Chris Johns
On both sides of the Atlantic - and elsewhere - people say “I want my country back”. An intelligent, articulate, ex-army officer said it to me the other day, expressing a wistful desire for a Britain that used to exist but, in his view, no longer does. This is what he said:
“We used to have shared values, a sense of community, a vague belief that we are all in this together. There was once a country where the system wasn’t rigged but one where hard work, talent and a dose of luck allowed people to ‘get on’. I want a Britain that invests in itself, doesn’t have crumbling public services, possesses infrastructure and high streets not in visible decay, and an NHS that works.”
I might have momentarily nodded along in agreement - it is a seductive line of reasoning. But then I went away and thought about it some more. It’s (mostly) nonsense.
A fondness for a remembered past, one at odds with today, was a big driver of the vote for Brexit. Nigel Farage famously said, many times, “we want our country back”. Trump regularly says “We’re gonna take back our country”. MAGA is a quintessentially nostalgic slogan. Lee Anderson, ex-Vice Chair of the Tory Party wants his country back. It would be understandable if we concluded that nostalgia is having a big moment.
An obvious line of enquiry would be to to fact-check the claims of the nostalgia peddlers. Examine each and every statement about the glorious past and simply ask if there is data support. Such an exercise would indeed find that beer was once warm, everyone watched the same TV programs and the faces on our high streets were mostly white.
All great lies come wrapped round a kernel of truth: a proper investigation of the (relatively recent) past would have to look at lower life expectancy, rampant misogyny, illegal homosexuality, hardly anybody going on to university, priestly abuse of children, plenty of dirty, soul-destroying manual jobs, physical - legal - beating of schoolchildren, extortionate airfares, year long waits for fixed telephone lines, rusty cars - we can pick and mix from a list of facts that would fill a long history book.
The past is not something that this writer wishes to return to. Maybe that’s because I have a good memory. When the Trumpists and Faragistes talk about the past I can see what they are trying to invoke: my grandparents generation who all lived cheek-by-jowl in the same terraced houses, doing the same jobs, going to the same pubs, sitting in the same charabanc for the once a year outing just after the street party celebrating a royal wedding, funeral or coronation. All very bucolic - except it never happened. There was more crime, violence, death and anomie than today.
To repeat: it really is all about data. A complete and proper comparison between today and the past would involve a library of statistics. Few people change their minds in the face of facts but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Here’s a selection of key indicators that are meaningful on their own terms but also because they capture many different facets of life. For instance, if it can be shown we are living longer in one simple number, that graph captures everything about life expectancy: health-care, diet, education, housing, incomes and so on. Let me try and convince you:
Researchers who compile ‘Quality of Life Indices’ sometimes acknowledge that if there is one metric that captures their efforts it’s life expectancy. The past that the nostalgists want us to return to is one where we all lived much shorter lives than today. Just look at how Ireland stands out.
This economist asserts that the single most important factor driving the rise in life expectancy is economic growth: just look at the improvement in China where around a billion people have been lifted out of poverty by economic growth. Ditto India. (That dip in life expectancy at the very end of the chart is (a) worrying, (b) not unconnected to the pandemic and (c) not unconnected to opioid overdoses in the US.)
Some more stats:
Another stat connected to economic development: 95% of all maternal deaths occur in low and middle income countries.
Less of us, in the rich world at least (another reason to like economic growth), die from air pollution:
We can cure many diseases of childhood:
We have more leisure:
Anyone want to go back to 1950s income levels?
I could on. Plenty of other people compile book length studies of how things are better today than they used to be. Of course, these are aggregate statistics: people who are miserable today but remember a happy time yesterday will have understandable nostalgia. Not everything is better today. Many people think the advent of social media is not a change for the better. But, in the round, why on earth would most people want to go back to a relatively unhealthy and impoverished past? And the far past really was economically grim. Most people struggle with the idea that economic growth really is a very recent phenomenon. Most of the past saw no sustained economic growth - at all. This chart captures so much and is my favourite economic picture of all time:
Political nostalgia
It’s today’s use and abuse of political nostalgia that is particularly fascinating.
