6 ms·

The cult of memory: when history does more harm than good

82 points by sasvari 11y ago

sbmassey 11y ago
It is important to remember as much history as possible, since it gives us an understanding of the range of human activity, and the outcomes of pursuing particular policies. The mistake is to take it personally.
- pascalmemories 11y ago
  Not taking it personally is probably the important take-away. I always recall Frank McCourt in Angela's Ashes talking about "the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years" as it summed up much of the logic and reasoning [I mean that ironically] that led to thousands of murders in Northern Ireland. (edit: For clarity, I think Frank McCourt understood that very well and that's why it wrote it as he did.) Young and impressionable people are prone to learning about historic injustice and they trying to right the wrongs by perpetrating new injustices. That's not what learning history is supposed to do - an understanding of history is about learning how society ended up the way it is now and trying to use that to improve society without repeating terrible mistakes that lead to death and mayhem in the past. It's vital to learn history, but it's vital to learn context and the bigger picture too. Without that, it becomes the source of hatred that undoes the evolution of society (sadly there are too many examples readily available of that happening).
  - meric 11y ago
    800 years is a bit of a stretch, but history can very well be personal. My Chinese great-grandmother was an opium addict who got kicked out of her village along with my grandmother and her sister after my great-grandfather died. That opium was imported by British merchants who the Qing government desperately tried to stop in the mid-1850's but failed and lost the wars. My great-grandmother, raising my grandmother as a single parent, was unproductive as an opium addict even during the best of times, could not support my grandmother and her sister during the Japanese invasion of China. First she abandoned my grandmother's sister, and then my grandmother was left in the orphanage for a few years. Later my grandmother was picked up by her relatives, but her sister never seen again. The lack of interaction with a father during my grandmother's upbringing meant when my grandfather had an accident working as a technician, and could not return to work, he did not receive the emotional support he could have received from my grandmother at the time, took it too hard on himself, and ended his life. That is why when I was growing up my mother treated me as both father and son at the same time. As her children we were supposed to look after her emotional needs, while our own were neglected. Listening to my grandmother's stories of having to hide every time the bomb siren went off because the Japanese were bombing the city, her starvation in the orphanage, children dying everyday, abandonment by her mother, loss of her sister, having an opium addict mother, how can I not be empathetic? It doesn't mean I have to take action or hate people for it, but how can history not be personal when it affects me and my family so deeply? Hell, I probably even wouldn't be here today if not for the turmoil in China's early 20th century causing many specific migration movements.
    - mwfunk 11y ago
      I don't think that's what was meant by not taking it personally. If you were "taking it personally" in the sense being discussed here, you would be holding modern-day British citizens accountable for the opium imported by the British merchants in the 19th century, maybe even actively plotting their demise. Everyone is personally affected by history, but this article is more about holding grudges against people or nations for centuries after the events that spawned those grudges. We need to understand history to understand how it shaped us and how we can avoid repeating events that we don't want to repeat, but we also need to resist the urge to allow injustices of the past to become an emotional impetus for present and future conflicts.
      - catnaroek 11y ago
        No, that is fundamentally wrong. Every self-respecting nation holds grudges, and bids her time until the time is ready to avenge them. Also, 100 or even 200 years are the blink of an eye in a nation's history. I'm particularly distressed by the fact my country doesn't do so, which is in great part why I find it much easier to identify with my Chinese ancestors (even though I only have partial Chinese ancestry) than my fellow countrymen (who are a spineless bunch).
        ktRolster 11y ago
        >No, that is fundamentally wrong. Every self-respecting nation holds grudges, Every rational nation doesn't hold grudges, and merely does what is beneficial at the time. Trying to avenge wrongs done to your grandparents or farther back is one of the dumbest things you can do.
        Radim 11y ago
        This is naive beyond belief. Reciprocation is a fundamental concept in keeping social systems healthy and balanced. Read up on the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (or any number of the copious academic research on this subject; but PD is a great entry point). "Merely doing what is beneficial at the time" is just bad advice, both on personal and social (national) level. "Spinelessness" is only a part of it; worse, such greedy strategies lead to poor socioeconomic results in the long run.
