Nostalgia, Moral Change, and the Intelligibility of Social Values

Abstract

The contemporary public sphere is full of fantasies about the good old days when "men were men and women were women" and "the world made sense." And while it is easy to discard these proclamations as empty nostalgia, the motivations and underlying normative facts behind them not only are philosophically complex but also help explain the broader social importance and political implications of longing for the past. This paper aims to analyze the phenomenon of nostalgia from the perspective of the recent debate on moral change. The main ambition is to explain how changing moral frameworks may lead to a crisis of intelligibility among sections of the population who, for different reasons and to differing degrees, have not adopted the prevailing moral outlook and have been "left behind" by the evolution of shared beliefs. We use two main models of moral change. One is derived from Alasdair MacIntyre's theoretical opus and uses his notion of "practice" as an evolving normative system of rules and beliefs. The second uses Michael Freeden's morphological analysis, showing how the relationships between "core" and "peripheral" concepts change over time in any complex set of beliefs. Both theories are capable of explaining how, on an individual level, a loss of meaning can occur when a given person gets "out of sync" with broader social-normative developments. This theoretical model enables us to analyze both the ramifications of nostalgia and the problems and dangers associated with it when it becomes widespread.