S4E9: From Disease to Desire: Dr. Agnes Arnold-Forster on Nostalgia’s Evolution and Impact

Transcript:

Erin Narloch 00:11

On today’s history factory podcast, we welcome UK based author and historian Dr Agnes Arnold Forster. During our conversation, we’ll cover a few century of nostalgia’s history and even talk about how it’s used as both a management and creative tool. In her book, Nostalgia, A History of a Dangerous Emotion, Agnes explores the really long and storied past of this emotion that we know today. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did. Let’s get to it.

Erin Narloch 00:57

Agnes, thank you so much for being with us today. So excited to have you on the podcast. I thought we would just get into it. And as a medical historian, how did you first become interested in exploring the history of nostalgia?

Dr. Agnes Arnold-Forster 01:16

Yeah, so I’m a medical historian, but I’m also a historian of emotions, and a lot of my academic work has tried to combine those two things. And a little while ago, I was working on an academic project and looking at emotions among healthcare professionals of different types, but mostly surgeons. And as part of that research, I was interviewing lots of healthcare professionals about their feelings, basically about their emotions. And I expected them all to talk to me about the big feelings around like patient death, or, as you know, really difficult times when you’re working as a doctor as a nurse, or you have to share bad news or give uncomfortable diagnoses, the bonds you form with your patients, all that kind of thought we sort of be dealing with the like, sort of the intensity, I suppose, of medical practice, and there was a bit of that, but there was also a lot of other stuff. There was a lot of emotions, big feelings about rotas and timetables and time off work and admin and paperwork and not having the right office and not being able to find their way around a new hospital, the kind of mundane feelings that I think a lot of us experience in our jobs, too. But the thing that kept coming up over and over again was nostalgia, nostalgia for how it used to be working as a doctor, as a nurse, as a midwife, nostalgia of what the healthcare system I’m in the UK used to be, like a kind of imagined history, or a semi imagined history of like, you know, resource, plenty and good funding, and, you know, just a kind of better time in healthcare. And I was really struck by this. And I thought, This is so interesting. I wonder why all these people are so nostalgic. I just kind of went down a bit of a rabbit hole and got a bit upset, and ended up writing a whole book about it. And the book is about a lot more than just that, but that was definitely the starting point. 

Erin Narloch 03:16

Yeah, that’s amazing. What a starting point, and what a rabbit hole to go down, when and why did nostalgia transfer from this disease and diagnosis to an emotion, and what was, when did they happen? What was the impact like? What was going on? 

Dr. Agnes Arnold-Forster 03:30

Yeah. So, I mean, the nostalgia for, you know, everyone kind of has a sense, I think most people have a sense of what nostalgia is. Now. It’s a, you know, intense emotion about some bygone time, whether that’s a period of your own life or a period in history that you long for regret, which you could return to in some way, but it’s you know, while it might feel intense, it’s generally pretty benign, right? It’s not gonna do you any major damage. But in the 17th century, it was a disease that could kill you and did kill people. It was recorded as a cause of death on multiple death certificates, in multiple records of, you know, population wide demise. And it was first coined the term by a Swiss physician called Johannes Hoffa in 688 as part of his medical degree thesis. And he was really concerned not only that there was this disease that seemed to be killing people, kind of going around, but that his medical colleagues had been paying kind of insufficient attention to this problem, and it became, quite quickly, one of the most studied medical conditions of Europe. It traveled the Atlantic, spread through North America, and was, you know, a serious ailment and was very difficult to treat. The only way that people thought you could effectively treat nostalgia. And at this time as well, nostalgia was a more of a kind of pathological homesickness than so much about a distant time. It’s more about place. But they thought the only cure was to return people home. If someone was very homesick and very nostalgic, then they would die if they weren’t sent back to where they came from, which, you know, in some circumstances, very inconvenient if they’re. Say, a mercenary soldier fighting very far from home to send them back, not only lose you a fighting body, but also would be difficult for them to make that journey at a time when transport options are limited. And so it was a real cause of concern, especially for countries that were trying to explore distant lands, colonize, wage war, all those sorts of things. And so it used to be this huge, deadly, terrifying disease, and then it kind of abated, and by the beginning of the 20th century, it had transformed, or was at least starting its transformation, into the thing we now know it to do today. But still, the last person to that I found, or have I’ve come across, to have died from nostalgia, and that’s their their cause of death. Death listed was a American soldier fighting on the Western Front in France in 1917 so pretty recent

