Nostalgia is being used to steal the future

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. 

Under academic scrutiny, nostalgia’s complication is emphasised. Particular strands of thought brandish it variously patriarchal, bourgeois, racist, and/or plagued by deliberate amnesia (see the work of Stephen Legg and Edward Said, along with criticisms, in particular). Like its less directed cousin, memory, nostalgia may thus be understood fundamentally as problematic: first, in its necessary exclusivity (read: emphasis on the positive, self-affirming, superior-to-present); and second, by extension, its vulnerability to (mis)appropriation (read: use of the former to justify a particular end). Beyond the innocence of reminiscing the freedom of post-exam university days by the river to justify a discontent with the rigidity one finds oneself faced with in a 9-5 office work environment, scaled to the context of nations, politics and futures it takes on a more sinister threat. It’s an argument that sits well with the aforementioned FT article, where Stephens claims both that ‘[t]oday’s nostalgia has become an engine of nationalism’ and ‘[p]eople who have lost faith in the future are seeking solace in old, imagined, certainties’.

In the second year of my undergraduate degree I took a paper called ‘Austerity and Affluence’, a title that loosely dressed a lecture series railing against the most recent rounds of austerity, post-2008 and -2010, but also the shadows of Thatcherism. Besides the murkiness of mortgage schemes and taxation policies, its emphasis on the popular culture of austerity (and affluence), coinciding with my growing interest in Memory, got me thinking about nostalgia as justification. Allusions to camaraderie and us All being In This Together, discreetly underwritten by narratives of inequality in popular dramas like Downtown Abbey or recycled urges to Keep Calm and Carry On, were a less overt and coincidentally far more powerful justification of cuts and adjustments than the studied use of so-called ‘poverty porn’ or pathologies of abuse (see: ‘CHAVS’ by Owen Jones) that sought to use abuse of welfare as justification for its reduction. Today, our society is as unequal as it was in 1930: a reality dressed in nostalgia for a glittering British golden age housed in the national home of Downtown Abbey, deliberately silent on the fact that more of us are downstairs than upstairs. 

Such appropriative use of nostalgia is most obvious in cases like Trump’s call to make America great ‘again’, Brexiters’ demands for a return to insular glory-days of our island as empire, and the justifications made by myriad far-right nationalists across Europe, as Stephens rightly points out. And the fact that these narratives have found electoral purchase. Stephens suggests this purchase stems from a loss of faith in the future, a replacement security in the sure and knowable past. Yet, crucially, what this conclusion misses, and the strength of recent marches and movements against sexism, racism, nationalism, xenophobia et cetera for a particular future stress, is that nostalgia, at base, is not an abstracted past for an abstract future, but is utterly rooted in the present. Recognising this temporality alerts us to the active sense of nostalgia in use: nostalgia as a tool that shapes a particular past from the perspective of the contemporary, with a view to work that contemporary into a particular future. Without reference to today, nostalgia is obsolete. If nostalgia highlights anything useful, it is thus the fragility and mutability of time unfixed from the present. Nostalgia has not, therefore, stolen the future. It has scripted a future, yes, but the future is not fixed. Movements, electoral cycles and conversations will take place. Instead, nostalgia is being used to steal the future: its manipulation is active, and, crucially, still possible to address.