What unites people?” Armies? Gold? Flags?” No. It’s stories, he said. “There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. No enemy can defeat it. And who has a better story than Bran the Broken? The boy who fell from a high tower and lived… He’s our memory. The keeper of all our stories. The wars, weddings, births, massacres, famines, our triumphs, our defeats, our past. Who better to lead us into the future?”
Tyrion Lannister, Game of Thrones, Season 8

A couple of years ago at In That Howling Infinite I wrote a long meditation on nostalgia entitled Blue remembered hills – a land of lost contentment. It wandered through Housman and Homer, Facebook nostalgia groups and old LPs and cassette tapes, Spike Milligan and Dusty Springfield, milkmen and memberberries, touching along the way on memory, ageing, and that curious ache that seems to settle upon us as the years accumulate and our lives begin to look less like roads stretching ahead and more like maps folded and unfolded over time.

This ramble through memory’s brambles was never really about the past itself. It was about our relationship with the past – why we keep glancing over our shoulders even as technology either frog-marches us unwillingly into the future or lures us there like the sirens of yore; why old songs can unexpectedly inflict  sweet pain; why memories unsummoned but never dismissed can transport us across decades with a force that no deliberate act of memory quite manages. It was really about that peculiar territory where memory, longing and identity overlap.

In an essay published in The Australian and republished below, sociologist Frank Furedi covers much the same terrain, thought from a somewhat different direction and with a more explicitly political destination in mind.

It him brought me back immediately to Blue Remembered Hills because I realised we were traversing similar landscapes, though perhaps by different paths. He is concerned principally with nostalgia as a cultural and political phenomenon; I was more interested in nostalgia as a human condition, a state of mind, perhaps even a permanent feature of consciousness itself. Yet the overlap is considerable, and worth exploring.

Furedi begins with an observation that feels difficult to dispute. In contemporary political and cultural discourse, nostalgia is rarely employed as a neutral descriptor. It usually arrives as an accusation. To describe someone as nostalgic is no longer simply to suggest wistfulness or sentimentality; it increasingly carries implications of intellectual weakness or moral deficiency. Nostalgia becomes shorthand for reactionary impulses, coded language for a desire to return to a world in which minorities “knew their place,” women remained within prescribed roles, social conformity prevailed, and authority went largely unquestioned. This conservatism itself is often dismissed as little more than “weaponised nostalgia.”

Furedi argues that this caricature misses something fundamental about human beings. We require continuity. Individuals and societies alike need some sense of connection across time if they are to understand themselves. Identity does not simply emerge from acts of self-invention. We understand who we are partly through knowing where we have come from, and that understanding is transmitted through families, customs, traditions, rituals, stories and shared memories. Drawing upon psychologists such as Erik Erikson and Roy Baumeister, Furedi suggests that stable identities depend upon linking past, present and future together. When that continuity is disrupted, people become untethered. The de-authorisation of the past – the tendency to regard inherited traditions chiefly through the lens of their failures – risks creating citizens detached not merely from particular customs but from historical memory itself. In this formulation, nostalgia becomes less an irrational yearning for a golden age than a search for home.

Reading him, I was reminded immediately of Roger Scruton’s small-c conservatism and also of one of the most resonant lines in English literature, from Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Horatius at the Bridge: “And how can man die better/Than facing fearful odds/For the ashes of his fathers/And the temples of his gods?”

The line is often invoked in patriotic contexts, but its significance extends well beyond nationalism. Macaulay was attempting to articulate what people fight for when circumstances become existential. They do not fight primarily for policy settings or administrative arrangements or economic forecasts. They fight for inheritance. “The ashes of his fathers” speaks of continuity itself – reverence for ancestors, memory, sacrifice, lineage and identity accumulated across generations. “The temples of his gods” points towards those sacred structures, literal and metaphorical, that provide coherence and meaning: religion perhaps, but also customs, symbols, institutions and moral frameworks. And “facing fearful odds” follows naturally once these things matter deeply enough.

In Macaulay’s poem, the Roman soldier is not merely defending a bridge into Rome. He is defending an entire civilisational story and all that has been invested in this: ancestry, faith and ultimate sacrifice – the belief that preserving one’s inherited world can be a noble undertaking. The late British philosopher Roger Scruton understood something similar. His conservatism was not fundamentally ideological but ecological. Human beings live within webs of affection and obligation that they inherit rather than construct. Home, family, language, neighbourhood and nation are not assembled from scratch like flat-pack furniture. They are inherited houses, perhaps imperfect and drafty, requiring repair and maintenance, but home, nonetheless. Burning them down because some parts are structurally unsound rarely ends well.