Erin Narloch 05:52

When that transfer happens from it being this disease, right? That folks die from this emotional state. How does that happen? Or where do we see that happen? 

Dr. Agnes Arnold-Forster 06:06

Yeah, I mean, it happens in all sorts of different complicated ways. But part of the thing is, it becomes the preserve of a different set of professionals, whereas in the 19th century it was really the concern, or 19th century before it was really the concern of physicians. So doctors primarily of the body. By the late 19th century, it was more more and more psychologists and a new profession, the psychoanalyst. I mean, both psychologists and psychoanalysts were pretty new at the beginning of the 20th century, but they kind of needed to find stuff to do for one of a better explanation, and they found nostalgia, one of the reasons why nostalgia loses its kind of deadly grasp, its kind of identity as a disease to emotion across the 19th century, especially is because society and the world around it changes. So if in the 18th century, the pace of change is relatively slow, although people did travel far distances, it was a relatively uncommon experience. By the end of the 19th century, it was incredibly normal for people to not only move around the world, but also normal for people to experience a kind of new technology that are much greater pace the 19th century industrial revolution, but also become aware of those changes. So the explosion and kind of the popular press and different kinds of communication technologies. And so nostalgia stopped being such a source of concern, really, because people’s lives had to accommodate that kind of pace of change and that kind of movement, national and international. And so there wasn’t much space anymore for nostalgia to be deadly, because there’s lots of questions about probably the people in the 17th century who died from nostalgia, and you can’t see but I put died in inverted commas. There little air quote by you, I mean the listener that they probably didn’t die from nostalgia. They probably died from something else. So what we’re looking at here is not so much the disappearance of a real disease, but a shift in understanding of a phenomenon, or a shift in an understanding of the category. So, yeah, it’s more of a kind of big shift in culture, society, politics, less than a kind of anything biological going on.

Erin Narloch 08:14

So if we fast forward a little bit and think of the 1970s you refer to it as the second hand decade like, why do you believe people were interested more interested in nostalgia in the 1970s and 80s? And by that time, what about the meaning of nostalgia had changed? 

Dr. Agnes Arnold-Forster 08:35

Yeah, so by the 1970s nostalgia is very much the thing we now know it to be. You know, it’s a kind of benign. Sometimes it’s quite silly, self indulgent, sentimental emotion that people don’t take that seriously because it’s not very dangerous, or at least it’s not dangerous in the same way it was in the 19th century. But it is, It was just a noise you probably can’t hear that I could, so I just paused. But it’s important to know that it’s not just me that calls it the second hand 70s, although I do title one of the chapters in my book that people in the 70s called it the second hand decade. The second hand 70s. That was a phrase they coined because they saw this kind of new phenomenon bursting through that suddenly everywhere seemed to be awash with nostalgia. Newspaper articles, kind of popular culture, fashion and furniture, everything seemed to be recycling things from the past, and they also, in the 1970s and the early 80s, had an explanation for this kind of, what they termed the nostalgia wave, or a huge like uptick in nostalgia, was bubbling around, and they said it was because nostalgia is very comforting. It’s an emotion that makes us feel more secure, more kind of better about ourselves, and it’s reassuring, and people needed that reassurance in the 1970s because the 1960s had been such a kind of cataclysmic moment in politics, culture, you know, human rights, you know, thinking about the swinging 60s, the sexual revolution, feminism, civil rights, all these things about the 1960s that you know, although you know now we would think and people then as well, think of those as positive shifts. They were nonetheless massive changes that took place in a relatively short period of time. And a lot of what people thought they knew about the world, what they thought they knew about society, had been upended. And so people went looking into the past to find some kind of comfort, some kind of stability. And we see that a lot with nostalgia, this kind of the sort of safety blanket ness of it that is something that provides people with a reassurance at times of turmoil or trouble, whether that’s turmoil or trouble experienced on a kind of national or international scale, or whether it’s just personal discontent. 

