Our unhealthy obsession with the past prevents us from addressing the problems of the future

It's time to kick our addiction to nostalgia

Looking back, as historians always like to remind their readers, is an entirely natural and even laudable thing to do. There can be few people who are not stirred by unexpected memories of their youth, awakened by a glimpse of an old photograph or a snatch of a half-forgotten hit; there are few pleasures as bittersweet as remembering happy days that can never be recaptured. And yet our current obsession with anniversaries and retrospectives, our willing submersion in the warm, soapy bath of nostalgia, represents a distinctly unhealthy flight from the possibilities of the future.

George Santayana famously wrote that 'those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it', but it seems that whether we remember it or not, we are stuck in an interminable time loop. Talk of the 'nostalgia industry' barely does justice to a vast, multi-million-pound operation designed to exploit our childhood memories and teenage affectations. This autumn, it would take no effort at all to spend entire days, even weeks, reliving the Sixties and Seventies, perhaps dining on revived brands such as Smash or Spam before strolling out to hear the Rolling Stones in concert or watching the new James Bond film. Television executives strike gold by bringing back Doctor Who and Robin Hood; novelists win fame and fortune by revisiting the Thatcher years or Britain in the Blitz.

This is a more recent phenomenon than we generally realise. Indeed, the very word 'nostalgia' originally had a rather different meaning: coined in 1678, it described expatriate invalids or injured soldiers overcome by an almost physical longing for their native land. Sufferers were treated as if they had contracted some disease and as late as the American Civil War, soldiers diagnosed with nostalgia might be sent on sick leave.

Nostalgia in its current form, however, would have struck them as downright bizarre. Although our Victorian ancestors might reflect wistfully on the lost innocence of childhood, they had no wish to spend their leisure hours pretending they were still living 40 years earlier. They might be fascinated by the styles and interests of bygone eras - the art of the Middle Ages, for example - but they were hardly besieging the toy shops for remodelled versions of their old playthings. And the House of Commons might have resembled a public school, but School Disco would have found few takers.

So what changed? One answer is that we simply have far more to be nostalgic for. The carefree days of adolescence, for instance, are a relatively modern invention. The idea of a distinctive youth culture, set apart from childhood games and adult cares and marked by particular musical and sartorial fashions, only really caught on in the late 1950s. Before then, most people simply left school in their early teens and worked as office boys, shop girls or apprentices.

By contrast, their successors in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties, blessed with school holidays, paper rounds and pocket money, had the opportunity and the means to carve out their own cultural niches. They rarely seem like it at the time, but teenage years often represent a brief flowering of security and freedom, insulated from the pressures of maturity. Little wonder, then, that their attraction never seems to pall.

But there is more to it than that. Nostalgia appeals because it feeds, almost parasitically, off a broader sense of pessimism and decline. We turn our eyes to the past because we fear to look to the future. It is no coincidence, for example, that the first great success story of the modern nostalgia industry, the BBC's record-breaking adaptation of The Forsyte Saga in 1967, came at a point when the technological optimism of the post-war era was running out of steam.

Before then, space-age visions had been all the rage; comic books and pulp novels had dreamed of a brighter, better world of monorails and bubble-cars, conversations with computers and trips to the Moon. But by the late Sixties, the economy had run aground, inflation was mounting and Britain was heading for the sick bay. In a world where the future suddenly looked a frightening prospect, the intrigues of the Edwardians proved unexpectedly seductive.

One man asked angrily in the press 'Why shouldn't we enjoy it?', in tones familiar today. 'We are sick to death of living in a world where we are exhorted to be different from what we are by critics and politicians... no wonder we are happy to escape for 45 minutes each week into a world of elegance and good manners!'

The success of the Forsytes was a sign of things to come and, ever since, with growing momentum and appeal, nostalgic escapism has sunk roots into contemporary British culture. True, this is not merely a British phenomenon, but an inevitable result of the pressures of modernity. Hollywood loves nothing better than to wallow in a fictionalised version of the 1950s, all high-school prom and Mom's apple pie, while, rather more weirdly, the German idea of Ostalgie has reinvented East Germany as a lost world of socialist innocence.

But nobody does nostalgia better than we do. Historians often complain that nobody cares about the past any more, but popular history sells better in Britain than anywhere else on the planet, while castles and country houses pull in hundreds of thousands of visitors. And we may have lost an empire, but we lead the world in Second World War documentaries and 1960s compilation albums.

But whatever its compensations, nostalgia can be a dangerous and addictive habit. As the Labour party learned during the 1980s and the Tories have been discovering for the last 10 years, you cannot advance by walking backwards. Yes, we are better off without that naive faith in the inevitability of progress that disfigured the 20th century; and yes, the combination of climate change, consumer debt, economic globalisation, international terrorism and all the rest suggests that tomorrow might be tougher than today. But harking back to sentimental versions of the past will hardly help to solve the problems of the future. It is better to face our challenges head-on than to cower in the false escapism of the everlasting school reunion.

Dominic Sandbrook
1 October 2006

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1885106,00.html

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