This is where Blue Remembered Hills perhaps parts company slightly with Furedi, because while it shares his concern regarding continuity, it remains cautious about nostalgia itself – or more accurately, nostalgia in excess.

As it observed, “nostalgia is not just wanting to go back to something that no longer exists but wanting to go back because it no longer exists”. That distinction matters because memory is not a neutral recording device. Memory is an artist, and often a romantic one. It edits and embellishes. It softens edges and airbrushes imperfections. Like objects in a rear-view mirror, the past often appears larger and closer than it actually was. The roads where we grew up seem wider; summers seem longer; music seems better; friendships seem deeper; and the world itself somehow appears more coherent and comprehensible.

Or, as in AE Housman’s “land of lost content”, “The happy highways where I went/And cannot come again”, the oft remembered lines from The Shropshire Lad. The crucial phrase here is not happy but cannot come again, because the longing itself derives partly from irretrievability. The ache comes not simply from what was, but from knowing it has gone forever.

This is where the distinction made by the late artist and scholar Svetlana Boym becomes useful. She wrote of two forms of nostalgia: restorative nostalgia which attempts to rebuild the lost world and reflective nostalgia which simply contemplates its loss.

The distinction matters enormously because much contemporary politics increasingly resembles restorative nostalgia. Whether in “Make America Great Again”, “Take Back Control” ans national flag marches in England and Australia, or broader calls to restore traditional values, the promise offered is not remembrance but return. Yet return is impossible. The world changes, and we change with it. Lewis Carroll put it succinctly through Alice: “It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then”. Reflective nostalgia, by contrast, understands that the longing itself may reveal something important.

This was what was fascinated about the Facebook nostalgia communities discussed in Blue Remembered Hills. On the surface, people appear to be reminiscing about milkmen, trams, proper binmen, fish-and-chip shops, sweet shops, old television programmes and the countless banalities of everyday life. Yet they are rarely mourning the objects themselves. Nobody seriously wants coal deliveries or outside toilets back. Very few wish to exchange modern medicine for the old days or surrendering a smart phone wired to the world for queuing up outside a telephone kiosk in winter rain and then fumbling with pennies to connect.  What they seem to miss is something much harder to define: predictability, familiarity, social coherence and a sense that the world itself made sense.

And here lies the danger, because loss can become attached to myth. The comments beneath nostalgic posts often drift rapidly from warm recollection towards grievance. “Everyone knew their place.” “People respected authority.” “Families stayed together.” “Children behaved.” “Things were simpler.” Much of Blue Remembered Hills wandered through precisely these landscapes because nostalgia communities frequently become repositories not merely for memory but also for disappointment and dislocation.

Not always, of course. Often, they are charming and deeply touching. But they can also become vessels carrying resentment. The difficulty is that social solidarity and exclusion frequently travelled together. The supposedly cohesive worlds people remember often contained rigid hierarchies and invisible outsiders. There was always an “other”, Irish, Catholics, West Indians, travellers, beatniks and hippies, homosexuals, single mothers, long-haired layabouts, anyone deemed insufficiently conformist. The problem with some nostalgic narratives is not that they remember the past, but that they remember selectively.

Yet contemporary culture often risks making the opposite error. If some nostalgists remember only the good, many contemporary critics remember only the bad. History becomes reduced to oppression, traditions become little more than systems of exclusion, and inherited identities become sources of guilt rather than belonging. Continuity itself becomes suspect.

But human beings do not thrive in a historical vacuum. People need stories. They need rootedness. They need to feel themselves situated within something larger than themselves. Otherwise identity becomes an endless project of self-construction. Perhaps this explains something of our present condition – that strange mixture of anxiety and certainty, fragmentation and tribalism. If the old maps are discarded and no convincing new maps emerge, people begin drawing their own, often with thick permanent marker.

So perhaps Frank Furedi and Blue Remembered Hills are not ultimately in disagreement after all. Furedi reminds us that continuity matters. Our concern was simply to remind us that memory lies – or at least embellishes. Nostalgia is perhaps neither pathology nor virtue. It may simply be part of being human.

We cannot live entirely in the past, but neither can we sever ourselves from it. The challenge is to carry forward what was best without importing what was worst; to preserve solidarity without exclusion, belonging without mythmaking, and continuity without embalming it. Or, as Roger Scruton might have put it, to repair the house rather than set fire to it.