Erin Narloch 10:55

And how have marketers utilized nostalgia as an emotion, and why is it so successful? Well,

Dr. Agnes Arnold-Forster 11:05

I think it’s exactly that thing of it being reassuring, it being a kind of emotional safety blanket and emotional ballast, kind of because the thing about nostalgia, if you ask a psychologist today or neuroscientist, they’ll most of them will say, well, nostalgia is something that we’ve evolved as humans. It is a tool that we use at our disposal to ameliorate feelings of anxiety and prove things like social connection. It makes us feel good. Basically, it’s a positive there might be tinges of like sadness or longing or regret, but overwhelmingly, it is a positive emotion and emotion that makes you feel good. And so if you are a marketer or an advertiser, and you can cultivate those feelings in your viewers or your potential customers, then it will make them want to buy your product or use your service, or, you know, stay loyal to your brand in some way. And so you see all the time in in both kind of traditional brands. So in my book, I write about some very traditional British brands like Povis and Ribena, which is a Bread Company and a soft drinks brand. And these brands have been around for a really long time, and they have, throughout their history, used really nostalgic advertising to kind of remind the public of their existence. But also, because they’ve been around for such a long time, they like use nostalgia to be like, Oh, look, this is, this is the bread you ate when you were a child, or this is the drink you had on your mother’s and people feel an emotional connection to their brands, then go back and buy it. And so you see in those traditional spaces, but also you see it now all the time, like tech companies and social media organizations as well, they will use nostalgia to get people to keep coming back. Basically, if anyone’s got an iPhone, they constantly recycle, you know, your pictures from five years ago. And you get like, little weird slideshows where you’re like, Oh, this is what I was doing in 2015 or whatever, or 2020, and it kind of gives you an emotional connection to this piece of technology that you know, otherwise, just a piece of technology becomes this kind of, you know, place where all these fond memories live and you’re constantly reminded of, like, oh, this thing has played such a big role in my life. It’s so important to me, I must, you know, keep it and then keep it safe and then buy a new one. And so it played a nostalgia played such a big role in marketing such a long time. It’s kind of almost, you don’t necessarily even notice it anymore. But it’s so effective because it’s so it taps into some really kind of fundamental things that we need as people to feel like, you know, connected with our own past, connected with each other, kind of social, warm, fuzzy feeling. 

Erin Narloch

Yeah, that’s that’s so true. So nostalgia is used by marketers, but it’s also used like an organizational nostalgia can be used as a management tool. Can you talk a little bit about that? And what is organizational nostalgia? 