The doyen of UK political bloggers Chris Grey says
…whilst Brexit had multiple meanings and motivations, many of them are captured by the idea of it being a great ‘re-set’, a return to ‘the time before’. It’s true that even contained within that single idea there are also a wide variety of apprehensions of when that time was, and what it consisted of, but they all entail some notion of a supposedly simpler, more comprehensible world (or, perhaps, country)
Chris draws our attention to the late great A A Gill’s beautifully written 2016 takedown of Brexit nostalgia. So much of it resonates today, it’s worth quoting at lenth:
“It was the woman on Question Time that really did it for me… There is someone like her in every queue, every coffee shop, outside every school... Middle-aged, middle-class, middle-brow, over-made-up, with her National Health face and weatherproof English expression of hurt righteousness, she’s Britannia’s mother-in-law… she shouted: “All I want is my country back. Give me my country back.”
Wanting the country back is the constant mantra of all the outies. Farage slurs it, Gove insinuates it… They mean back from Johnny Foreigner, back from the brink, back from the future, back-to-back, back to bosky hedges and dry stone walls and country lanes and church bells and warm beer and skittles and football rattles and cheery banter and clogs on cobbles. Back to vicars-and-tarts parties and Carry On fart jokes, back to Elgar and fudge and proper weather and herbaceous borders and cars called Morris. Back to Victoria sponge and 22 yards to a wicket and 15 hands to a horse and 3ft to a yard and four fingers in a Kit Kat, back to gooseberries not avocados, back to deference and respect, to make do and mend and smiling bravely and biting your lip and suffering in silence and patronising foreigners with pity.
… It’s snorting a line of the most pernicious and debilitating Little English drug, nostalgia. The warm, crumbly, honey-coloured, collective “yesterday” with its fond belief that everything was better back then, that Britain (England, really) is a worse place now than it was at some foggy point in the past where we achieved peak Blighty.
Gill’s piece is worth reading in full. One of many significant points he makes is that a lot of this is code for racism: a desire for an immigrant-free country. That’s something quite different from gentle nostalgia of course. That’s an important point: manipulation and invocation of nostalgia often involves using it as code for something else. Particularly as a racist dog-whistle. More generally, people can be persuaded into anger via a populist-political use of nostalgia. Angry people don’t vote for incumbent politicians.
It is sometimes said that nostalgia is a political vice - or weapon - of the political right. Trump and Tories and Farage tell people about the dystopia that they live in and convince them about yesterday being so much better - vote for me and I will transport you back to a pain free past.
According to author Agnes Arnold-Foster, nostalgia isn’t in fact particularly new, isn’t a tool used exclusively by the far right, and is not more prevalent than usual.
Nostalgia has a long and fascinating history, dating back to 17th century Switzerland, and has often appeared on death certificates, listed as a fatal condition. It was a big ‘cause’ of non-combatant death in the US civil war. It is a tool of hacks and charlatans across the political spectrum: plenty of people in Russia and the old East Germany long for the return of Stalin and the Stasi.
We talk about seeing the past ‘through rose tinted spectacles’. That can be useful of course: good, if selective, memories, can be both fun and psychologically comforting. Talking about the good old days can offer social connection. Some scientists think we can even add meaning to our lives via nostalgia.
Creativity, self-esteem and optimism have been shown to be boosted by nostalgia, while stress and anxiety are sometimes attenuated. Nostalgia is thought to be a self-regulating emotion, even when recalling negative events - it’s bittersweet (there is, apparently, something called nostalgic depression), but sweetness dominates.
It doesn’t necessarily have to kill you (the last recorded appearance on a death certificate was in 1917 apparently). Inevitably perhaps, at least some of the benefits of nostalgia come from release of dopamine in the brain.
