How the wrong kind of nostalgia can endanger a society

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If you spend any time on the artsy and philosophical side of social media (of which I am a proud denizen), you will eventually stumble upon some nostalgia-made-cool. I am as guilty as the rest.

Because English has only a few words for nostalgia-adjacent emotions — like heartache, homesickness, or sorrow — English speakers tend to grasp thirstily for what other languages have to say. And other languages certainly seem to have richer accounts of a complex emotion.

In Portuguese, you have “ saudade ,” which is a deep, melancholic longing for something or someone now lost. The Germans have “ Sehnsucht ” for that visceral ache that comes on when you yearn for the past, or something lost. In Welsh, “ Hiraeth ” is a more geographical kind of nostalgia that pines for a certain land and home country. And, of course, you have the Japanese. That sense of drifting pathos for a world that’s left behind is very Japanese. And you’ll find a cottage-industry obsession with the concept of “ mono no aware ,” or “the pathos of things.”

I am sure you’ve felt some of these words. I certainly have. I’m not sure whether it’s the sign of the times, my increasing old age, or reading too much philosophy, but the more I look back, the more I get that heart-aching lurch of Sehnsucht . It hurts to remember the past. It’s sad to remember how good things were. It’s embarrassing to think how utterly ungrateful or unappreciative I was of everything I had.

Pain, sadness, and shame are powerful emotions, but they are also dangerous emotions. And so, this week, we look at the joys and the dangers of nostalgia.

The good old days of nostalgia

Nostalgia is an invented word. Of course, all words were invented at some point by someone, but while nostalgia might sound like some ancient Greek idea, it was actually coined in the mid-17th century by a doctor. Nostalgia was a condition to be cured, like insomnia or anemia.

Part of this was because physicians back then didn’t really separate mental and physical conditions into the boxes we do today. Now we have psychology and physiology. Back then, everything was psychosomatic — a spectrum more than a binary. But the reason nostalgia was taken so seriously and treated medically is that it was seen as being incredibly serious. It caused heart palpitations, nervous shaking, sweats, and, occasionally, self-starvation. Nostalgia was important because it was life-threatening.

Today, we’ve come to realize that the emotional effect of “nostalgia” does not cause all these physical symptoms, but it might co-occur with them. Nostalgia and nervous sweats are both caused by an unknown third condition. But according to the philosopher Svetlana Boym, we should still view nostalgia as a dangerous thing — not for its symptoms but for the behaviors it motivates.

Nostos and algia

Boym argues that there are two kinds of nostalgia: a good and a bad one. The “good” kind is what Boym calls “algia,” or a longing for something gone. It’s the saudade of reflecting on a childhood friend, lost even to social media searches. It’s the mono no aware of grieving for the childhood you once had — the faces, the laughing times, the simpler existence. Algia is not “good” in that it’s always happy and pleasant, but is simply harmless. In fact, it can even be beneficial. This reflective brand of nostalgia allows us to linger in our memory, using the past as a way to find a bit of creative space in the present.

The “bad” kind of nostalgia is when we long for some imagined “golden age,” either in our lifetime or long before. This “back-in-the-day” syndrome is what Boym calls “nostos,” or “the return home.” Boym argues that nostos often encourages people to do two things: first, to reject, mock, or even hate the world as it is; second, to seek some rebirth or return to a better time — be that real or imagined.

This sense of nostos is not necessarily bad in itself. Many reformers and progressives are often motivated by an internalized utopianism that hates the problems in the world and then seeks to remove them. But the problem for Boym is “the promise to rebuild the ideal home lies at the core of many powerful ideologies today, tempting us to relinquish critical thinking for emotional bonding…In extreme cases, it can create a phantom homeland, for the sake of which one is ready to die or kill. Unreflective nostalgia can breed monsters.”

The good and bad of nostalgia is that algia — longing for what’s lost — is what unites us. The reason all those nostalgia words are so popular on social media is that most of us feel them. Most of us miss the good old days of our childhood — cared for and carefree. We miss the joys of playing computer games, going out with our friends, and staying up watching TV after the parents have gone to bed. Nostos, though, divides. It says that the new, the young, or the different are an unwelcome change. It says not only “I miss the old days,” but “You are the reason the old days are gone.”

There will always be an allure to nostalgia. In fact, as far back as diarists and historians, we can find cases of nostos in action. In the 1st century A.D., Plutarch was nostalgic for the lost, great Greek city-states. In the 1600s, Michel de Montaigne was nostalgic for Plutarch’s Rome. And in the 20th century, J.R.R. Tolkien was nostalgic for Montaigne’s pre-industrial idyll. The movies and books we read present ancient Rome, medieval villages, and the 1960s as some kind of heroic, bucolic, swinging golden past. Maybe that’s true, and maybe that’s harmless, but Boym argues we should be careful that nostalgia doesn’t make us hate the neighbors we have because we love people we never met.

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