish, forced to flee their own countries, even before World War II. “So it’s not surprising that they would have a negative view of people who wanted to stay put. And of course, they were sceptical about nationalism, as history swerved towards the most deadly stage of nationalism.”
Adolf Hitler and the Nazis ruthlessly appealed to Germans’ nostalgia for the pre-war strength and unity of their country. And politicians have never stopped resorting to “the good old days” slogans, as seen in Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (a direct copy of Ronald Reagan’s from 1980) and his constant repetition of the words “again” and “bring back”.
The scientific study of emotions is a winding road, and it has not yet reached its end. Ever since Phineas P Gage had half a teacupful of his brain removed after an industrial accident on the railroads of Vermont in 1848, scientists have studied the relationship between the brain and emotions. By the end of the Victorian period, they had concluded that emotions inhabited the most ancient part of the brain, the limbic system, and thoughts were assigned to the cortex.
But in the first half of the 20th century, scientists moved to the biology of behaviour when, writes Arnold-Forster, emotions “were recast as states of the nervous system that caused specific behaviours or physical reactions”.
So, fear wasn’t located in one part of the brain; it was part of the freeze-fight-flight action. Research went through various iterations like this until, in the late-1970s, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) arrived with the ability to actually see how the brain was working. The new technology brought new disciplines, such as cognitive neuroscience, and, at first, it looked as if they would be able to find specific areas of the brain responsible for emotions such as fear and anger. But like all science, there is a great deal of data and debate about what it all means.
In 1995, American psychologist Krystine I Batcho set out to measure how often and deeply people feel pangs of nostalgia with her Nostalgia Inventory. Participants were asked to score items including family, someone you loved, toys, school, the way society was; their score was an average of all the subjects. Previously, it had been thought that nostalgia was felt more by people who were unhappy with the lives they were living than those who were happy with their lives and optimistic for the future. But results showed the difference was negligible. Those who did score highly, however, were more emotionally intense.
Emotional ambush
Exactly what brings on nostalgic feelings has also been studied. Many people have told researchers that feeling low triggered nostalgic thoughts. But more importantly, says Arnold-Forster, researchers also found that “nostalgia can make people happier and more content. For those who feel emotionally detached, it can be used as a tool to create a sense of meaning and purpose”.
Smells are particularly evocative. The book quotes psychology senior lecturer Simon Chu of Liverpool University: “Odours recall memories that are more detailed, more emotional and go back further than those that are recalled by any other sense.”
They can summon an actual specific memory, which is why, when you pass someone wearing Shalimar in the street, you are back in your childhood bedroom, being kissed goodnight by your mother as she goes out to a party. These are unsolicited nostalgia-alerts – unlike the willed experience of looking at an old photo – in which you can be suddenly ambushed by the past.
If all emotions have a reason, what is nostalgia for? “Evolutionary psychologists today say nostalgia assists with socialising,” says Arnold-Forster. “When you indulge in nostalgia, your mind is peopled. You are almost never nostalgic for solitary times, so it keeps us connected to our sociable world. Cultural rituals are the things that keep us connected to nations, culture. So nostalgia plays a big part in national identity; it makes us feel more positive about people around us.”
Being nostalgic for pasts we’ve never known (and might well hate) is surprisingly common. In the UK, anti-immigration rhetoric is often seen as nostalgia for the 1950s era of cultural homogeneity, which is beyond the recall of almost everyone under 70. Throughout the former Soviet Union, there is nostalgia for the communist era, never mind the food shortages, lack of free speech and totalitarian repression. In 2020, in Russia itself, 75% of Russians polled claimed that the Soviet era was “the greatest time” in the country’s history.
Popular culture is awash with nostalgia. Currently, the 90s are coming around again, and again, and again. It’s the last decade before the internet became ubiquitous, before social media, smartphones and the hyper-connected world as we know it.
But as Arnold-Forster points out, there have been plenty of periods that have gone through similar waves. And some of our personal relation is to do with our now personal stories, what age we are and whether we have come to the stage of mourning our late, departed youth.
For the scientific study of this bitter-sweet emotion, Arnold-Forster wonders whether it would make more sense to see nostalgia as a more or less permanent condition in the Anglophone West – “something that happens regardless of the problems and promises of the age in which we live. Nostalgia is everywhere, felt by almost everyone, all the time.”
As someone whose London hallway is lined with photos of my family, many of them in New Zealand, and the older ones all dead, I know it’s never far from my mind. And though it may sometimes make me feel sad, it always turns to making me feel happy, and connected.
Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion by Agnes Arnold-Forster (Pan Macmillan, $55 hb) is out now.
