Culture and Society
PUBLISHED
Ask your grandparents and they’ll tell you that music was better in the 1960s, they don’t make cars like they used to, and there was once a time when you didn’t have to worry about locking your front door. The truth is, though, that humans throughout history have tended to idealize the past while complaining about the present, despite the fact that life has actually improved in many ways as the years have ticked by.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.To learn more about this often-misplaced nostalgia, sociologist Ze Hong from the University of Macau has penned a new study into the cognitive and cultural underpinnings of our rose-tinted view of the past. His research reveals that the idea of a “golden age” appears in cultural narratives across the world, from ancient times to the present day.
In the ancient Greek poem Works and Days, for instance, the famous author Hesiod laments humanity’s decline from a perfect world into one marked by toil and hardship. The Aztecs, meanwhile, subscribed to a mythology that depicted a lost realm of abundance that was destroyed by the arrival of an evil spirit.
In medieval Europe, debates over the feasibility of alchemy often reached the conclusion that the philosopher’s stone was once attainable, but that the loss of ancient wisdom and the rise of charlatan practitioners had triggered the irreversible decay of this esoteric magic. Herbal remedies at the time were therefore often marketed as the products of ancient recipes in order to enhance their credibility – a trend which continues to this day.
To explain this universal fixation with a golden past, Hong highlights recent research pointing towards certain psychological biases. The first of these is known as negativity bias, and refers to the tendency to focus on elements in our lives that are perceived as bad. This, says the author, may have deep evolutionary roots, as ancestral humans needed to become highly attuned to threats in their environment in order to survive.
Paired with this is the so-called biased memory effect, whereby negative experiences in the past are often erased from our recollection or transformed into positive memories. “Collectively, the biased exposure to negative information in the present and the selective memory of past events create an illusion of a superior past, reinforcing the perception of a decline over time,” writes Hong.
This theory is supported by studies showing that people often recollect their past vacations with greater fondness as time goes by.
Yet it’s not just individual memories that are susceptible to what Hong calls “rosy retrospection”. Shared cultural narratives also tend to become warped in order to glorify the past and denigrate the present. For instance, Hong describes how rumours about witchcraft became exaggerated in Europe between the 15th and 17th centuries, leading to the idea of moral degradation and an emerging threat that had to be purged.
Psychological research suggests that this tendency may be underpinned by a need for “collective nostalgia”, whereby populations long for a heroic shared history that promotes group cohesion and ideological conservatism. Often, these narratives are hijacked or exaggerated by political leaders seeking to place themselves as the defenders of this collective history.
“By framing themselves as restorers of a lost golden age or as protectors of ancestral traditions, rulers, priests, and other authorities can strengthen their legitimacy and justify the existing power structure, and sometimes claim that they could restore past greatness,” writes Hong.
Echoes of this tired political playbook can be easily spotted in the rhetoric of politicians promising to make their country “great again.” Yet as Hong’s analysis points out, such narratives are usually rooted in psychological fluff.
Having said all that, music was actually better in the '60s.
The study is published in the journal Human Nature.
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