Dr. Agnes Arnold-Forster

Yeah, absolutely. So tapping into again, those sort of warm, fuzzy feelings, the positive affect of nostalgia. And Marcus have done it, but also HR companies and Angela consultants and people interested in attracting and retaining stuff. And you see it particularly in companies or industries that have been around a long time and have a kind of, I suppose, a longevity to them. So in the UK, where I’m from, I talked a bit the beginning of this conversation about healthcare and the National Health Service, or which is our state funded healthcare system, but also individual hospitals you see all the time in these kinds of places, where people who run these hospitals, you know, if you’re a doctor or nurse, sometimes would have been at one hospital for a really long Time, for a long stretch of your career. And managers at those hospitals would be like, well, we need to make people feel good about the fact they for a long time and then stay here for even longer. And so what they do, and sometimes it’s quite sort of cynical, they will try and cultivate feelings of nostalgia among their staff in order to increase the kind of loyalty to the organization, to remind people of the good old days and suggest that, you know, you’ve had good times here, you will have good times again in the future. We’ve done things for you. You can do things for us. It’s kind of mutually beneficial emotional relationship. And there’s lots of kind of funny ways that people do that. It’s partly in their kind of comms and messaging. So they’ll send out company wide emails, and I’ll be like, oh, you know, write in with your memories of this event in 2010 or right in with your earliest memories of joining the hospital. Or today we’re reflecting back on, you know, good times of the 1990s you know, I’m just making these up. But that kind of, sort of messaging, sort of internal, but also external, like pitching to the, you know, general public, like, oh, this, this company’s been around for a long time, and we’ve got a good cohort of loyal workers, because we’re a great place to work and we look after our own. You see that kind of in that messaging, but also you have things like companies will institute like annual events or yearly or sort of every five years or 10 years, or kind of bring old people back into the fold. I don’t know if you’ve seen there’s a Netflix documentary at the moment about the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, and it’s really interesting. They make so much use. It’s not a company in quite the same way as like some other things are, but they make such interesting use, I think, of organizational nostalgia in that they’re constantly inviting back their sort of veteran members from people who were cheerleaders in the 70s and 80s and 90s, cultivating this kind of narrative about themselves, that they are an organization that has a long history, that has like a huge amount of kind of mutual investment, and it is about makes it seem like an attractive place to work for people who might want to join. It makes it sort of seem like somewhere that people might like to be, a kind of community that people might be a part of. And also, I mean this, they’ve got a high turnover on the cheerleaders because, you know, you’re less springy at 40 than you are at 23 I suppose. But, but still, it makes it kind of seems like somewhere that makes people want to continue investing their time long after they technically left the role. And so, yeah, that’s kind of recent example of it, but you see it all the time in all sorts of organizations. And sometimes it’s really like, you know, it’s a combination of both really well meaning and well intended. And like, you know, why shouldn’t you feel good things about the place you work? But it can be quite cynical, because there is some evidence suggests that companies who attempt to cultivate or that if you cultivate organizational nostalgia, or nostalgia within an organization, it makes your employees more likely to put up with other kind of structural shortcomings, like poor pay, or what HR normal, like managerial academics call interactional injustice. So you know, kind of aggressive behavior at work, or poor treatment or harassment of any kind, and that nostalgia within the workplace can act as a kind of buffer against those things and keep your employees more client and willing to put up with things that they might not otherwise put up with in a place where they don’t feel the same sort of emotional investment.

Erin Narloch 17:52

And I think that gets to the not to say that the dangerous side of the emotion, but can you talk a little bit about, you know, how you have to be mindful, or any red flags in utilizing nostalgia?

 Because, I think, as you put in the book, like, if you really, truly, honestly look to parts of the past, they’re not always, you know, you want to take the progress of today and elements of the past, but if you could kind of talk about that a little bit, 

Dr. Agnes Arnold-Forster

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so I’m a historian, so my whole job is to look at the past, what’s the norm, and appraise like the good, bad and the ugly. And there’s a lot of ugly, you know, a lot of the time periods that people are very nostalgic for, you know, if you assess them kind of objectively, there’s going to be, definitely, huge parts of those time periods that were not pleasant places to live in, were dangerous, unequal, unpleasant, risky. You know, these things are kind of totally true. And I think it’s, I think interesting about nostalgia is, although it is about the past, ostensibly, it is actually not really about the past. You know, what people are doing is projecting contemporary concerns back on a kind of fiction of the past. And that fiction isn’t entirely false. You know, there will be things about the past that are positive, that people draw on in their kind of, their sort of making of their nostalgic memories or their nostalgic images, but there’s still a lot of like kind of construction going on, kind of, you know, fictionalizing something that is, you know, complex and nuanced. And they sort of flatten it and make it all so great and warm and fuzzy and nice and rose tinted. And so there’s that kind of element of nostalgia. It makes it quite vulnerable to misuse, and also can make it quite well, as we’ve sort of talked about, it’s an incredibly powerful emotion. It has the real power to make people feel intense things and do intense things. And so it has not infrequently been used or kind of manipulated, I suppose, by the politics of the far right, or indeed just of the right. And we see that, you see the kind of quintessential I suppose, example of political nostalgia sort of messaging is Donald Trump’s slogan, make America great again, which is so obviously nostalgic, but also incredibly

