Review: Nostalgia is a seductive siren, it’s no wonder we get stuck living in the past
Tapping the vein: Nostalgia has been used to explain the enduring appeal of politicians like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Photo / Getty Images
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.