Nostalgia used to be considered a disease; causes, symptoms, and cures were debated by doctors. Now it’s a cultural condition, but no less dangerous…
Friedrich Nietzsche was an alienated man and saw alienation all around: “We are no longer at home anywhere”, he wrote of modern life. This high priest of disenchantment nonetheless knew where he would feel at home – ancient Greece. “We want to go back”, he insisted, and added triumphantly that “day by day we are becoming more Greek”. Becoming Greek meant, first, thinking like the ancient Greeks; but the ultimate goal, more bizarrely, was literally to embody an antique ideal: “one day – or so we hope – we will also become more Greek in our bodies” – though I suspect Nietzsche never went to the gym to work his abs into a sculptural six-pack, or shaved off his luxuriant and very unclassical moustache.
In this nostalgic longing for ancient Greece, Nietzsche was paradigmatic of the philhellenism that swept through German cultural life from the eighteenth century. Nostalgia, it might seem, has been part of European attitudes for centuries. So, with typical ideological fervour, the composer Richard Wagner, Nietzsche’s beloved but later rejected hero, declared, “I felt myself more truly at home in ancient Athens than in any condition that the modern world has to offer”. Writers, artists and philosophers across the world proclaimed that Greece was their “second homeland”; in an age of fierce and aspirational nationalism, this was highly charged language indeed. The desire to return to the past of antiquity was not just part of a philosophical or artistic movement, but became fully institutionalized in the school and university system; the study of the ancient world of Greece and Rome so dominated the curriculum, in fact, that by the end of the century, Kaiser Wilhelm II felt moved to argue that “we should raise young Germans, not young Greeks and Romans”. For Wilhelm, nostalgia entailed a worrying distortion of national values.
What does it mean when a culture expresses its aspirations and ideals through a longing for a lost past, the past even of another country? Of course, every society has some version of its own past, and many of these are idealized pictures. Homer’s Iliad, the first work of Western literature, reminds us that “ten men of today could not lift the rock that Hector lifted with ease”. Homer portrays a heroic world in which men were stronger, more beautiful and in closer contact with the gods than they were in his own society. Homer’s heroes went on to provide a model for the heroes of a later age: Alexander the Great in his search for glory, we are told, never travelled without a copy of the Iliad beneath his pillow. But the heroic age provided examples to live up to, not a lost world to hanker after. No Greek ever said: I could only be really at home in Homer. When the Parthenon was decorated with scenes of mythic battles, the temple was not designed to create a longing to return to a world where men and centaurs mixed, but to project a lesson of moral order for contemporary society.
Fantasizing about a simpler, happier world is a common enough reaction to rapid social change. In the comedies of Aristophanes, which are set in classical Athens, characters dream of a lost day before modern politics and modern rhetoric, when boys did what they were told, and sex and food were easy to get. Such nostalgia is a joke to be shared: it is significant that such sentiments come from the mouths of rather buffoonish older men. However much the audience wants easier access to food and sex and compliant boys, it is encouraged by its complicit laughter to recognize the silly fantasy within the nostalgia. For the Greek writers of the Roman Empire in turn, 600 years later, the comedies of classical Athens, especially Menander, became an ideal of Hellenism to imitate and re-embody, as they negotiated their place within the new power structures of imperial society. How we determine the relationship between the past and the present is a fundamental gesture of self-definition.
The past is always with us, used and re-used for political, aesthetic and cultural ends. But there is, I think, something distinctive about the nineteenth century in particular. One factor is the intense awareness of the rapidity and profundity of social change – from the railways to the Reform Acts to new sciences to the massive shifts of industrialization, people were vividly aware that they were witnessing, as Thomas Hardy wrote in 1893, “a precipice in time”. What it meant to live today, in modernity, in this age, was an abiding concern of Victorian writing. It was only in the nineteenth century that people started regularly to say that they lived in a particular century. The more the present felt troubling, the more the past seemed to matter. It was not by chance that the Olden Times, or the Good Old Days, became a cliché in this period. Portraying Elizabethan England in particular became a way of imagining the greatness of imperial Britain. Nor was it by chance that so many great theorists of change on the grand scale – Marx, Darwin, Freud – came out of this milieu. Or that historical novels became such a popular form, from Sir Walter Scott’s medievalism to Ben-Hur. “How did we get here?” and “where are we going?” became burning questions with which writers and thinkers sought to change the very world they were describing.
