Is nostalgia really a ‘dangerous emotion’?

The holidays of yesteryear: a poster for the London & North Eastern Railway – Alamy

“Nostalgia,” Agnes Arnold-Foster tells us – echoing a graffito reported near the refectory at Middlesex Polytechnic in 1974 – “isn’t what it used to be.” From “the Swiss Alps in the 17th century… to the election campaigns of Donald Trump”, she traces startling transmogrifications in her story of how scientists, scholars and self-interested manipulators have used and abused the word.

For the Swiss physician who coined the term in 1688, “nostalgia” named a disease: homesickness so intense that it could kill the maidservants and mercenaries whom it afflicted. In the 19th century it denoted longings induced by regrets. In what is surely a nonsensical variant of modern psychiatry, it can even refer to a similar yearning for an imagined future. Progressives see it as self-indulgence on the part of romantic reactionaries. For conservatives it is a delusion that blinds the Left to the bloodstains of the barricades and the defects of the nanny-state. Europhiles revile it as a pathology that condemned Britain to Brexit. For escapists it is a recourse, innocent or benign. For hawkers of comfort foods, period dramas and retro fashions it is exploitable weakness, which turns consumers into suckers.

Arnold-Foster is a shrewd critic and delightful guide. Her prose is fluent but not flashy, demotic without being dumb. She carries weighty learning lightly – embracing everything relevant, from dubious neuroscience to cod sociology. She turns specialists’ pedantry into perceptive anecdotes. Her lively eye for evidence spots the relevance of Gef – a mildly mischievous Manx poltergeist of the 1930s – or the story of Phineas Gage, who lost a large lump of his brain when a rogue explosion drove a tamping iron through his head in 1848. She can evoke the experience of a baby separated from his wetnurse in Paris in 1841, or the sensation of viewing old ads for Hovis and Ribena.

Food for thought: Agnes Arnold-Foster explores the impact of Hovis adverts – PA

Although her own views are conventional – she declines to vindicate nostalgia on the grounds that the world is getting worse – she is slow to anger, generous in judgement and always respectful towards the many mad scientists, amateur smatterers and doctrinaire denouncers of sentimentalism whom she has encountered in her research. Nostalgia, she concludes, is irreducible to definition and unconformable to agendas. She chases it like a lepodoptorist, in pursuit of ever-mutating prey that easily eludes the net. She writes neither in justification nor condemnation but “in defence” of (or, at least, with respect for) nostalgia. She admits to fondness for it.

She knows, it seems, everything about it except what it is. Because she sees nostalgia as a mercurial product of culture, she denies its place in “basic emotion theory”, which says that certain feelings are biologically hardwired, universal and unaffected by changing circumstances. The dichotomy is false: emotions have fixed characteristics – they exude the same bodily fluids and smells, jitters or jollity, stresses and sensations in every age and clime. But we indulge or evade, value or vilify, respond to and report them differently in different times and places to reflect the social pressures and scientific paradigms that surround us.

What defines nostalgia – its central, immutable core – is surely its function in revulsion from changes that challege our wellbeing. Homesickness is a response to a change of location and childishness a rejection of the unsettling responsibilities of adulthood, while preference for the past is a rational reaction to a hateful present and fearsome future. Nostalgia therefore increases in proportion to the pace of change.

The acceleration of change has been a persistent feature of history and has now attained a madcap pace that unsettles even the most restless spirits. This week’s argot, academia’s or art’s most recent “isms”, today’s trendings on the web or the fashions of a fortnight hence are bewilderingly untrackable to most of us. We wake up every day like Rip van Winkle, astonished at the unrecognisability of our surroundings.

When times are hard, when novelties jar and when we confront the shock of the new we reach for past comforts and familiar feelings. Nostalgia is cultural, but it is also natural. It is justifiable, but needs no justification. Is it a “dangerous emotion”? The real danger arises from utopianism – idealism ungrounded in experience, which makes people hew brave new worlds, exterminate enemies and cancel their critics.

Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion is published by Picador at £22. To order your copy for £18.99 call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books

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