Nostalgia is a debased emotion. Intellectuals scorn it; corporations exploit it. Therapists instruct us to live in the present moment. Yet only the most austere and bloodless temperaments seem immune to the lure of times gone by. All the same, this sentimental yearning for an irrecoverable past is widely dismissed as regressive and reactionary. When we give in to nostalgia, we do not simply remember the past. We distort it, idealizing and whitewashing whatever lost era we wistfully recall. In projecting our desires onto the past, we bury historical reality—and the many forgotten people who lived, suffered, ate, had sex—in clouds of perfumed mist. Like the candies spread on the shop counter, nostalgia is unhealthy, artificial, kitsch. And sweet, too sweet.
Nostalgia’s bad reputation is the main theme of scholar and writer Tobias Becker’s Yesterday: A New History of Nostalgia. Across several cultural domains—politics, fashion, film, architectural preservation, heritage museums, battle reenactments—Becker finds that nostalgia is a near-universal pejorative. The charge of nostalgia is a convenient insult to hurl at a political opponent, or a protester blocking the Victorian building you’re trying to bulldoze. Vintage fashions (rose-pink bridesmaids’ gowns from the flea market, platform shoes from the back of your aunt’s closet) or films that pay tribute to another era (Bonnie and Clyde, The Way We Were) can be hailed as “retro” (an ingenious appropriation of existing material) or condemned as “nostalgic” (indicating that the culture is out of ideas). Historians, meanwhile, wield accusations of nostalgia as a method of professional gatekeeping, suggesting that costumed reenactors or family ancestry enthusiasts are approaching the past in an unserious (which is to say, uncritical) way.
Our thinking about nostalgia is badly flawed, Becker proposes, because it relies on defective assumptions about progress and time. Attacking nostalgia, he claims, is often a surreptitious way of defending a naive belief in progress. If you think the world is getting better and better, then a longing for the past seems bigoted or baffling. Who would want to turn the clock back and go from better to worse? This belief in embedded progress is allied, according to Becker, to a view of time as uniform and linear. Quoting the social theorist Bruno Latour, Becker encourages us to think of time as less like an “irreversible arrow” and more like a “plate of spaghetti.” The past is perpetually “recombined, reinterpreted, and reshuffled,” Latour ventures; it loops around and doubles back on the present. All this may sound like postmodern esotericism, but the idea of the past overlapping and entwining with the present is not some recent import from French theory. The rabbinic scholar Lynn Kaye has found a similar temporal flexibility in the Talmud (for example, in the Passover rituals with which Jews attempt to merge the present with the long-ago events of Exodus). More plainly, we can see in the built environment of any city the commingling of past and present.