Because ultimately Horatius was not defending stones and timber. He was defending meaning itself. And perhaps all of us, in one way or another, spend our lives doing much the same thing – carrying fragments of home with us as we move through time, searching always for those blue remembered hills shimmering in the distance, knowing perfectly well that we cannot return there, yet unwilling entirely to let them disappear beneath the horizon.

Coda

Recall the quotation at the head of this article – Tyrion Lannister’s’s final speech in Game of Thrones, addressed to the assembled nobles of the erstwhile Seven Kingdoms of Westeros.

It fits remarkably well into the thread running through both Furedi and Blue Remembered Hills, because beneath all the discussion of nostalgia, continuity, memory and belonging sits a simpler and much older question: how do human beings hold themselves together across time? Tyrion’s speech, whatever one thought of the controversial series ending itself, touched on something ancient and surprisingly profound:

“What unites people? Armies? Gold? Flags?…There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story.”

The speech sits very comfortably beside Macaulay’s “the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his gods.” Armies may defend states, gold may purchase influence, and flags may function as symbols around which people rally, but stories explain why any of these things matter in the first place. Beneath institutions and political structures there almost always lies a narrative – some account of who we are, where we came from, and what obligations and meanings flow from that inheritance.

Rome was held together not merely by its legions but by stories about Rome itself – Romulus and Remus suckled by the she-wolf, Cincinnatus leaving his plough to save the Republic and returning quietly to his farm, Horatius standing at the bridge against impossible odds. Britain carried stories of Dunkirk and the Blitz spirit, of endurance and muddling through. America possesses its frontier myth and constitutional narratives. Australia has Gallipoli and the digger tradition, Ned Kelly and the battler, Clancy of the Overflow and the secular civic religion of giving everyone “a fair go”.

Whether these stories are entirely true in a strict historical sense is almost beside the point. They function as interpretive frameworks, shared narratives through which societies understand themselves and situate individuals within a larger continuity extending backward and forward through time.

This perhaps returns us to what Furedi is really lamenting. Beneath his discussion of nostalgia lies not simply concern over the loss of affection for the past but anxiety regarding a broader loss of confidence in inherited stories themselves. Increasingly our old narratives are subjected, often quite rightly, to forensic examination. We ask difficult questions. Who was excluded? Who suffered? Whose voices were ignored or omitted? Such questions are entirely legitimate and indeed necessary. Historical narratives that are immune from criticism become dogma.

Yet something else can be lost if all inherited stories are reduced solely to exercises in power, domination or hypocrisy. Human beings do not seem able to live indefinitely without narratives that locate them in time and place. Remove old stories entirely and people rarely become liberated, detached rational actors. More often they begin constructing new tribes, new identities and new mythologies of their own.

Blue Remembered Hills circled around much the same thought without quite expressing it this directly. The Facebook nostalgia groups it wrote about, with their endless photographs of everyday life in those golden, olden days, were never really about the objects themselves. These fragments were really pieces of larger stories people were attempting to preserve. What they were saying, consciously or otherwise, was something closer to: this is where I came from; this is the world that made me; this is how I understand myself.

That may explain why nostalgia can be both comforting and dangerous. Stories bind communities together, but stories can also become myths. The “good old days” can cease being memory and become something approaching scripture. The selective recollection of the past can harden into certainty, grievance and exclusion.

Which is why Tyrion’s choice of Bran becomes more interesting than it first appears. Bran is not presented as the strongest warrior, the wealthiest lord, or the most charismatic leader. Tyrion describes him instead as: “our memory. The keeper of all our stories.” And the important word there is all. Not some stories. Not only the glorious ones. The wars and the weddings, the triumphs and the massacres, the births and the famines, the victories and the defeats. In other words, continuity without selective amnesia, memory without mythmaking.

A people who remembers only their triumphs eventually become propagandists; a people who remember only their crimes risk becoming paralysed by self-reproach. A mature culture probably requires both: stories that inspire affection and belonging, and stories that remind us where we failed and what we learned.

Which returns us, inevitably, to Horatius standing at the bridge, and perhaps also to those blue remembered hills shimmering on Housman’s horizon. We do not ultimately fight for stones and timber, borders and institutions alone. We fight for meaning, for the stories that tell us who we are, where we came from, and why any of this matters.

If Tyrion was right, and he probably was, then what ultimately joins past and future is not power at all. It is narrative itself. We are, in the end, storytelling creatures carrying old tales forward as we walk into countries, we have not yet seen.

Paul Hemphill, May 2026

See also in In That Howling Infinite, Blue remembered hills – a land of lost contentment.