When Shelley wrote, in Hellas (1822), “We are all Greeks”, it was a battle cry for political liberation against conservative authoritarianism. When Marx declared that the “French Revolution was enacted in Roman dress”, he was insisting that the motivating republicanism of the revolutionaries was inspired by classical sources and that their actions were felt to embody classical ideals. The deepest aspirations for the future were informed by a deep longing for an idealized past of antiquity. That is what Nietzsche meant when he aspired to become more Greek on a daily basis: that he could transform the self – politically, culturally, aesthetically, even bodily. Wagner too was clear: the longing for the past was meaningless without a programme for the future: “We do not try to revert to Greekness”, he argued in the essay “Art and Revolution” (1849); “only revolution, not slavish restoration, can give us back the highest art work”. The Victorian proclamation of triumphant progress goes hand in hand with a committed, ideological reversion to the past. It is emblematic that 70 per cent of British parish churches and cathedrals were restored in the nineteenth century – that is, rebuilt with modern techniques and to modern designs that, the architects asserted loudly, accorded with their imagined ideal of early Gothic architectural principles. Here, longing for a lost past – nostalgia – was a radical principle of change.
In this light, it is fascinating to note that from the early modern era to the twentieth century, the word nostalgia primarily indicated a disease, whose causes, symptoms and cures were debated. Nostalgia’s test-case was Swiss soldiers abroad who missed their home and were depressed. (It is not an ancient Greek term at all.) Immanuel Kant in particular was much vexed by the supposition that going home could somehow satisfy the longing for a lost past, which, he insisted, must remain unsatisfied by definition. Nostalgia in those days was a technical term used and discussed primarily by specialists. In the twentieth century, however, the word has become fully demedicalized. It now means little more than a sentimental attachment to a lost or past era, a fuzzy feeling about a soft-focus earlier time, and is more often used of an advertising campaign, a film or a memory of childhood than with regard to any strong sense of its etymology, “pain about homecoming”. Victorians talked with passion about their feelings for the past, longed for lost ideals, and, as one would expect in an imperial age, often talked about travelling home, in overlapping physical and metaphorical senses. They also theorized such feelings and dramatized them in poetry, art, music and novels. But “nostalgia” is a major term for us, not them. In this sense at least, nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.
I can’t help wondering whether this shift in usage does not betoken a broader shift in politics too, or perhaps in cultural self-understanding. Nostalgia seems now to mark out a particular type of attention. If you call something “nostalgic”, you are suggesting that it evokes a memory of a former pleasure, a bitter-sweet recognition of the passing of time, or a sense of a lost era. To be nostalgic oneself is to experience those (possibly quietly melancholic) pleasures. It would be odd, indeed insulting, to describe the return of a concentration camp victim to Auschwitz as nostalgic.
There are two corollaries of this form of emotional attention to the past. The first is that the past remains selectively attractive; there is no misery, violence, prejudice or despair in a Hovis ad. The second is that linking the past and present in such a way as to work to change things for the future is discouraged. Nostalgia in this sense is the very opposite of the force for change that Shelley or Nietzsche or Wagner saw in their longing for an idealized Greek past. Its best hope is what Wagner called “slavish restoration”.
Today’s constant talk of nostalgia – for old passport covers, old manners, old food, and above all that fantasy of a Britain before multiculturalism – is in part a response to rapid social change and feelings of insecurity. In part, it is what anyone who is growing older might feel, as their childhood becomes vividly distant. But these nostalgic images are a shoddy replacement for any sophisticated understanding of history – the complex story of the past, and the intricate forces that link the past and the present – and that is why we should be worried when politicians play the nostalgia card. When we forget that the questions “where have we come from?” and “where we going?” are integrally linked, we drastically reduce our chances of self-understanding or effective action. If we oversimplify history, we will live – as both Cicero and Kant predicted – with the shallow mindfulness of children.
Source: Arts & Letters Daily
