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Chapter 17

Politics of Nostalgia, Logical Fallacies, and Cognitive Biases: the Importance of Epistemology in the Age of Cognitive Historiography Leonardo Ambasciano

The clearer we are about the theme of our own research, the clearer we become about our own bias. And the clearer we are about our own bias, the more honest and efficient we are likely to be in our own research. Arnaldo Momigliano (1979, 372f.)

∵ A Toxic Nostalgia1 In a landmark contribution published in 1991, Jeppe Sinding Jensen and Armin W. Geertz wrote that “some historians of religion have advocated a personal and existentially relevant attitude to the world’s religious traditions. Foremost among these is Mircea Eliade, who presented modern man’s estrangement from tradition as fundamentally detrimental to individual and social balance, hence the politics of nostalgia which seeks, on the basis of a universalist interpretation of religions, to restore Man as a complete and inherently spiritual being” (Jensen and Geertz 1991, 13). Romanian-born historian of religions Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) is singled out by the two authors because he was “the most influential comparativist and interpreter of the modern day”, almost single-handedly responsible for the “establishment of the study of religions in North America” starting from the 60s of the past century (Strenski 2015, 142). And yet, as pointed out by Jensen and Geertz, his works carry with them a burdensome and problematic legacy. 1 A partial and preliminary version of this chapter was presented during the conference “Relazioni pericolose. La storia delle religioni italiana e il fascismo” organised by Roberto Alciati and Sergio Botta and held at Sapienza Università di Roma (Italy) on December 3–4, 2015. The original draft has been re-elaborated during my 2016 visiting lectureship at Masaryk University, Brno (Czech Republic).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004385375_019

Politics of Nostalgia, Logical Fallacies, Cognitive Biases

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While the roots of the “politics of nostalgia” in Eliade’s works had been already noted by various historians (Ambasciano 2016a, 150, 159), Jensen and Geertz’s definition has been specifically adopted to indicate the ideological continuity between Interwar right-wing extremism and the Western interplay of academia and politics during the Cold War (McCutcheon 1997; cf. Doležalová et al. 2001). More precisely, if “nostalgia” refers to the “sentimental longing or wistful affection for a period in the past” (Pearsall 1999, 972), the Eliadean politics of nostalgia entailed the emic reading and/or conscious manipulation of (mostly ancient) religious materials to advance and support reactionary politics (McCutcheon 1997, 32–35). The underlying project encompassed the sympathetic and anti-modernist endorsement of specific dynamics of social power extrapolated from ancient religious documents (Jensen and Geertz 1991, 13; cf. Lincoln 1991, 123 and Dubuisson 2005). This is not the place to discuss the interaction between nation-state building processes, historiography as a discipline, politics, and the academic study of religions and folklore between 19th and early 20th century (403–411).2 Nonetheless, it should be noted that two of the most important concepts that preceded Eliade’s politics of nostalgia were originally embedded in a precise cultural landscape. The ideas of religion as an exit from history and history as a corrupted repository of originally pure religious symbols (67; Ţurcanu 2007, 290f.) represented an apologetic answer to the perceived intellectual marginality of Interwar Romania and its apparent lack of prestigious historiographical roots comparable to those of Western Europe (370). Like other coeval intellectuals, Eliade combined those ideas with local ultra-nationalism, xenophobia, and Orthodoxism, almost ticking all the boxes of what Umberto Eco defined as Ur-Fascism (Eco 1995; additional bibliography in Ambasciano 2014). As a result, Eliade’s conception of the history of religions (HoR henceforth) was strictly tied to the extremist right-wing building of a “new (or renewed) man” (301). After the end of World War II, Eliadean concepts such as the “terror of history” and the “nostalgia for paradise” echoed the defeat of the Romanian far right, conveying a sympathetic nostalgia for reactionary politics and traditional mores (Ginzburg 2010). Such disciplinary labels were by then transfigured as universal axioms according to which history (i.e., the profane) is a fall from the primeval grace (i.e., the sacred) which homo religiosus, the spiritual and religious human being, yearns for (Spineto 2006, 203–226).

2 For the sake of brevity, unspecified parenthetical referencing in Italics indicates bibliography and documents gathered and discussed in Ambasciano (2014).