Nostalgia: A human emotion that can be manipulated

Nostalgia marketing

The NPR program Throughline broadcast a fascinating 58 minute program, The Nostalgia Bone, on the origins of nostalgia, what behaviors it can lead people to engage in and how it can be manipulated for profit and power. The program description is this: 

The global pandemic has spawned a different type of epidemic, one of an entirely different nature: a nostalgia outbreak. Longing for 'simpler times' and 'better days', many of us have been turning to 90s dance playlists, TV sitcoms, and sports highlights. We're looking for comfort and safety in the permanence of the past, or at least, what we think the past was. But, when it first appeared, nostalgia itself wasn't considered a feeling; it was a deadly disease. This episode traces the history of nostalgia from its origins as an illness to the dominating emotion of our time. And in doing so, we wrestle with its eternal paradox to both hold us back and keep us going.

A couple of points merit mention. In early written sources, nostalgia was described in Homers' ~8th century BC poem Odyssey. Although Homer described nostalgia, the concept had not crystallized into a discrete disease. It was a state of mind. A later Portuguese writer described it as a pleasure you suffer and an ailment you enjoy. Nostalgia has been described in essentially all cultures.

10:00 Centuries later, it was identified by an inquisitive 19 year old medical student, Johannes Hoffer, in the 1680s as a serious disease after he became aware of a strange new set of previously unrecognized symptoms. Nostalgia had appeared in a group of Swiss mercenaries with symptoms that included fainting, voice and visual hallucinations, serious depression, lack of appetite, inability to fight and intense homesickness and longing for home cooked food. The symptoms were contagious and more mercenaries succumbed to the disease as time passed. The symptoms appeared to be triggered by the onset of autumn. 

Hoffer wrote his medical dissertation on this new disease and he named it nostalgia, based on the Greek words nostos and algia, roughly 'the ache for home.' Hoffer described one symptom as "stupidity of the mind based attending to nothing hardly other than the idea of the fatherland." This arose in mercenaries in foreign countries with alien customs and Hoffer believed that the afflicted simply did not know how to accustom themselves to local culture, foods, manners and other customs. Some of the afflicted mercenaries may have died from nostalgia (some death certificates named nostalgia as the cause of death). 

The only treatment of the time was to send the afflicted person back home for a while to recover. Army generals of the time found that treatment to be unacceptable, so they tried to suppress the rise and spread of nostalgia in their soldiers by banning things that reminded the troops of home, e.g., popular songs from home were banned and the afflicted were put in isolation, which tended to make the problem worse. 

18:00 Written records show that nostalgia spread with the rise of imperialism. It was seen in British soldiers in India and in French troops outside France. One aspect of being a soldier, usually a young person, is experiencing a loss of control relative to life before the confines of military life asserted itself. 

Some American soldiers in the US Civil War experienced serious bouts of nostalgia, so they were encouraged to write letters to fend off the disease. Soldiers in the Civil War who did not experience nostalgia were observed to be ones who tended to be solidly ideologically committed to their cause. Slave owners came to believe that their slaves captured in Africa were incapable of forming any attachments to their homes or families and thus could not experience nostalgia or homesickness. Emotions could not apply to property, including slaves. 

The 1800s medical establishment shared that false belief and thus did not even consider it or write about it, leaving very little written record on the subject. Signs of nostalgia were categorized to conform with the false belief. Thus slaves who tried to run away in hopes of getting back home were diagnose with a slave disease such as "the madness to flee the plantation" or a pseudoscientific label. The prescribed treatment of such slave diseases was regular whippings for slaves. Similar White-centric responses arose when Indians were forced off their lands, their feelings were trivialized, e.g., American Indians forced off their land would feel no different from White settlers leaving the East to settle in the West. President Andrew Jackson saw no difference subjugated Indians forced off their land against their will to places with no prospects, and White folks deciding to move West to seek their fortune. 

{Comment: The point of this state of denial for slave owners and Whites who displaced American Indians is obvious now but was unknown then (more accurately, unacceptable then), namely defense against cognitive dissonance. Slave owners and Indian abusers needed to believe that slaves and Indians were not partly or fully human and therefore not either susceptible to human emotions and feelings or came from causes no different that what ordinary White people would experience. The power of motivated reasoning is on display in that blast of blatant social self-deception. The contrary evidence was obvious and undeniable, yet it was unseen and thus there was no need for White people in power to deny anything.}

23:00 It turned out that sending people home to cure nostalgia usually did not work. Sometimes, home had changed. Sometimes people had false memories of what home was really like. Feelings of nostalgia spread from soldiers who returned home to local residents. The medical community was baffled. The idea that slowly seemed to make more sense was that nostalgia was associated more with time than longing for a home or place. Change was what was triggering nostalgia. The medical community stopped looking for Hoffer's postulated broken "nostalgia bone" (physical cause) and started to believe that nostalgia had a mental cause that arose in reaction to modernity itself and the constant changes it imposed on people. 