 powerful, partly because, not only because, it cultivates nostalgia, which is very motivating, but also because it’s sufficiently vague as to mean kind of anything to any person you know. Make America great. Like, what do you mean by great? If you know 10 different people could have 10 different understandings of what greatness could be. And also, again, it’s similarly kind of slippery, because are you talking about returning the US to the 90s, the 80s, the 70s, the 60s, the 1880s, the 1770s you know, what point are you looking at? And anyone can then apply their own understanding of both great and again into that slogan, which is one of the reasons it proved so effective in 2016 and hopefully won’t prove effective again. But that is the thing about the kind of risks of nostalgia is that because it’s so powerful and because it’s so loosely tied to historical reality that it can be used and deployed in some more troubling ways, and used to kind of convince people to do things that perhaps they wouldn’t want to do in other circumstances.

Erin Narloch 21:32

Yeah, and question, Has nostalgia always been here? Has it always existed? And you know, there’s, there was talk like, will it ever go away? Do you see it going away? And if not, why not?

Dr. Agnes Arnold-Forster 21:48

It’s a great question, which I have slightly, um, avoided answering head on in my book, I slightly sidestepped the issue by saying, Well, it depends who you ask. So if you ask some neuroscientists, some psychologists, they will say nostalgia, like all emotions, have evolved as part of, like, humankind’s evolution into the thing is now. So we have evolved nostalgia because it suits certain, um, kind of, like needs for survival, and in the same way that we evolved fear or or or, you know, discuss, those things are useful to us to help us survive, nostalgia does different things, but a similar thing. And so therefore, if you have that understanding of nostalgia, then you’ll say, well, it is. It’s always been with us, because we have been roughly the same sort of human for a very long time. And it’s also ubiquitous worldwide. And it doesn’t really matter what culture or community or language you speak, you will all experience the same fundamental evolved emotion. If you are a slightly different kind of psychologist, and I think there are fewer of these, or if you’re a historian of emotions like myself, then you have a more, I suppose, complex picture, in some ways, other notions. And you say, okay, there is probably an evolved kernel. You know, it’s true that we probably have some shared fundamental emotional experience with other people in the world, but also people in the past. But also that because society and culture has changed so much and vary so much worldwide, that like the precise way that we feel, the way we express, the way we write about, speak about, worry about different emotions are going to be different depending on where you are or when you live and and I tend probably more towards in that direction. So I would say that if someone’s writing about nostalgia in the 17th century, they probably have something in common with the nostalgia we’re talking about now. But there’s also going to be something, something different about it, because they lived in such a different world, in such different time. And by that logic, nostalgia could go away, or it could at least shift or morph. And I was actually doing a talk about my book to, you know, in a bookshop, and a young person, she was like 20, asked me about whether I thought nostalgia was going to disappear, and she said, I think it is going to, because social media makes our past so accessible to us all the time we don’t have any time to miss it, because we can anytime we want to look at a picture from our childhood, look at a picture from our university days, look at a picture or video from, you know, two weeks ago, or whatever it may be. And we’ve got none of that kind of distance that like longing or regret you don’t like, you know, in the 50s or whatever. If you wanted to look at pictures of your past, you’d have a few and then to be in a photograph, and we had to kind of seek them out, look them up. And so there’s a kind of, there’s time there for you to start missing things, to feel longing, to feel regret, whereas now, because everything’s so immediate that it kind of shifts that sort of, you know, the sort of space that nostalgia can fill, it shrinks in. But then equally, I think you could say that there’s more possibilities for nostalgia now, because the future for lots of young people, especially, feel so uncertain at a time of climate crisis, or, you know, very uncertain economic climate in some places in the world, or, like, anxieties about AI and technology, you know, the future feels like completely unknown, and so people retreat back into the past, more so than they’ve ever done before. So that’s my academic side stepping of the answers of the question, once again, a bit, a bit of column, a bit in column B, 

