As a historian of emotions, Agnes Arnold-Forster, Ph.D., is fascinated by how we feel about our feelings. She has a particular fascination with nostalgia — so much so that she recently published an entire book about it.
In “Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion,” she traces the origins of nostalgia back centuries, to a time when doctors considered it a potentially fatal condition.
That’s obviously no longer the case — but Arnold-Forster says our cultural relationship to nostalgia hasn’t changed much since then. She says moments of collective nostalgia are often associated with moral panic.
In her mind, for example, it’s no coincidence that many people are rediscovering a love for analogue technologies as fears intensify about the long-term psychological impact of smartphones and social media. As Arnold-Forster told The Show’s Sam Dingman, that may seem like a modern phenomenon — but we’ve seen it all before.
Full conversation
AGNES ARNOLD-FORSTER: And one of my favorite examples for this in the book is Samuel Pepys — who is the 17th century diarist who lives in London, wrote a lot about himself. He got a pocket watch one day and writes in his diary about how obsessed he is with looking at his pocket watch.
He is surprised, saying, “I just cannot — I kept bringing up my pocket, checking the time, I don't have enough get anything else done. This is going to be the ruin of me, it's going to be the end of my career. I'm not gonna be able to socialize properly, I'm not gonna be able to do any of the things I like to do. This is a dangerous, toxic bit of technology. We're going to — it's going to be, again, the end of civilization as we know it.”
And now most of us have watches, and I think we cope.
SAM DINGMAN: Right, right. Well, as a historian, do you think that there is any difference in the tone and content of the hand-wringing that's happening now? Or is this right in line with what we've been seeing for generations?
ARNOLD-FORSTER: People have been saying the world is going to end for a very long time. It's still here, which is maybe for better or worse. The problem with some uses of nostalgia, at least politically, is that it can become incredibly myopic and also very historically ill-informed. It can project an image of the past that, frankly, is not true. That's not how the past was.
DINGMAN: Sure, sure, even at the time that people are harkening back to, the people who were alive at that time were harkening back to a previous time.
ARNOLD-FORSTER: Yeah, exactly. Or maybe we're just just as miserable as anyone living today. It's also things like the "tradwife" phenomenon on social media at the moment. The resurrection of a traditional housewife baking bread, all that kind of stuff. But the problem with that is — not that there's nothing inherently wrong with being a homemaker or whatever — but the idea that this is how all female life was lived prior to 70 years ago or whatever. It's just not true. Like very few people have ever been able to live those lives. So, it's sort of funny to try and return to that.
DINGMAN: Yeah, well, so so far, we've been talking about some of the negative effects of nostalgia, what are some of the positive impacts that nostalgia can have?
ARNOLD-FORSTER: I think that there is a pervasive social and cultural tendency to eschew emotions from public life. And I think part of my goal is to say that, if we're going to think that history is important — which as a historian, I do — then we're gonna have to take nostalgia along with it.
And I think that for a lot of people, nostalgia draws them into history and then keeps them interested. And I write a bit about people who do, say, reenactments or people who love to go to things like renaissance fairs or Medieval Times. As a historian, I want people to be invested in the past, and so I've got to live with nostalgia rather than just be rude about it.
DINGMAN: Right, well, it's so interesting to hear you say that, because kind of floating around the edges of our conversation is the idea that nostalgia is a powerful human tendency that certain politicians have realized they can exploit for their aims.
And in a way, you're saying the same thing as a historian. It's people's tendency towards it is a way of getting people to engage more deeply with history and ironically, therefore, develop a more nuanced understanding of the emotion that got them interested in history in the first place.
ARNOLD-FORSTER: Yeah absolutely. I mean, I would say that I, as a professional historian, have a lot less power than any potential politician and so less likely to use it for evil, but absolutely keen on exploiting nostalgia wherever I can.
DINGMAN: If you're comfortable saying, what does your own tendency towards nostalgia prompt you to fixate on?
ARNOLD-FORSTER: I grew up in London, inner city, went to a normal inner-city public school, as you put it. And I don't know if she's very popular in the US, but the children's novelist Enid Blyton, who wrote books about boarding schools in the 1950s, girls boarding schools, and I was just so desperate to go to a 1950s girls boarding school. That's all I wanted.
I was so bereft that I had been born in the wrong decade, been born in the wrong place, been born to the wrong parents. I begged my parents to send me away to a boarding school — they were like "We're not going to do that." And so to compensate for that, I used to go to my very normal school in little white, button-down blouses and pleated skirts that I made my parents by me.
And that really, I think, drew me into history, like that kind of allure, the kind of aesthetic, but also emotional connection that I developed with the past.
DINGMAN: So you were kind of a historical reenactor yourself, it sounds like.
ARNOLD-FORSTER: Exactly. I just was this sad girl with no friends. No, it's fine. I managed to make some friends. But they did think I was a bit odd.
DINGMAN: Yeah, yeah. Well, can I ask — I'm not familiar with the books that you referenced — but was the appeal of going to one of these boarding schools that the characters would, I don't know, have adventures and solve mysteries, that sort of thing?
ARNOLD-FORSTER: I mean, a bit of that, but also a bit of kind of child-led anarchy. They live these lives where there's constantly sneaking out at night and having midnight feasts, and there's something about that world where children had power and agency.
DINGMAN: Yeah, it strikes me in in hearing you say that — and thank you for sharing all that — that somebody who might put on a Make America Great Again hat, say, what is it that they are really asking for from that phrase? They're asking for something that they never have been able to find.
ARNOLD-FORSTER: I mean, that's the absolute power of that slogan. It is so capacious and so vague that it can mean anything to anyone. Saying "Make America Great Again," it's not specific about when "again" is referring to it's not precise about "great." Anyone can see themselves in that slogan and use it as a way of articulating what it is that they feel would return them a feeling of agency, empowerment, this kind of individuality that America promises people that they feel they've lost.
DINGMAN: Well, Dr. Agnes Arnold-Forster, author of "Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion," thank you so much.
ARNOLD-FORSTER: Thank you so much for having me.