More and more people were moving to respond to more rapidly changing conditions and opportunities, and a loss of control tended to accompany the changes. Rural people moved to towns and worked in factories under a boss instead of working for themselves on farms. Even people who did not move were also facing significant changes, e.g., mechanization of agriculture. Modernity forced time itself to be viewed differently to adapt to the demands of industrialization and the ever more intrusive global economy.

The backlash to industrialization was the rise of romanticism, sentiment and emotion in literature, art and philosophy. It was a backlash against the enlightenment, reason and rationalism. Nostalgia was absorbed into the romanticism movement. The poetry of English poet William Wordsworth fostered the integration of nostalgia into the backlash movement, e.g., in his nostalgic unattainable thing (the fictional woman Lucy) poems. This backlash movement was global, not just Western. In view of impending uncertainty from modernity, people were grasping for the past by latching onto the certainty in (sometimes false -- usually?) memories of how life and they themselves used to be. 

35:30 It took until the 1960s for the medical community to finally accept the idea that nostalgia was a mental state of mind, not a physical malady. Science was starting to accept the idea that nostalgia was a mood or emotion. Once nostalgia came to be seen as not serious or pathological, the business community immediately started asking, how can we use this for profit? How can marketers direct those normal human feelings to generate sales and profit? 

In 1974, the TV series Happy Days came on the scene as a nostalgia marketing vehicle. It was all about growing up in the Midwest in the 1950s, with the drive-ins and hair gel and leather jackets, i.e., the Fonz. Ads sold homes linked to the 1950s, a time when jobs were more stable and homes more affordable. The appeals were directed to White middle class Americans. Product life cycles were extended by appealing to nostalgia to sell products at the end of their run of consumer popularity. The "nostalgia tail" was added to marketers' conception of the product life cycle. (Anyone up for a "classic" pet rock? Hula-hoops anyone? Re-runs of the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air?) Marketers were laser focused on how to milk profit out of this new found source of human manipulability. A whole new area of the human mind to sell to. Exciting times for sure. 

44:30 The 1970s were the start of a massive nostalgia-based marketing wave. It or successors to it continues today. But there is a new nostalgia wave going on now, starting about 15-20 years ago. Recent chaos and demographic and social changes have instilled another wave of nostalgia in many Americans. The pandemic is part of the current wave of chaos, crisis and change. Crises and loss of control foster nostalgia. COVID has done that. We get endless Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Law & Order reruns. Nostalgic people tend to spend if they believe they can buy some little sliver of something that are linked to a past they want to hold onto.

48:15 Not surprisingly, playing on nostalgia has oozed into politics. Now things get ugly. The program highlights the ex-president as the prime example of direct appeal to nostalgia in a ruthless political quest for power and money. Make America Great Again is a direct appeal. The origin was with Ronald Reagan and his use of the exact same tag line in the 1980s. That resonated with a lot of people in the 1908s and again in 2016. 

Of course, Biden does the same with Build Back Better. The question is what are the goals and underlying morals behind the appeals? 

Depending on how it is used, nostalgia can hold individuals, groups of people and even whole societies back. That is something that both marketers and politicians can and do use to their advantage. By fostering an ongoing low-level state of nostalgia, corporations and politicians keep people engaged and buying or supporting. Nostalgia is used to cloak or fog the past much more than it is used to reveal past reality. Nostalgia in the hands of emotional manipulators is more about the present than the past. It is used to deceive and manipulate.

Nostalgia can also be use to help people cope with loneliness, sadness, anger or grief if that is one's intention, e.g., grief over what is happening to the environment. The Throughline hosts postulate that as political, social and environmental concerns intensify, feelings of nostalgia will become more prominent. People will become more susceptible to nostalgia-based deceit and manipulation. They warn that society needs to become aware of this aspect of the human mind to help ward off people who use dark arts on feelings of nostalgia to achieve their self-serving ends.

Nostalgia, like all other aspects of the human mind that can be appealed to, will be used for both good and bad. The question is how well will society cope in the face of (i) intensifying environmental and social concerns, and (ii) ongoing efforts by bad people to divide, deceive and manipulate using nostalgia as their weapon.