Erase & Rewind: The Politics of Nostalgia & its Ethical Implications

By politicizing nostalgia, politicians sow seeds of fantasy among their citizens—visions that may never reach the hoped-for fruition.

A conventional starting point is the derivation of the English word “nostalgia” from Greek words nos-tos meaning “return” and algos “pain.” Viewed in the modern-day context, it becomes a metaphorical “longing for a home that no longer exists” or, worse yet, one that never even existed. Sociologists Georg Stauth and Bryan S. Turner, in their work Nietzsche’s Dance, define nostalgia as a longing for a “golden age of heroic virtue, moral coherence, and ethical certainty—a time when there was no disparity between virtue and action, words and reality, or function and being.” The acute danger of this sentiment is that it can confuse and conflate one’s actual home with an imaginary one, thus creating a phantom of a past.