What’s so wrong with the good old days? In defence of nostalgia

Frank Furedi, The Australian, 21 May 2026

Nostalgia isn’t a political insult. Populists and conservatives are condemned for attachment to the values associated with ‘the good old days’. Here’s why we need it.

In the Western world – particularly among the intelligentsia and the cultural elites – nostalgia has a bad press. As one study of how the use of this label is seen or used stated: “To have one’s ideas, program, policies or style labelled ‘nostalgic’ is to be on the end of one of the most enduring and non-negotiable insults in modern political discourse.” The accusation of nostalgia serves to delegitimate individuals and movements by associating it with outdated and irrelevant sentiments.

Nostalgia is continually affixed to ideological attacks on populism and conservatism. Typically, the coupling of nostalgia with conservatism and populism serves to signify the fear of facing up to the present and an irrational escape into a mythical past. Time and again the accusation of nostalgia is coupled with a denunciation of everything its practitioners value about the past.

Critics of nostalgia contend that the “good old days” never existed. They insist that those who idealise the world of intact families, stable communities and solid intergenerational bonds are living a lie. These critics assert that people who possess an affinity to the past do so because in the old days racial minorities knew their place, women were confined to the kitchen and the LGBTQ+ community had no visibility or voice. Writing in this vein, one critic stated, “conservatism is just weaponised nostalgia”.

It is worth noting that anyone who voices a positive attitude towards Australia’s past is likely to be accused of the reactionary crime of nostalgia. So earlier this year, commentary broadcast on the ABC suggested that former prime minister John Howard’s legacy represented “nostalgia for a whiter, more conservative Australia”.

In the same vein, Tony Abbott’s book, Australia, is frequently denounced as the product of colonial nostalgia. Those labelled as members of the Nostalgia Right are regarded as irredeemable racists and xenophobes.

Critics of nostalgia do not merely caution people about the problem of living in the past: they also seek to delegitimate the values and customs that prevailed in yesteryear.

The aim of the political critique of nostalgia is to distance society morally from its history. Its goal is to undermine a nation’s sense of cultural continuity. Australian conservatives and populists are frequently attacked for invoking three nostalgic pasts: the social order and prosperity of the 1950s Menzies era; the celebration of the nation’s connection with the British monarchical past, and; the social solidarity that prevailed in pre-multicultural Australia.

Yet maintaining a sense of historical and cultural continuity with the past is essential if we are to know where we come from and who we are. So don’t get defensive when you are told off for being nostalgic.

Without falling into the trap of uncritically celebrating the “good old days”, it is vital to affirm the legacy of our past, especially the sense of solidarity and community we are at risk of losing.

Nostalgia assists the maintenance of cultural continuity.

The sense of historical continuity plays an important role in the constitution of the self. Understanding where we come from influences and strengthens individuals’ sense of who they are. A feeling of continuity with the experience of previous generations lends stability to a people’s identity.

Continuity across time is achieved through the intergenerational transmission of a community’s way of life and its ideals. It is difficult to develop a sturdy sense of community identity without a shared memory and a common attachment to conventions or customs that are rooted in the past.

The sense of continuity across time is, as psychologist Roy Baumeister stated, one of the defining criteria of identity. This point was echoed by American social psychologist Kenneth Keniston, when he stated, “one of the chief tasks of identity formation is the creation of a sense of self that will link the past, the present and the future”.

The common ground on which people live requires a shared understanding of where members of a community come from. Learning about the past helps children to know their place in the world and develop their identity. German psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, who formulated the concept of an identity crisis, attached great importance to providing young people with a sense of cultural continuity. He noted that “true identity … depends on the support which the young individual receives from the collective sense of identity characterising the social groups significant to him: his class, his nation, his culture”.

For socialisation to occur successfully, adults draw on the experience of previous generations to provide young people with a meaningful account of adulthood. Erikson remarked that the values with which children are trained “persist because the cultural ethos continues to consider them ‘natural’ and does not admit of alternatives”.

He observed: “They persist because they have become an essential part of the individual’s sense of identity, which he must preserve as a core of sanity and efficiency. But values do not persist unless they work, economically, psychologically and spiritually; and I argue that to this end they must continue to be anchored, generation after generation, in early child training; while child training, to remain consistent, must be embedded in a system of continued economic and cultural synthesis.”

Valuing the past

The socialisation of children is key to the transmission of this legacy of the past. It is integral to an intergenerational transaction whereby moral norms are communicated by authoritative adults to the young. Though this form of socialisation is likely to be perceived as impregnated with nostalgia by the technocratic-managerial elites, it is essential for providing the young with roots.

