The old joke is right: nostalgia ain’t what it used to be. Really, it ain’t.
While the word has been around for three centuries-plus, “nostalgia” originally just meant “homesickness”. As late as World War II, the US Army was telling its doctors to watch out for nostalgia among recruits – meaning they wanted to go home.
The word’s shift to its modern meaning is relatively recent. In 1957, Webster’s dictionary still offered only the original definition; by 1961, it had added “a wistful or excessively sentimental, sometimes abnormal, yearning for return to or return of some real or romanticised period or irrecoverable condition or setting in the past”.
And by the mid-1960s, “nostalgia” had well and truly taken on its current meaning.
Today, there are plenty of books whose appeal relies entirely on nostalgia, inviting us to bathe in warm memories of the fabulous 50s, swinging 60s or myriad other times and places. To be clear, this is not one of those books – even if it does start with some lines from the Beatles’ Yesterday and end with Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia. This is a serious academic work on the meaning of nostalgia and how the word has been applied to everything from high fashion to politics and popular culture.
And, skipping to the conclusion, it finds “nostalgia” has become so imprecise a term that it has pretty much lost its value for any serious analysis.
After all, when used by professional tastemakers it’s a word that usually comes with a sneer attached. Did any commentator ever use “politics of nostalgia” without meaning it as a slur? Nostalgia may be wildly popular among the hoi polloi – just look at the durability of the TV series Who Do You Think You Are? or the many people untangling their family tree on Ancestry.com – but it is seldom regarded as respectable among professional historians or critics of art, architecture, fashion and so on.
Take politics. As Becker says, “nostalgia in politics rarely appears as anything other than an insult”. It’s a handy bit of abuse, making your opponent look emotional rather than rational, and backward-looking as well.
Nostalgia has been used to explain the appeal of politicians, including Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, and to rationalise Britain’s Brexit vote.
And as those examples suggest, the “politics of nostalgia” claim has mostly been employed by the political left, against the right.
But as a tool of political analysis, nostalgia is a pretty blunt instrument. In Thatcher’s case, for example, her embrace of “Victorian values” made it easy to mock her as nostalgic, but for better or worse, in many ways she was a thoroughly unsentimental moderniser.
And during the Brexit debate, what if the Leavers didn’t think they were looking back at all, as critics claimed, but were looking forward to what they regarded as a brighter future, and it was the Remainers who were wallowing in the past?
As Becker says, critics who use the nostalgia argument against people who say “things were better in the past” seldom stop to ask whether for some people things really were better in the old days.
There’s a problem when whole groups are written off as merely nostalgic, he says, concluding that it would be better if the term vanished from the political vocabulary.
In pop culture, too, nostalgia may be all around us – where would commercial radio be without it? – but among the critics, the term is often used as an indictment.
Becker charts the “nostalgia wave” and its many manifestations: 1950s-60s Teddy boys dressing up as Edwardians, American Graffiti and Back to the Future, TV shows from Happy Days to Brideshead Revisited, Adam and the Ants in pirate gear.
Previous eras have come back into fashion at ever-diminishing intervals, until today we seem to be revisiting every preceding period simultaneously.
As a result of all this plundering of the past, he says, “there has been no decade since the 1970s that some cultural critic has not declared inferior because of its backward-lookingness”.
But again, it’s a bit less black and white than that. For one thing, revivals of past fashions are often driven not by old fans reliving their glory days, but by younger people discovering those fashions for the first time.
Becker also visits other supposed manifestations of nostalgia – the boom in museums, genealogy, saving old buildings – and find they often engage with the past in more subtle ways than the critics might have it.
The whole criticism of nostalgia, he concludes, is rooted in Western, modernist ideas about the passage of time and the naturalness of progress.
Nostalgia makes some people uncomfortable because it subverts that idea of progress, putting the golden age in the past rather than its rightful place, the future.
Yesterday: A New History of Nostalgia by Tobias Becker (Harvard University Press, US$35 hb, ebook) is out now.
