Conscious Choice: Nostalgia

August 2000 | Citizen at Large

Nostalgia

by Jay Walljasper

For us the word "nostalgia" implies an escape into a rosy past that never actually existed. It’s used to describe the good old days of village life, friendly neighbors, and lazy afternoons at the swimming hole. It means a fantasy time when the skies were never cloudy, roses were always in bloom, and hopelessly romantic dreams came true.

Yet British psychiatrist Trevor Turner points out in the New Internationalist that nostalgia entered our language as a medical term describing the rather serious condition of soldiers who had spent too much time away from home. The word was coined from fusing the Greek concepts of nostos (return home) and algos (pain). "Treatises were written on the symptoms and diagnosis, the causes and treatments." Turner writes. "It was agreed that...the only effective management was the nostos, the journey back home."

It says a lot about the modern mentality that something treated as a depressive disorder as recently as World War II can now be dismissed as a silly, sentimental mood. How we use the word "nostalgia" has changed, but so has the way we view the world. A trip back home now seems as impossible as travel to the moon once did. With the forces of technological and economic change marching on, it’s almost guaranteed that the place you grew up, the campus where you went to school, the spot where you first whispered "I love you" to your future mate doesn’t look the same anymore. We don’t have any expectations of the past being there for us — not just Currier and Ives’ bucolic scenes or Paris between the wars, but our own personal past from 1968, 1977, or 1989. Nostalgia has been transformed from a longing for home to a hopeless pining for never-never land.

Historian Jackson Lears of Rutgers University notes how high-level leaders in universities, the media, government, and business have always been dismissive of nostalgia, even the harmless sentimental variety. That’s because it defies the modern ideology of Progress — the cherished belief that the future always represents an improvement over the past. "From the view point of the liberal intellectual," Lears writes in the academic magazine Lingua Franca, "nostalgic people suffered from a failure of nerve: They refused the challenges of modern industrial society, taking refuge in the dreams of lost innocence.... Nostalgia, they believed, substituted feeling for thought, fantasy for fact.

"Hatred of nostalgia was not simply a liberal reflex," he adds. "Right-wing ideologues used accusations of nostalgia to discredit...critics of capitalism."

Lears goes on to note the continuing appeal of nostalgia for modern people — from the continuing popularity of "country" home furnishing to the swing music craze now taking America by storm, and wonders why this should cause such consternation for intellectual and economic elites: "Surely the longing for times lost deserves to be treated as more than a symptom of intellectual weakness. Surely the devotees of a past Golden Age deserve as much credibility as those whose Golden Age lies in the future. Why grant legitimacy to one form of sentimentality and not the other?"

Nostalgia, he says, doesn’t necessarily mean a retreat from the future; it might actually aid us in efforts to create a better society for tomorrow. The environmental movement, for instance, has shown that the pursuit of progress sometimes causes more problems than it solves. "Renewed respect for nostalgia could provide a powerful antidote to linear notions of progress — by underwriting the conviction that once, at least in some ways, life was more humane and satisfying that it is today."

British author Patrick Curry in his book Defending Middle Earth: Tolkien, Myth, and Modernity coins the phrase "radical nostalgia" to describe how the pastoral fantasies of J.R. Tolkien in novels like The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy have instilled two generations of young people with imaginative visions of how society could be different from the modern, militaristic, market-driven world we know. He recounts a visit to road protesters blocking construction of a highway through a forest. "I found only one person out of dozens who hadn’t just read The Lord of the Rings, but knew it, so to speak, inside out," Curry writes. "Nobody can tell me Tolkien’s books do not encourage such ecological activism."

"There is no doubt that nostalgia can cripple serious thought," Jackson Lears notes, just as blind allegiance to progress can. But it can also offer an important insight often overlooked in our hurly-burly quest for technological and economic innovation: "the recognition that something of value might have been lost on the way to the present."

Recommend this page to a friend

Top Ten pages recommended to friends: