Warnings Against Nostalgia

Some quotes (maybe even warnings?) about nostalgia

Painting above: Cherries in a Silver Compote by Fede Galizia, 1610

I've never considered myself a very nostalgic person, and I further admit that I have little patience for those who are. This irritation of mine has largely gone unexplored until recently, when I've been able to pull together a few quotes here which have given me food for thought on nostalgia. 

From A Lethal Nostalgia by Deborah Rudacille on Aeon.co

Thousands of working-class communities around the country lament the shuttering of blast furnaces, coke ovens, mines and factories. This yearning for a vanishing industrial United States, a place in long, slow decline thanks to globalisation and technological change, has a name – smokestack nostalgia. It is a paradoxical phenomenon, considering the environmental damage and devastating health effects of many of the declining industries. Our forebears worked gruelling shifts in dangerous jobs, inhaling toxic fumes and particulates at work and at home. Many lived in neighbourhoods hemmed in by industries that pumped effluent into rivers, streams and creeks [...] Absent that sense of connection between past and present, nostalgia becomes a painful reminder of what has been lost and can, according to researchers, lessen people’s willingness to embrace new opportunities and experiences. When people feel the past slipping away, and try desperately to hold onto it, they might sacrifice the long-term benefits of growth and change for the short-term benefits of security and familiarity.

- Deborah Rudacille

From The Enchanted Life: Unlocking the Magic of the Everyday by Sharon Blackie

The opposite of true belonging is nostalgia: a longing for a place which  no longer exists - or which maybe never existed at all, except in our imagination.

- Sharon Blackie

From Nostalgia Reimagined by Felipe De Brigard on Aeon.co

The politics of nostalgia has less to do with memories about a rosy past, and more with propaganda and misinformation. This suggests, paradoxically, that the best way to counteract it might be to improve our knowledge of the past. Nostalgia can be a powerful political motivator, for better or for worse. Improving the accuracy of our memory for the past could indeed be the best strategy to curb the uncharitable deceptions of the politics of nostalgia.

- Felipe De Brigard

From Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment, and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words by David Whyte

Nostalgia tells us we are in the presence of imminent revelation, about to break through the present structures held together by the way we have remembered: something we thought  we understood but that we are now about to fully understand [...] something that was important, but something to which we did not grant importance enough, something now wanting to be lived again, at the depth to which it first invited us but which we originally refused. Nostalgia is not an immersion in the past, nostalgia is the first annunciation that the past as we know it is coming to an end.

- David Whyte

From "It Was Never Golden" on Aeon.co by Alan Jay Levinovitz

Longing for the past is generally referred to as nostalgia – a gentle, tender feeling that might make these stories seem like nothing more than harmless sentimentality. But it is crucial to distinguish between wistful memories of grandma’s kitchen and belief in a prior state of cultural perfection. The latter form of nostalgia currently serves as the ideological foundation for political movements like Greece’s Golden Dawn, which calls for a return to Hellenic glory via radical right wing nationalism, and ISIS, which waxes rhapsodic about a distorted Islamic golden age. This alone should serve to make us warier of nostalgia’s dark side, which, I fear, is badly underestimated, and wreaks havoc not only in politics but also medicine and anthropology. Far from being harmless, ‘the good old days’ is a virulent falsehood that infects those whose intellectual defences have been weakened by fear and insecurity. It is easily weaponised by power-hungry propagandists who seek to replace nuanced discourse with patriotic platitudes, and diverse ideologies with homogenous tribal nationalism: Mao, Pol Pot, Hitler, the Ku Klux Klan. In its endless incarnations this myth has shackled people’s thoughts and actions to the promise of a fiction, facilitating evil on all scales, from everyday racism to the greatest human rights catastrophes of the 20th century. Faced as we are with yet another global epidemic of golden age rhetoric, the time has come to inoculate ourselves against the good old days once and for all.

- Alan Jay Levinovitz