The first few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall were giddy ones for East Germans. For the first time, after years of communist privation, bottles of Coca-Cola decked the shelves of the shops and American soap operas could now be watched on television. But it didn’t take long for this excitement to pall. A few years later, people from the erstwhile German Democratic Republic began to feel a peculiar sentiment that would be named ostalgie : nostalgia for the east. The novelties of capitalism, it turned out, could only be novel for so long.
Ostalgie , like other forms of nostalgia, can mean more than one thing. Maybe it reflects the truth behind the old joke that after the end of the Cold War, people on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain had two rude shocks. First they discovered that everything the communists had told them about communism had been false. Then they discovered that everything the communists had told them about capitalism had been true. One can only drink so much Coca-Cola.
India has its own version of
Obviously, ‘simpler’ is not always better. It is easy enough to romanticise the old days of power cuts if one now has reliable power supply and/or diesel generators to hand (as most people still do not). But it is harder to remember just how much the power cuts were resented at the time. The same applies to the long waits for telephone connections or scooters. The simpler life was one in which much legitimate aspiration was quashed.
Behind some forms of nostalgia is just failure of memory. Human memory, that fallible thing, is prone to wishful thinking. The cinematic reel of the ’80s is edited down to show only the pleasant bits. The tendency to nostalgia is particularly strong when the period we are nostalgic for is the period of our childhoods. It is easy to conclude that the years of our childhood were a simpler time from the fact that our childhoods were simpler. But they seem that way only because loving parents are anxious to keep the really unpleasant truths from their children’s ears.
Of course, people ‘manage’, if that means that they formed — to use the economist’s useful phrase — ‘adaptive preferences’. If frustrated desires are the cause of much human suffering, then one can suffer less by the simple expedient of having fewer, and weaker, desires, and those easier to satisfy. This is a noble enough idea, but one should be suspicious of it. In this form, it suggests, quite offensively, that the colonised or oppressed are better off without the dream of emancipation.
But one cannot simply shed desires — or preferences, or aspirations — at will. Once people will no longer settle for a malfunctioning moped and dial-up internet connections, it is too late — certainly for any politician — to do anything about it. There is no way of turning the clock back to a time when people were willing to settle for less.
It is an odd thing: we want reliable electricity supply but we also want a world in which we didn’t rely so much on electrical appliances. We want to have choices (of clothes, food, TV channels) but we also want to be free of having to choose all the time. We want faster internet connections, but we also want to be undistracted so we can do all the things we used to do when there was no internet.
Are these thoughts and feelings simply incoherent? Not really. The fact that we feel nostalgic for something tells us something important about ourselves. But what it tells us about ourselves is that we are complicated beings. Our psychologies are not entirely harmonious, and there is no way of life that will perfectly suit all of us. Indeed, there isn’t even a way of life that perfectly suits any of us. To some degree, we will all always be a little bit unsatisfied.
Paradoxically enough, however, we come to be happier when we realise that we shall never be perfectly happy. And any time we find ourselves wishing we could turn the clock back 30 years, we can remind ourselves of this: that 30 years from now, it will be the bad old present for which people will be nostalgic. We today — discontented and nostalgic though we are — will be the ones they envy.
Nakul Krishna is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Cambridge