Freed From Behind The Paywall: Why I'm Allergic To Nostalgia

The Past is Another Country - One I Don't Want To Visit

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I was struck reading these two pieces in The Guardian about how mired in nostalgia England has become.

‘Mired’ is the right word - because nostalgia is a mire, a bog in which you can become stuck.

Notice that people never talk about being ‘mired’ in the future.

The word ‘nostalgia’ actually in its original meaning translates as ‘acute homesickness’. Nowadays we see it more fondly - as a gentle and largely harmless longing for something in the past, now lost. This something may be a certain way of life (‘Proper Binmen’) a product (‘Blockbuster Video’) or a TV programme ( ‘Top Cat’). But in the way many think about it now, nostalgia is nothing more than an affectionate reflection on something passed away.

And so many things have passed away from the present into the past. A virtually infinite number really, but here’s a list from the first Guardian piece, cataloguing some of the topics that appear in the spread of Internet nostalgia memes:

“Who remembers a dripping sandwich? Who remembers rag and bone men? One pound notes. Drinking water from a hose. Choppers. The saying “act your age, not your shoe size”. Queueing to use a phone box. Playing in the street and yelling “car!”. French cricket. Jam sandwiches. Scabby knees. Skipping. Routemasters. Salt and vinegar Chipsticks. Hot chocolate from the vending machine after swimming lessons. Coal fires. The slipper. The cane. The ruler. Getting a thick ear. Concentrated orange juice. Cumbersome lawnmowers. Traditional drapers. Stand pumps. Ink wells. Duffle coats. Tin baths. Marbles. Jack Charlton. Stevie Nicks. Forgetting your PE kit. Bus conductors. Bob-a-job week. Wooden ice-cream spoons. Snakes and Ladders. Ponchos.”

Odd that they should include Stevie Nicks - hard to imagine her as an object of nostalgia. And children were still forgetting her PE kits last time I checked . But in any case this list is just a small sample of a great panorama of reminders of ‘lost things’.

I have a less positive view of nostalgia than the one of ‘affectionate recollection’. One of my writing heroes, the TV dramatist Dennis Potter, wrote that nostalgia was a ‘second order emotion’. He meant, I think, a second-rate emotion. It is not authentic, like love or hate. It is hardly an emotion at all, more an orientation toward life. It is more like a comfort blanket, an emotional prop. It gestures towards a deep avoidance of reality.

What’s wrong with that, you might say? Reality is ugly enough without us being reminded of it every five minutes. Why not escape into the past where everything was apparently safer, kinder, more comprehensible?

Perhaps nothing is wrong with that. But personally, I object to nostalgia because it is a lie. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with looking, say, at old family photographs now and then, or cherishing a relic of your childhood. But once one starts to fetishise the past - its culture, its way of thinking, its habits and norms - one is unable to engage properly with the present or the future. It is a turning away from actuality - because nostalgia is not simply remembering. It is sugar-coating and pasteurising.

Things were never as good as we remember them. Because when they were happening, they were in the present. And therefore they were - as they were actually being lived - couched about with all the anxieties, doubts and qualifications that attend all real life.

Only when fixed into the past can things and events become perfect, immutable and timeless. In this sense, the past is not a reality - it is a symbol for what we secretly wish the world to be, i.e. unchanging.

Nostalgia at its worst leads to political ossification and stagnation. How much of Brexit was based on nostalgia - for a country that might well have existed but which was almost certainly different from how we remember it? Yes, England was very different in the 1950s. It probably felt much safer. In fact, statistically, it was much safer, at least in terms of street crime and motor vehicle accidents. But it was also boring, racist, limited, inward-looking, sexist and complacent. Staring longingly at ads for Imperial Leather soap and Morris Minor cars plaster over this element of the national psyche.

Many questionable political movements have been rooted in nostalgia - Nazi Germany for an imagined greatness and ‘purity’ that existed in the past, Trump’s campaign to Make America Great Again.

We hope what we have lost can be regained. But it cannot - if it was even there in the first place. And trying to regain can be a tremendous act of folly as well as a waste of energy.

Not that such dark matters are the only reality either. There was much light in the past, just as there was darkness. Just as there is now. But nostalgia sees only a lost Shangri-la and may destroy much that is good in the present in the hope of regaining it, just as another kind of idealist will destroy much that is good in the present in the hope of some imagined perfect future. Think the Chinese Communist Party in the 1960’s which created a nightmare trying to build a brand new world.

Perhaps idealism and nostalgia are two sides of the same coin.

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There is a kind of giving up on life in the present implicit in nostalgia. And if you are old, like me, you are going to die, probably, sometime in the next few decades. Do you really want to spend your time lost in static dreams of the past rather than in the energy and uncertainty of the present? Perhaps your life is bad enough to make it worthwhile. Mine definitely isn’t. I am grateful for every moment of present time, as more than ever now I am faced with my own finitude.

I can honestly say that, as a 66-year-old man, I almost never think about the past. As Alan Watts says, ‘ a memory is the corpse of an experience’. The only reality is here and now. The past has gone and the future hasn’t arrived yet.

Nostalgia is about seeking security - but there is no security, and if we haven’t discovered that yet as adults, then we have not grown up. And growing up is an urgent task, not only for ourselves but for our culture and even civilisation.

Not that nostalgia if purely confined to old people. I remember in my 30’s there were people actually getting misty-eyed about the days when they were twenty.

It might seem perverse for me to take nostalgia so seriously. And yet I genuinely believe it represents a distorted relationship with time itself - and our relationship with time is crucial to who we are and how we perceive and are able to enjoy the world.

I think it takes courage and clear-sightedness to face full on the real world, which is the real present, with all its limitations. Nostalgia, to me, is a form of cowardice - and dangerous cowardice at that.

All this seems a long way from staring longingly at a picture of a spud gun. And it is a long way. But it is a matter of degree, a habit of mind that if indulged in can be hard to shake off. If we are too lost in the past, then we are truly lost.

And when you are lost, who knows where you will end up.

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