How We Are Weaponizing Nostalgia

Some time ago, before the pandemic, I wrote about how memory shapes our understanding of politics and recent history. Drawing on Nabokov’s approach to memory as the construction of the self, in particular how he would try to force a memory to take shape, I wondered what this might tell us about the modern political project of intentionally forgetting things. Specifically, back when they had concerns about harassing a Black woman at Harvard, The New York Times wrote a story about how the Chinese government was educating young people of the truth about the Tiananmen Square Massacre so that they can then censor that truth on the Chinese internet.

After acknowledging the usefulness, at times, of intentionally forgetting an upsetting thing, my conclusion was a bit bleak:

In literature we often celebrate the thrill of an unreliable narrator — the character whose memory might be gauzy, or overly beautiful, or incomplete, such that we feel a shock and thrill as the unreliability is revealed… But unreliable memory becomes less charming when it is expressed as a society as a whole. We tend to celebrate the act of remembering in equal measure to the act of not remembering, especially if it is rebellious memory. Pop culture is replete with stories of a population awakened by choosing to remember something forbidden and throwing off the shackles of tyranny. Most of the time, however, that is just a fantasy.

I bring this up because nostalgia is a form of both remembering and not remembering: choosing to focus on a happier version of the past, even if it is unreliable and non-factual. According to neuroscientist Richard Sima at The Washington Post, this is actually good for us.

Psychologists are finding that nostalgia is not only universal, but also associated with better mental well-being. It can serve as an important psychological asset in our present — and future.

Sima goes on to quote psychologists and cite their studies showing that people report improved wellbeing if they experience nostalgia and move on. Nostalgia, he establishes, is universal across cultures, has existed into our deep history, and is commonly experienced several times a week (I know I feel it more and more as I age). And all that’s fine, but where Sima argues that it is categorically good for us is where he loses me.

Over the past few decades, research has uncovered three main functions of nostalgia: increasing social connectedness, self-continuity and meaning. Researchers typically induce nostalgia by asking participants to think and write about nostalgic memories or listen to nostalgic music. In the control group, participants are instead asked to think about more mundane memories or listen to music they have no nostalgia for. Studies show that nostalgia tends to make people feel more socially connected.

This type of psychology lab experiments are fundamentally flawed. For one, people behave differently in labs than they do in their lives. In my own research, the standard pretest-posttest survey experiment not only missed important psychological factors: there was no published research about the role of competition on video game player mental arousal before 2019, and including competition changed the study’s conclusion from video game violence causes aggressive behavior to video game competition creates an aggressive mentality. For decades, the field just didn’t measure a factor that subsequent studies have all confirmed was the most powerful driver of mental states. It’s a problem with psychology research generally, leading to a so-called “replication crisis” (which is really a field-validity crisis) whereby studies do not generate the same findings and a shocking amount of data are so p-hacked to pieces it’s practically fabricated.

I bring this up because nostalgia, its utility aside (I assume we evolved the capacity for nostalgia for valid reasons), is an incredibly powerful force in how cultures create shared memories. One psychologist noted that nostalgia can “enable a sense of continuity of self despite life changes” as well as “satisfy and facilitate the need to belong to a cultural community.” The sociologist Fred Davis, in his 1979 book Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia, argued that, unlike the instrumental uses explored in Sima’s article, nostalgia can also be its own goal: “So frequently and uniformly does nostalgic sentiment seem to infuse our aesthetic experience that we can rightly begin to suspect that nostalgia is not only a feeling or mood that is somehow magically evoked by the art object but also a distinctive aesthetic modality in its own right.”

One reason I suspect my understanding of nostalgia as a source of danger is at odds with how the psychologists quoted in Sima’s story viewing it as a source of comfort is because nostalgia is often discussed as having two forms that align but don’t necessarily overlap. Barbara Stern, in a 1992 study of nostalgia in advertising, argued that advertisers draw on personal nostalgia (fond memories of one’s own past) and historical nostalgia (yearning for an earlier time, even one you never experienced) to evoke feelings in their audiuences. While it’s convenient to create an artificial taxonomy that distinguishes the two, people really do not use one in isolation. Fond autobiographical memories are inseparable from our perceptions of and reaction to history filtered through those memories.

The Post story only quotes studies of the personal type of nostalgia, and hints that, most of the time, it is either healthy or harmless. But this is a judgment that assumes a lot about what a person is using nostalgia for. Svetlana Boym argued more than twenty years ago that nostalgia can present itself as truth and tradition, and can refocus mental energy on longing and loss built on social, but not personal memories. This it turns out, makes nostalgia a rather powerful tool for fascism—something that Richard Sima did not include in his story.

In 2018, two UCLA scholars called for memory studies to “to think more about the historical consciousness that buttresses contemporary far-right politics and about the potential memory politics that might oppose it.” They explain that the modern day fascism movement uses memory, and instrumentalizes it, to build support and gain political power. Looking specifically at Germany, another scholar found that nostalgia is a central dynamic for the rise of a violent-far right movement: “nostalgic memories inform far-right activism for an alternative future.”

It’s worth noting that these studies are from 2018. Nostalgia as a driver of political movements is fairly new research in political science, and it is definitely not only a bad thing. Nostalgia can also drive progressive change, shape the ways we debate fundamental liberties, and construct collective memory that, much as Nabokov’s invocation of his own past, builds identity. The key element is that this can be constructive or destructive.

The problem is, such nuance—which isn’t impossible to provide, as I just did in two paragraphs—didn’t make it into that piece. Instead, it selected only studies which supported the main argument (nostalgia is good for us), and ignored studies showing how it can be bad for us, as well. Like most emotions that may or may not drive behavior, nostalgia can have positive, healthy purposes, but it can also have extremely negative ones too.

The transnational fascist movement steadily gaining political power in the US and Europe is driven by nostalgia, by gauzy memories of a time when its adherents didn’t have to worry about the rights of women, refugees, queer folk, people with different color skin. It is driven by and sustainted through nostalgia. A time when their resentment and domination could be centered as the social default, with everyone else excluded or an exception, when they felt they were on top. Fascism is a nostalgic movement.

So, while we can and should develop a healthy relationship with our own memories and our own pasts (I’m far from perfect on this), we should also be careful that these same memories can be harnessed to do profound evil in the world—something those experiments in psychology labs simply aren’t designed to do.