A Short Defence of Nostalgia

Oasis might be bad, but nostalgia isn’t.

Cards on the table: I think Oasis are wildly overrated, and the tension between Noel and Liam must be the benchmark for what Freud called ‘the narcissism of small differences’. Amy Winehouse, on the other hand? Now she could sing. She had imagination. And gosh, did she have style. Both Oasis and Amy Winehouse are in the news because the former are back together and the latter’s things are being auctioned off. These facts are getting plenty of attention. The charge of ‘nostalgia’ will surely follow.

And no one wants to be perceived as nostalgic. ‘Nostalgia is to longing as kitsch is to art,’ wrote Charles Maier, who teaches European and international history at Harvard. The claim is that it amounts to a withdrawal from reality into fiction. So runs the argument, nostalgia draws our attention away from our discontent in the present by painting what came before in lovely colours. Like the mother who loves her miscreant son so much that in her eyes, he can do no wrong, the nostalgic person wilfully turns his imperfect history into something wonderful and idyllic, denying truth and embracing fantasy. Such a person, goes the thinking, is an easy target for demagogues and sundry cynical politicians, who promise us a return to the place of our idealised recollections — ‘Make America Great Again’ and so on. And there is a grain of truth in all of this.

But only a grain. The idea that nostalgia is in and of itself a bad thing to be dismissed betrays a misunderstanding. That whatever is remembered is not objectively true, or not wholly true, is besides the point, and not just because all memory is unreliable. There is a great deal of evidence that nostalgia has a wide array of important psychological uses. A 2006 study by Wildschut et al. concluded that nostalgia regulates our feelings, helping us to cope with stress, worry and loneliness; while in two studies run four years apart, Zhou et al. found that nostalgia made us more resilient and generous, strengthened our sense of self and increased our perception of social connectedness which — it goes without saying at this point — is badly lacking in our fragmented, atomised world. Hepper et al. put it more simply: nostalgia gives us meaning.

That whatever is remembered is not objectively true, or not wholly true, is besides the point, and not just because all memory is unreliable.

I am persuaded that the chief reason for this is that it gives us a sense of continuity, stitching the past to the present and so creating a sense of integrity and stability through time. Indeed, the Greek nostos, from which we get the word nostalgia, denotes the pain we feel when severed from the form of life and place to which we belong. It is the ruling theme of The Odyssey, the bedrock-text of our civilisation, (the collapse of which I, wine in hand, continue to watch from my window with mild interest), which throws light on the fact that the tendency to nostalgia is not an embarrassing foible but something of personal and cultural value. In the story, Odysseus has the choice of remaining with the nymph Calypso on her island and being an immortal Anywhere (to use David Goodhart’s terminology) or returning to Ithaca, his wife, his child and a mortal life. He chooses to be a Somewhere.

Eliot touches on this theme in his Four Quartets, writing, in those gorgeous and immortal words from the last stanza of ‘Little Gidding’ that ‘We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.’ A century before, the equally philosophical and tortured poet Friedrich Hölderlin explored homecoming as literal and metaphorical in Heimkehr. Part of the emotive force of the story of the Dunkirk evacuation and of Christopher Nolan’s masterful film of the same name springs, it seems to me, from the sense not only that the young men who returned to England were coming home, with all of the emotion that little word evokes, but that the idea of home, in the shape of the hundreds of Little Ships called into service, came to get them, so reminding them of exactly what they were fighting for.

So those hard-headed types who dismiss nostalgia as a form of sentimentality have misunderstood what it is: not cheap feeling but a means by which we connect our collective and individual past to our present, redeeming the imperfections of then so that it may serve the now. And in this way, we find we are no longer living in what Sir Roger Scruton called a ‘tiny time slice’, staggering through the unillumined corridors of history, but striding forward as—to mix my metaphors—a sovereign individual, a main character with a narrative and in a narrative that will, with any luck, stretch out before us.