Erin Narloch

and it’s true, Apple serves up those you know, serves up those albums and slideshows for you, and makes you feel nostalgic even about what might be immediately accessible. Yes, well, I mean, so nostalgia, a history of a dangerous emotion. I find it to be an incredible read. Very interesting. There’s so much, so much in here to unpack. Is there any anything about writing the book or that you’d like to share, any learnings or any surprise stories?

Dr. Agnes Arnold-Forster

I mean, I’m sure alert, a lot of learnings, but any surprise stories? Yeah, I mean, so I actually, again, I gave another talk. When you write a book and you publish it, you do a lot of talking about it. So I did another talk about it, and the really sweet woman the audience said, Oh, I read your book already. And she said, and you didn’t say the thing that I liked best about it in the talks, I wanted you to share it. And it was that nostalgia was the leading cause of non combat death during the American Civil War. And people are always very surprised by that. And I was also very surprised by that, not knowing a huge amount about the history the American Civil War before I started writing the book. And so, yeah, that was, that was, that was a sort of a treat, I suppose. I mean, not a treat, obviously, fad, but, you know, it was a treat with historical nugget to come across. And then the other thing, I think the reason I wrote the book is that I’m very nostalgic. I have real nostalgic tendencies. I can really wallow in like, you know, as a historian, I really like the past. I’m really drawn to the past. It sometimes feels like it sits at odds with other elements of my personality, or kind of sort of the ways I see myself, like, I definitely see myself as, like, politically progressive, progressive in general, like, I’m interested in the future. I’m really optimistic as well, like, as a sort of personality trait and and so it kind of feels like those two things sort of sit strangely. And so I kind of wrote the book to try and make sense of that, like, weird tension. And I think the way, partly, the kind of thing I came up with was that those tensions are normal, and everyone has them, and that’s fine. But also I found that, like, I didn’t find it very convincing, the sort of stuff that people, lots of people, have written about nostalgia, I’m kind of implying that it’s like, a bit silly or sentimental or self indulgent or conservative, like sort of not, not necessarily politically conservative, but socially conservative. But actually nostalgia, because it’s so malleable and so flexible, could mean so many different things to different people, and that you can actually use nostalgia as inspiration for the future, as a kind of creative tool, and that it’s too easy to dismiss the past. It’s like, well, they’ve got it all wrong, and now on the right track. I think there’s so much about the past that we can mine and make use of and use to make the future a better place. It’s just about, you know, what you choose, what you select. I think I see nostalgia in a kind of a similar way, like, it’s not something intrinsically, nothing intrinsically good or bad, conservative or progressive about nostalgia itself. It’s more about like, what you choose to do with that nostalgia and what you choose to do in your own remaking, sort of reinventions of the past. Yeah, that’s probably why I wrote the book, and hopefully I’ve succeeded. I feel better about my nostalgic tendencies now having written it. 

Erin Narloch 28:38

Yes, same and I do agree that nostalgia is this creative tool that you can use and leverage to create, you know, a future. So Agnes, thank you so much for your time today. It’s been wonderful to talk with you. I really appreciated it. 

Dr. Agnes Arnold-Forster

Thanks so much for having me. It’s been great.

Erin Narloch 29:02

Wasn’t that a great conversation. I learned so much, and really Agnes helped pique my curiosity even more.

Erin Narloch 29:12

I hope you take the opportunity to read nostalgia, a history of a dangerous emotion, and continue to follow us on the history factory Podcast until next time, thank you and be well. You.