So, nostalgia can be a good thing. But it is undoubtedly true that it is a tool that can be weaponised. It is, perhaps, a classic two-edged sword.
While Trump and the Brexiteers use nostalgia to drum up support, the key insight is that this is nothing new. Political opportunists have been doing it forever. Pick your country, pick your era: there is always somebody at it. For example:
In response to the Kemalist establishment’s secularism, political Islam glorifies the Ottoman past as a tool for reconstructing “the Great Turkey” today.
Ireland’s main political opposition party, Sinn Fein (SF) is stuck on the horns of a dilemma: it regularly tries the populist trick of painting the current state of the nation as a dystopian nightmare, invoking the state of the health service and the housing crisis as evidence for the prosecution.
The first problem facing SF is it can’t really play the second populist card: invoking the past. Too many people remember what Ireland was like and are aware of how far it has progressed, socially and economically, over a remarkably short space of time. Nobody, apart from a few cranks, wants to go back to where Ireland once was. SF are half-hearted nostalgists at best. So SF has to be a different kind of populist.
The other problem facing SF is that housing and health issues are problems common to most developed economies. At the very least, economic success is correlated almost everywhere with high house prices and demands for health services running ahead of supply. Few, if any, economically successful countries have news media that do not daily carry stories about problems in the health service and the availability of affordable housing.
Janen Ganesh has recently written a brilliant piece in the FT about the unsolvability of many problems.
Ganesh’s piece is mostly about regional development, the impossibility of ‘levelling up’, ‘solving’ immigration and the like. I would add health and housing to that list. I wouldn’t go as far as Ganesh when he says:
Some problems can’t be solved, just mitigated at the edges. Pretending otherwise isn’t “optimistic” or enlightened, it is poisonous to a nation’s civic health. Oh, for more of the can’t-do spirit.
That’s a bit too defeatist for my taste - yes, some problems are hard and/or nearly impossible to solve. Regional development does look to be nearly impossible, at least for those who have tried over many decades. But sometimes it is a matter of time. In Ireland, for example, the housing crisis will be dealt with when house building finally catches up with demand. Or a recession takes care of demand. Be careful what you wish for with SF.
Mythical pasts and unsolvable (or just extremely tough) problems: the two are joined at the hip. Pretend that the past is when those problems weren’t problems and promise to go back there.
The only thing that really matters for a better life is economic growth. That’s the only thing that works, historically at least. Wanting to return to a mythical past is a con trick of a very old fashioned kind. Painting the present in dystopian terms and promising an easy fix is just another con, a variant on a well worked populist theme.
I’ll finish where I started: getting back our country. Here is one British MP recently echoing the calls of so many others:
Chris Grey makes the point that wanting your country back embodies a logical flaw, or at least one that arises if successive generations of politicians keep saying it - as they do. Read a bit of history and you will find Margaret Thatcher, Mary Whitehouse and a cast of thousands from the dim and receding past all wanting their country back. The obvious question: When did they ever have it?
[Nostalgia] was examined by sociologist, Geoffrey Pearson. His analysis showed how such fears in the 1970s and 1980s typically referenced an imagined past, vaguely referred to as ‘about 20 years ago’, before things got ‘out of control’. Yet, he demonstrated, going back about 20 years to the 1950s and 1960s revealed that exactly the same fears were being expressed, and also with reference to the period ‘about 20 years ago’ or ‘since the war’, and so on back into the even more distant past
Nostalgia is, indeed, what it used to be.
This is your best piece to date! As always realistic, well researched, broad minded, even handed but best of all provokes personal reflection. I am eagerly looking forward to the next ten to twenty podcasts which this piece will provoke.
One question: why oh why do you finish your best podcasts with “Unfortunately we have run out of time to discuss ….. this further”. I rarely tire of most topics you two cover. Also maybe could you include Jim’s statistics on the podcast email as I have to replay,stop and start the pod to write them down.
Martin Murphy
This is possibly the most cogent exploration of this phenomenon I’ve read so far. Congratulations.