Nostalgia

The Heritage Industry by Robert Hewison is a great book and, albeit with personal hindsight, would have made for a very interesting and insightful read for me during my years working for the National Trust. I would very likely not have been able, or in a position, to do anything about its views and findings, but the book’s relevance is still (very) important and, in my mind, deserves to be made an introductory text to new starters at that organisation and even those at many other heritage, historical and cultural organisations and venues.

Even without the sort of environmental changes that have taken place since 1945 it would have been necessary to adapt to the process of social change. A secure sense of identity depends not only on a confident location in time and place, but also on an ability to cope with the inevitable alterations that time brings about. The sense of time passing often evokes feelings of nostalgia but, it appears, nostalgia is one of the means we use to adjust to change.

In Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia, Fred Davis points out that nostalgia (literally, homesickness, a seventeenth-century medical term coined to describe the melancholia of Swiss mercenaries fighting abroad) is not simply a longing for the past, but a response to conditions in the present. Nostalgia is felt most strongly at a time of discontent, anxiety or disappointment, yet the times for which we feel nostalgia most keenly were often themselves periods of disturbance. Individually, it is common to experience a nostalgia for the pain and longing of late adolescence; collectively the Second World War, and most particularly the Blitz, exercises a powerful hold on the British imagination, even for people who were not yet born in 1940. A cataclysmic event, such as the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 serves as a focus of memory, and its recollection can trigger the release of waves of nostalgia which have little relation to the impact of the event itself.

Nostalgic memory should not be confused with true recall. For the individual, nostalgia filters out unpleasant aspects of the past, and of our former selves, creating a self-esteem that helps us to rise above the anxieties of the present. Collectively, nostalgia supplies the deep links that identify a particular generation; nationally it is the source of binding social myths. It secures, and it compensates, serving, according to Davis, ‘as a kind of safety valve for disappointment and frustration suffered over the loss of prized values’.²⁰

As the very act of publishing a sociology of nostalgia in 1979 implies, the nostalgic impulse has become significantly stronger in recent years. For Davis, ‘the nostalgia wave of the Seventies is intimately related - indeed, the other side of the psychological coin, so to speak – to the massive identity dislocations of the Sixties.’²¹ Writing in 1974 Michael Wood noted that ‘the disease, if it is a disease, has suddenly become universal.’ He stressed the contemporary longing for the past. ‘What nostalgia mainly suggests about the present is not that it is catastrophic or frightening, but that it is undistinguished, unexciting, blank. There is no life in it, no hope, no future (the important thing about the present is what sort of a future it has). It is a time going nowhere, a time that leaves nothing for our imaginations to do except plunge into the past.’²² Nostalgia can be a denial of the future.

Yet it is also a means of coping with change, with loss, with anomie, and with perceived social threat. It is around these unpleasant aspects of the present that our ideas of the past begin to coalesce. In 1978 Sir Roy Strong wrote:

It is in times of danger, either from without or from within, that we become deeply conscious of our heritage. . . . Within this word there mingle varied and passionate streams of ancient pride and patriotism, of a heroism in times past, of a nostalgia too for what we think of as a happier world which we have lost. In the 1940s we felt all this deeply because of the danger from without. In the 1970s we sense it because of the dangers from within. We are all aware of problems and troubles, of changes within the structure of society, of the dissolution of old values and standards. For the lucky few this may be exhilarating, even exciting, but for the majority it is confusing, threatening and dispiriting. The heritage represents some form of security, a point of reference, a refuge perhaps, something visible and tangible which, within a topsy and turvy world, seems stable and unchanged. Our environmental heritage. is therefore a deeply stabilising and unifying element within our society.²³

As this passage unconsciously reveals, nostalgia is profoundly conservative. Conservatism, with its emphasis on order and tradition, relies heavily on appeals to the authority of the past – typically in Mrs Thatcher’s reference shortly before the 1983 general election to the recovery of ‘Victorian values’. During the miners’ strike she made much blunter political use of ‘the enemy within’.

But nostalgia is a vital element in the myths of the Left as well as of the Right. There is a powerful myth of prelapsarian agricultural simplicity that has survived, even been encouraged by, three hundred years of industrialisation; the emergence of an urban proletariat has led to memories of community and class solidarity which are summoned up to confront contemporary conflicts and defeat. At times the myths of the past have become more powerful than mere party politics: the Royal Jubilee in 1976 and the Royal Wedding in 1981, albeit discreetly stage-managed as a ritual enactment of tribal loyalty, tapped the most atavistic roots. The Falklands War released profound emotions derived from folk memory – the uses to which the apparent rediscovery of a national identity were put is another matter.

The impulse to preserve the past is part of the impulse to preserve the self. Without knowing where we have been, it is difficult to know where we are going. The past is the foundation of individual and collective identity, objects from the past are the source of significance as cultural symbols. Continuity between past and present creates a sense of sequence out of aleatory chaos and, since change is inevitable, a stable system of ordered meanings enables us to cope with both innovation and decay. The nostalgic impulse is an important agency in adjustment to crisis, it is a social emollient and reinforces national identity when confidence is weakened or threatened.

The paradox, however, is that one of our defences against change is change itself: through the filter of nostalgia we change the past, and through the conservative impulse we seek to change the present. The question then is not whether or not we should preserve the past, but what kind of past we have chosen to preserve, and what that has done to our present.

Robert Hewison The Heritage Industry

The British union (certainly the English nation) seems to be drowning in heritage and not admitting that that is a societal and civic harm of sorts that really just perpetuates conservatism and Conservatism, hierarchies and a national (if not somewhat populist) attitude and arrogance to legacies; all with a patronisingly modern-day, down-with-the-people approach that doesn’t really allow meaningful and educative progress and the building of a better future for all, devoid of, or certainly separate from, legacies that should be recorded and acknowledged but not preserved in aspic nor taking up useful space; the drowning in heritage just preserves pointless art, artefacts, industrial technologies et al. (making money for someone and gaining exemptions from tax) while selectively telling stories that support arbitrary benchmarks and emotional connections alongside misbegotten economic profits and so-say, social insights (invariably found in a political and overly centralised state that works in short-term electoral cycles, in a media (and digital) world that shouts and grabs attention before understanding reason, effect and meaning for the sake of data and spreadsheets).