Once the moral status of the past is put into question, the achievement of a stable identity becomes fraught with uncertainty. The de-authorisation of the past renders the experiences of the older generations redundant and complicates the task of socialisation. Adulthood becomes compromised by its association with the past. Instead of being able to serve as a model to the young, it ceases to serve that role effectively.

Erikson’s reference to the “collective sense of identity” that adults communicate to young people has as its premise the capacity of the older generation to communicate a model of identity to their offspring. However, with the loss of the “sense of the past”, cultural continuity has become disrupted and the capacity of adults to serve as models to the young has diminished.

Nostalgia can be understood as the cultural antithesis to the loss of a sense of the past. As sociologist Fred Davis noted, nostalgia “leads us to search among remembrances of persons and places of our past in an effort to bestow meaning upon persons and places of our present”. From the anti-populist standpoint, the very search for meaning in tradition and the experience of the past is likely to encourage opposition to the value system of the defenders of the cultural status quo.

A yearning for home

Instead of responding to the critics of nostalgia by dismissing the charge of being drawn towards it, it is preferable to embrace it. Nostalgia refers to a yearning for home. It expresses an understandable and genuine sense of cultural loss underwritten by the belief that values that had once provided the unity of social relations and personal experience have become marginalised.

Populists and conservatives are on solid ground when they seek to reconnect with the legacy of their nation’s past. Those who possess a positive orientation towards the past should not be seen as emotionally illiterate, naive simpletons. Through their nostalgic orientation, they attempt to retrieve and develop sources of identity, agency or community.

The attempt to forge a sense of historical continuity is a prerequisite for providing the present with the sturdy foundation needed to face the future. Those who have become detached from the past inevitably become obsessed with inventing an identity to the point that they become detached from the project of facing the future. Call it what you will, but the attempt to forge a consciousness of historical continuity makes an indispensable contribution to the creation of a bridge between the past and the present, and the present and the future. It is an effective way of cultivating a genuine sensibility of belonging.

Nostalgia is not only good for society but also for the wellbeing of individuals. Studies suggest that those who “reminisce are more likely to keep friends and expand social networks”, and are able to forge closer and more durable relations than those who are indifferent to their past. Common sense suggests that the individual’s attempt to forge and maintain a sense of continuity with the past assists the development of an individual’s identity and feeds the soul of society.

In the 21st century, the main distinguishing feature of movements labelled as populist is their tendency to challenge the cultural values espoused by the political establishment. Often, the challenge posed by populist movements to elite values is expressed through their reluctance to abandon customs and traditions that elites have discarded: sentiments described by the use of that confusing term “nostalgia”.

Yet without a close connection with the past, we become prisoners of fate. Why? Because we can only truly understand what humanity has achieved so far and acquire insight into what it can achieve in the future by evaluating the experience of our forebears. The legacy of the past provides the moral and intellectual resources for developing a 21st-century narrative of what solidarity and community looks like. Very importantly, it also provides the foundation for freedom.

Once society becomes de-historicised, it will become lost in a timeless wasteland. Those with an impoverished historical imagination are doomed to embark on an eternal quest for meaning because we become connected and situated in time through cultivating an empathetic relationship with the past as members of a community. Without such an attachment, we struggle to intuit where we have come from and are constantly in search of an identity. Navigating our way into the future is harder when we are deprived of a means to assimilate the experience of our ancestors. Put simply, to determine where to go, we need to know where we came from.

It’s an Australia that did exist

In Australia, hostility towards nostalgia is motivated by a venomous hatred towards the nation’s past. Take the hatred directed at former opposition leader Peter Dutton. According to the National Indigenous Times, his “path to the party leadership has been defined not by nation-building, nor a vision for Australia’s future, but through obstruction and division, wedded with a nostalgia for an Australia that never truly existed”.

The reference to an “Australia that never truly existed” is frequently invoked by critics of nostalgia. Implicit in this statement is the dispossession of Australia’s historical legacy of any positive features.

Populist conservatives do not want to go back to a golden age, but nor do they want their communities to be dispossessed of the customs and ways of being that made them who they are.

Keeping alive the traditions, customs and rituals that have inspired their communities over the generations provides populism with the cultural power to motivate millions of people. It provides the foundation for the kind of cultural security that allows people to face the future.

— Frank Furedi is a sociologist, author and former professor of sociology at the University of Kent. This is an edited extract from his new book, In Defence of Populism (Polity Press), which will be published on May 22 in Australia.