The Financial Times published an article yesterday morning arguing that ‘nostalgia has stolen the future’:
“I remember when elections were won by leaders selling visions of the future: Harold Wilson’s white heat of technology, Ronald Reagan’s morning in America or Tony Blair’s New Britain. In the new democratic disorder nostalgia has replaced optimism as a ruling emotion. Populists recognise the power of adjusted memory. America’s Donald Trump, British Brexiters, Europe’s new nationalists – they all inhabit a rose-tinted past. Nostalgia’s force lies in a human instinct to screen out the bad while recalling the good…”
Though I agree largely with Stephens’ polemic, and the questioned use of nostalgia is something I have been thinking about for a while, I would argue a more active accusation of nostalgia’s theft of the future. That is: nostalgia has not simply ‘stolen the future’, but is actively being used to do so.
Nostalgia has a complicated etymology beyond the popular understanding of rose-tinted glasses. Borrowed from Latin, its early usage from the mid-18th century was as a medical diagnosis for homesickness, a meaning that retains contemporary use as a longing for familiar surroundings. In the early 20th century the term is de-spatialised by an emphasis on its temporal properties; nostalgia thus comes to describe a sentimental longing for or regretful memory of a period in the past, especially in one’s own lifetime, or a sentimental imagining or evocation of a period of the past. In the 1970s it transmogrifies once more: a collective term for things that evoke a former (remembered) era. Retaining its triad of forms, nostalgia today is generally understood as a sentimental longing or wistful affection for a period in the past. It’s the sighed remarks of older generations about Their Day and the comparative ignorance of The Youths Today; the #throwbackthursdays shared across social media platforms in weekly longings for beaches, parties and other off-days past; the renewed (characteristic?) contemporary fascination with period dramas of vintage styles, romances and heroes.