nostalgia and collective delusion

Perhaps it is best to start at the beginning, since there is where beginnings tend to begin. Nostalgia comes from Ancient Greek, though it is a neologism. That is to say, it is an invented word from around the 1770s (historians vehemently differ on the exact date- some argue as late as 1788). A Swiss (or Alsatian) physician named Johannes Hofer put together “return” (nostos) and “pain” (algos) to make 'nostalgia' in attempt to make the existing German word "heimweh" (homesickness) more palatable to the scientific community, as he viewed the feeling as an ailment to be cured.¹ Indeed, this was the view of nostalgia for much of the 18th and 19th centuries - a sickness that could be cured. However, despite the attempts of physicians, there was no cure found. Instead the answer was to be found amongst poets and philosophers who provided alternative remedies.

Towards the latter half of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Nick confronts Gatsby about his desire to return to a time when Daisy loved him. He claims "you can't repeat the past". Gatsby responds, "incredulously", "can't repeat the past? Why of course you can!". This desire to repeat the past is something different than simply a longing or a pain for returning, or for the home. This is a desire to recreate that home. Svetlana Boym, whose work The Future of Nostalgia some of this essay/lecture is based on, defined nostalgia rather simply: "longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed".² There is much debate amongst scholars, as there always is, as to when exactly nostalgia went from being a longing for a home specifically to longing for a more general time. Gatsby does not long for his home, indeed he is far from attempting to recapture that specific part of his past. Instead he longs more generally for a time since past. A time when, as far as he believed, Daisy loved him and would have married him if he had been of a greater social class.

This lecture/essay is not about whether or not Daisy would ever have married Gatsby if he was of a higher social class, or whether, if Tom was not in the picture, Daisy would have married Gatsby once he had become 'new money' (though I think still the sheer newness of his money would mean she would not ever be able to marry him). What it is about, is this desire to recreate the past; Gatsby's insistence that it is possible.

As we reach a decade on from 2016, there is this nostalgic desire to return. The time was simpler, the music better, the culture overall was different. Less tainted somehow. Better. There is a desire to recreate that aesthetic. YouTube now is awash with 2016 music playlists. One video, entitled "The Worst Day in 2016: A Playlist" has garnered 4.8 million views in just four months.³ This desire to return to 2016 is clearly strong, and it can be corroborated with a trend to be more 'analogue'. Yet this aestheticisation of 2016, this romantic view of the year, fails to take into account the awful situation we were in. It was the first year of the first term of Donald Trump's presidency, the climate emergency was just as pressing as it is now, the internet was an even more toxic place than it is now (if you can imagine) and, most strikingly, Britain was voting to leave the European Union. It was not a wholly good time, and yet young people, a mere ten years on from then, romanticise the period as if it is absolutely better than the present - and then they try to recreate it. People are nostalgic for how they felt, rather than for what actually existed.

This moves us on to another point of Boym's, best surmised in Gizela Horvath's Faces of Nostalgia: "The image of the past nostalgia uses to operate with is not an objective complete one, but a subjective pick, a selective past, in which some aspects are presented in entirety, while others are carefully hidden".⁴ Nostalgia depends on half-truths. Yes, the music in 2016 was quite good, and yes there was a distinct aesthetic with the Olympics taking place in Rio that year. However, those who are romanticising that period were not fully conscious of it to remember it. They were young, they were growing up. The events of 2016 are tinted first by the emotions of adolescence and then tinted again by the emotions of recalling one's adolescence until the year is a different shade than it was in the first place. However, there has always been a desire to return to the 'good old days' (so much so that it has it's own Wikipedia page)⁵ to the extent that in Ecclesiastes 7:10 of the Bible, it reads "Do not say, 'Why were the old days better than these?' For it is not wise to ask such questions.". What makes this desire to return to 2016 unique is that it is genuinely possible to recreate some poor facsimile of the good old days. The playlists, the clothes, the aesthetic of the period can genuinely be recreated in a way in which it was much more difficult to do so before. The advent of the internet means that nostalgia can become "something other than an [...] intermediary between us and our personal past, but something that is trying to trick us into desiring a prefabricated, alas, manipulated past."⁶. It means that we actually can now recreate the past in a way that was not before possible, and Boym calls this "Restorative nostalgia".⁷ Restorative nostalgia is as the name implies. It moves beyond simply a longing for the past and instead moves to experience it in the same form, to recreate the way it 'used to be' - whatever that means. Since we know that nostalgia is never a complete or accurate reflection of the what the past was, restorative nostalgia does not look to accurately repeat the past but instead create something new under the pretence of recreating the old. This can be harmless, as it has been with the 2016 trend. However, it can also have serious consequences on an understanding of history and on political movements.

Hungary is the classical example of how collective restorative nostalgia, essentially collective delusion, can "mitigate collective guilt for historical wrongdoings".⁸ In Hungary, Horthy-era (1919-44) nostalgia mentions nothing of an allegiance to the Nazis, the persecution of the Jewish minorities, or the immense loss of life suffered by the country in World War Two. Instead it focuses almost exclusively on the glory of returning Hungarian territory lost as a result of the Treaty of Trianon - namely, Transylvania. The sharpest example of this is the Monument for the Victims of the German Occupation, which alludes to the idea that the country of Hungary was the real victim of Nazi occupation, and that the Hungarians had no part to play in the persecution of the Jews, placing all the blame on the Nazi 'occupiers'.⁹ There is no confrontation of the past in the slightest. Eric Hobsbawm warns the students at the CEU in Budapest of the way that history can be warped to suit a narrative, how restorative nostalgia can distort the truth and replace reality: "the past gives a much more glorious background to a present that doesn't have much to celebrate".¹⁰ The Hungarian government doesn't have much to celebrate. The country is relatively irrelevant geopolitically, it's economy is middling, there isn't much going on. So instead the government must galvanise the spirit of the population to vote for a certain party or policy by first inventing nostalgia for a period that has been generalised and romanticised, and then appealing to that invented period.

However, one does not even need to allude to any particular period in history in order to create this sense of collective restorative nostalgia, this collective delusion. The 'Make America Great Again' (MAGA) movement in America is a masterclass in weaponising restorative and vicarious nostalgia for political gain. Vicarious nostalgia, also known as anemoia, is a longing for a past not personally experienced, but emotionally connected to. It is nostalgia for a home which literally never existed.¹¹ The movement never specifies when America was supposedly great because the power of the slogan lies precisely in its ambiguity. Different people project different fantasies onto it: the 1950s nuclear family, pre-war America, the frontier, the Founding Fathers, or some imagined morally pure nation. It allows people to feel this sense of restorative and vicarious nostalgia without needing a vast number of people to agree on what the good old days actually were. The entire movement sustains itself by having each member cling on to something which doesn't really exist and never really did exist. One can, of course, link this to the fractured (non-)existence of the American Dream and how people's different desires for the future can also be projected onto this movement, but, alas, there isn't enough space for that today.

Governments and movements now possess the ability to actively reconstruct narratives, aesthetics, and historical memory. Nostalgia therefore becomes more dangerous because it no longer appears unattainable. There seems to be a “cure” for longing, a promise that the imagined past can genuinely be restored — but when that restoration is rooted in restorative nostalgia, the consequences can become incredibly destructive. I'll quote one last time for the end of this essay, from a paper called Collective Memory and Nostalgia by Eemeli Hakokongas: "nostalgic longing refers not to actual historical events or periods but to more abstract - and thus less contestable - ideas of lost 'purity' of a nation".