Currently, many societies are experiencing rapid and fundamental changes, one of which being the transition from an industry-led economy to one that is based on digital technologies and services. This transformation has given people a sense of anxiety about the future, making them nostalgic for a time that made ‘sense.’ Indeed, that many Western societies still identify themselves with the industrial character of their nation’s past represents an attempt to turn back the clock to something more palatable and understandable. Nostalgia has thus become central to our contemporary condition. As Grafton Tanner, a scholar on nostalgia, has said, ‘I think that nostalgia is sort of the defining emotion of our time in that the last 20 years has seen one kind of nostalgia wave after the other.’ In other words, we seem to be trapped in a ‘doom loop’ of nostalgia. Why is this the case?
Nostalgia was first talked about in the sixteenth century as a disease that was associated with Swiss soldiers fighting abroad and people moving from one region to another. Johannes Hofer is credited with coining the term in his medical dissertation, where he combines two Greek words to encapsulate this new disease: ‘Nosos, return to the native land; the other Algos, signifies suffering or grief.’ At the time, being nostalgic was seen as a potential death sentence, as it renders people paralysed and succumbing to fever. Because of this, nostalgia would be diagnosed as a deadly disease that had to be contained since it could spread among soldiers, causing morale problems and death. As several scholars note, the concept of nostalgia subsequently went through various transformations, such that ‘by the beginning of the 20th century, nostalgia was regarded as a psychiatric disorder. Symptoms included anxiety, sadness, and insomnia. By the mid-20th century, psychodynamic approaches considered nostalgia a subconscious desire to return to an earlier life stage, and it was labeled as a repressive compulsive disorder. Soon thereafter, nostalgia was downgraded to a variant of depression, marked by loss and grief, though still equated with homesickness.’ Although nostalgia is no longer a deadly disease, its meaning still runs true by creating a desire to go back into a certain time and place in which a person longs for a more familiar environment.
Collective nostalgia often emerges during moments of change, when conditions of instability trigger a shared longing for a familiar past in the face of an unpredictable future. Historian Thomas Dodman explains, for example, that part of why nostalgia became widespread during the early days of European imperial conquest was because of the massive migration of people into ‘strange’ lands. He suggests that ‘what nostalgia’s victims all had in common, therefore, was not so much travel and displacement (though that certainly helped) as a shared sense of isolation and estrangement in a foreign place.’ Writing about the collapse of the Soviet Union, Svetlana Boym similarly observes that ‘the campaign for the recovery of memory gave way to a new longing for the imaginary ahistorical past, the age of stability and normalcy. This mass nostalgia is a kind of nationwide midlife crisis; many are longing for the time of their childhood and youth, projecting personal affective memories onto the larger historical picture and partaking collectively in a selective forgetting.’
These feelings of estrangement and longing can now be seen throughout the world, especially in societies which have experienced fundamental economic changes in the form of the transition from an industrial-led economy to one based on service and digitalisation. Andrew R. Murphy has pointed out how, in some countries, the nostalgia for a more stable and familiar time has been expressed politically as populism. This is summed up by authors such as Joris Lammers and Matthew Baldwin, who write that ‘right-wing populism appeals to its voters by promising to restore the glory of a simpler and more predictable past—a past with less international dependency, a more culturally homogenous society, and more traditional role patterns. People who feel left behind in an ever faster moving world may hark back to this simpler and more predictable past and thus be attracted to such movements.’
Yet, nostalgia for the past is not only expressed in Right-wing politics; it is also part of the politics of the Left. This can be seen in the way politicians and activists continue to express a longing for traditional industrial and manufacturing jobs. As Petra Rethmann writes, many left-leaning parties in Germany such as die Linke are ‘largely associated with the political legacies of industrial state socialism.’ This remains the case despite the fact that deindustrialization has been going on for decades and the manufacturing or industrial sector does not account for the largest proportion of advanced economies such as the United States and Germany.
Idealising past economic models will likely prove to be detrimental. Economic historian Jonathan Levy makes this point in relation to the American economy by writing that, although ‘[t]he past simply cannot be swept under,’ ‘[m]isplaced nostalgia for bygone eras will not do either. However uncomfortably, history must be faced.’ Politicians should be thinking about a future beyond industrialisation that accommodates a new class of service and digital workers. Nostalgia gives us a false sense of security and warps our perception of what should be done. Our current nostalgic politics confines us to the past, making us dismiss what the future might hold at a time in which we should be building new ways to organise labour and rethink our relationship to the government in the digital age. Putting these questions for tomorrow condemns us to a moment of crisis which can turn unpredictable and destructive.
In times of instability, it should be no surprise that people will look for a comforting familiarity. However, nostalgia idolises the past to the point of making the future disappear from the collective imagination. The past is best used when we learn from a society’s mistakes and its eventual triumphs. Yet today, we look to the past merely in the hopes of creating a bygone utopia.