THE MYTH OF COLLECTIVE MEMORY

History is the written record of how people see their reality, how they distort it, fictionalize, change and warp it.                                                        

Edward Berenson in his article “Historians and Collective Memory” (HuffPost, March 25, 2013) tells us what we, in essence, already know: that historical memory is suppressed, distorted, obliterated, erased, biased and even forgotten. I contend that there is no such thing as collective memory. I mentioned, in part one of this post, how memory can actually be distorted on a personal level.

The idea of Collective Memory is an off-shoot of Carl Jung’s (1875-1961) theory of the collective unconscious, the whole reservoir of humankind’s experience, where humanity somehow stores its memory handing it down from generation to generation. This farfetched memory theory does not hold water and never will, even if historians, such as Professor Berenson, think otherwise.

Yet mankind is horrified at the possibility of being forgotten or forgetting. Forgetfulness appears as a curse to be avoided. We can ascertain this by visiting any cemetery where we can read tombstone inscriptions averring that those buried there will not be forgotten. Abraham Lincoln knew that it is in our nature to forget and said so in his Gettysburg Address: “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” What soldiers did at the battlefield has been forgotten but the President’s address that day, his words are still remembered, contrary to what Lincoln thought. The ups and down of collective and individual memory.

I sometimes chat with my mother (97 years old) about her experiences in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939, and the long postwar, when she was in her teens and twenties. I come to realize that her memories, vivid and true to facts, are her memories, the circumstances she had to live, along with her immediate family. Each person of her age lived a different Civil War, a personal Civil War, with personal sufferings, atrocities, depravations and losses. Younger generations in Spain react to this war as they might react to the Napoleonic invasion of Spain in 1808. All traces of personal horror are gone and… forgotten. That is why we can say that there were many Spanish Civil Wars, not just one.

The key to historical forgetfulness is to be found in neuroscience, not in history books. Neuroscientists will soon discover that the answer to the historical survival of humanity lies in forgetting, in starting afresh with each successive generation and shaking off the hindrance, the load, of unpleasant and overwhelming memories of events that happened at a given point in time. Humanity has made it to the XXI century simply because each generation has started anew, as a tabula rasa, creating new memories and forgetting and shedding the old.

December the 7^th is a day, as President Roosevelt put it: “…that will live in infamy”; the day the Japanese Navy and Air Force attacked Pearl Harbor. Yet the country that forced the US to enter WW II is an ally now and most of those who fought that long war are dead. The military, commercial and strategic conflict seems to be fading away in people’s minds while “more” pressing vicissitudes like job hunting, economic growth, health care, terrorism… come to the fore of our concerns, obliterating past historical events and relegating them to “history” books, a branch of literary fiction that focuses on a given subject from myriad points of view, depending on the writer, the historian and his political views and nationality.

History is the written record of how people see their reality, how they distort it, fictionalize and change it. History may be the art of perverting, twisting and misrepresenting bare facts that have no meaning other than how we interpret them.

Our memory of our past, of “our” history, is seldom reliable because hindsight is never 20/20.