There's a great post over at Bagehot about just how often in the past few hundred years people have decried the moral and social collapse of England and associated that collapse with whatever recent violence has occured, just as we've seen in the UK in the past couple of weeks.
It's a point Andrew Marr makes in his book about British journalism - there never was a "magic age" of journalism, indeed early gazettes and newspapers were much more scurrilous and suggestive than they are today. It's part of the human condition of looking fondly back on the past in contrast to the future.
It occured to me that we have no word in English to describe this emotion and perhaps that's part of our collective national problem. I'm pretty sure there's no word in Polish for it either.
Might it be possible to argue that in the absence of the word we can't label it when we see it and therefore can't address it? Half the Daily Mail's content suffers from this fatiguing emotional condition, for example, this obsession with everything "going to the dogs" (in the English phrase) when it might be better and more productive to focus on the future with all our energy.
Nostalgic won't quite do, as it doesn't offer up the contrast between the now and the then. So I offer up these wordspawn and see which one will swim:
Canisire (from "going" and "dogs")
Rememoric (to return to memories)
Valepresentic (a farewell to the present)
The act or emotion of thinking the past better than the present or future.
Well I like rememoric as it looks like remoronic, which should also be a word I think, maybe meaning a relapse into a moronic state or something...
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