The Ministry of Nostalgia: Consuming austerity
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Are we a little too nostalgic? From the rise of The Great British Bake Off to our obsession with bunting and the increase in sales of traditional sweets, we see the past through rose-tinted spectacles. But why do we view the old times as the best of times — even when they’re harder?
“Nostalgia is an important psychological construct,” says Andrew Abeyta, author of Looking back to move forward: nostalgia as a psychological resource for promoting relationship goals and overcoming relationship challenges. “It can have a positive influence on mental and emotional well-being. Reflecting on life experiences that make you feel nostalgic leads to increased happiness and self-esteem. But for a long time nostalgia had a bad rap, with many people considering it a psychological dysfunction. It’s the idea that this kind of golden age living might render us unable to move forward, pursue goals and connect with others.”
But writer and critic Owen Hatherley in his latest book The Ministry of Nostalgia: Consuming austerity doesn’t view our nostalgic ways too favourably. In his rampage, Hatherley suggests that the creation of a rose tinted history, or how he calls it — a rewriting of the austerity of the ’40s and ’50s — has been retold to offer consolation for our current political situation. Hatherley speaks dispassionately about coveting ex-council flats, Jamie Oliver’s cooking, and — highest on his hit list — is the dreaded ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ tea towel.
The ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ poster seemed to embody all the contradictions produced by a consumption economy attempting to adapt to thrift, and to normalise surveillance through an ironic, depoliticised aesthetic. Out of nowhere, this image — combining bare, faintly modernist typography with the consoling logo of the Crown and a similarly reassuring message — spread everywhere.
The power of ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ comes from a yearning for an actual or imaginary English patrician attitude of stiff upper lips and muddling through. This is, however, something that largely survives only in the popular imaginary, in a country devoted to services and consumption, and where elections are given to sudden, mawkish outpourings of sentiment. The poster isn’t just a case of the return of the repressed, it is a nostalgia for the state of being repressed — solid, stoic, public-spirited, as opposed to the depoliticised, hysterical and privatised reality of Britain over the last 30 years.
It is both reassuring and flattering, implying a virtuous (if highly self-aware) consumer stoicism. Of course, in the end, it’s a bit of a joke: you don’t really think your pay cut or your children’s inability to buy a house, or the fact that someone somewhere else has been made homeless because of the bedroom tax, or lost their benefit, or worked on a zero-hours contract, is really comparable to the Blitz — but it’s all a bit of fun, isn’t it?
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Written by Jo Allison, commissioning editor at Canvas8
