The word nostalgia implies an escape to a rosy past that never actually existed--a fantasy time when the skies were never cloudy, the lilacs were always in bloom, and hopelessly romantic dreams routinely came true.

Yet British psychiatrist Trevor Turner points out in The New Internationalist (Nov. 1997) that nostalgia entered our language as a medical term describing the psychological condition of soldiers who had spent too much time away from home. The word comes from the Greek nostos (return home) and algos (pain). 'Treatises were written on the symptoms and diagnosis, the causes and treatments,' Turner writes. 'It was agreed that...the only effective management was the nostos, the journey back home.'

That something treated as a depressive disorder as recently as World War II can today be dismissed as a silly, sentimental mood says much about how we view the world. A trip back home now seems as impossible as travel to the moon once did. It's almost guaranteed that the place where you grew up, the campus where you went to school, the spot where you first whispered 'I love you' to your future mate doesn't look the same anymore. We don't have any expectations of the past being there for us--nostalgia has morphed from a longing for home to a hopeless pining for never-never land.

Leaders in universities, the media, and business have always been dismissive of nostalgia, even the harmless sentimental variety, notes Rutgers University historian Jackson Lears. 'For centuries,' he writes in Lingua Franca (Dec. 1997), 'it's been the bete noire of every forward-thinking intellectual, right, left, or center.'

That's because it defies the modern ideology of Progress--the cherished belief that the future always represents an improvement over the past. 'From the viewpoint of American liberal intellectuals,' Lears writes, 'nostalgic people suffered from a failure of nerve: They refused the challenges of modern industrial society, taking refuge in dreams of lost innocence.' Conservatives, Lears adds, take an equally dim view of anyone pondering if the world might have been better in some ways before the advent of global, corporate capitalism.