  - irish_lad 11y ago
    Ehh not some much. The attempted crushing of the Civil Rights movement by the then sectarian government of Northern Ireland and the subsequent esclation on all sides is much more "responsible" for the decades of troubles there than lingering memories of 800 years. If you found your street under attack by the police, homes burned out and forced to become a refugee (as was happening with State backing in NI in the late 60s) it's not so easy to dismiss it as "history"
- ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
  And to hold grudges for what happened to your supposed ancestors 800 years ago.
  - Spooky23 11y ago
    Easy to say now. If you were a Catholic in Northern Ireland in the recent past, subject to arbitrary harassment and systematic discrimination, you might feel differently. In a sense, every day you wake up is one more day tacked on the those 800 years -- dozens of generations of abuse.
    - ktRolster 11y ago
      > If you were a Catholic in Northern Ireland in the > recent past, subject to arbitrary harassment and > systematic discrimination, you might feel differently. That's why you don't let your feelings dictate your actions. Listen to your feelings, sure, but if your feelings tell you to do something stupid, shake your head and wake up.
    - vacri 11y ago
      You're describing a situation where it is still personal. Whereas for the people in the RoI, the English menace is no longer in living memory.
      - Spooky23 11y ago
        Absolutely. My grandparents were born in Ireland and were children during the 1920s. They were more live and let live, but my older uncles who were of military age and more aware of what was going on had a distinct distaste for most things British.
  - CM30 11y ago
    You mean like a significant amount of the 'social justice' movement, that seem to be hellbent on attacking people based on their ancestors being such and such hundreds of years ago? Some of the exact people who the Guardian itself seems to like appealing to?
- mc32 11y ago
  One could argue the English could have held a grudge against their subjugators in the manifestation of the Normans who took all the English lands and made it their own as well as foisted their new-to-them old French influenced Norman language. They could have held that grudge but they didn't. They subjugated and were coöpted by the Normans and then forming this new hybrid identity went on to become one of the greatest empires on Earth. Had they gone with the precursors and the likes of Winstanley I'm not certain they'd have accomplished so much and the English the Anglosphere begot by said empire would not exist today nor the world we enjoy today. The world would be much more fragmented, if not more Frankish and perhaps Spanish.
  - abiox 11y ago
    to this very day they still have all those extra U's and -re's instead of -er's. ;_; can't say i'm all that romantic about notions of empire, though.
    - mc32 11y ago
      No, but empire did set the stage for the world we have today and the set of people we have today. In other words the rebirth of the West and the focus away from state (serf-lord) and religion to science and advancement (progress) results in us (the whole set of people alive today), the product.
wangii 11y ago
History would be less fun without interpretations which is confused with remembrance in this article.
goodcanadian 11y ago
It is not enough to remember; you must also understand and learn from history. The memory of World War Two does not make Germany and Japan my enemies. On the contrary, it shows why we MUST be friends.
- AnimalMuppet 11y ago
  > On the contrary, it shows why we MUST be friends. If possible. WWII also showed that trying to be friends at any price can work out quite badly.
x5n1 11y ago
I take the stance of my Jewish friends, when they say never again. That's what history is suppose to teach us, NEVER AGAIN! Yet we still have not worked out how to make that happen for all these government based power plays. All power needs to be distributed far and wide so that no one has power. That's a very good way to ensure people can't bring harm to others at every level of society/.
clock_tower 11y ago
It would be very convenient for the British if their historical (and, like in Northern Ireland, contemporary) crimes were forgotten, wouldn't it?
mynameishere 11y ago
He who controls the past controls the future What this guy is getting at, in a necessarily stupefying way to confuse and tire the reader, is that we should remember certain events and not others. No doubt the lists of things to be forgotten and propagated will be determined by people as enlightened as himself. But on that count he's calling for the status quo making the article that much more dull.
tim333 11y ago
There's a lot of flexibility as to what you can focus on. If some group attacked your ancestors you can build up a grudge against the group and want to fight back or you can resent war and try to stop that in general. Both positions tend to get campaigned for by political groups.
hmahncke 11y ago
This topic is the subject of Kazuo Ishiguro's book "The Buried Giant" where a long-married couple explore medieval England to understand why everyone has forgotten their history, and discover that it was probably for the best. Never thought that would be on-topic at HN.
- ktRolster 11y ago
  Have you read it? Is it worth reading?
ktRolster 11y ago
The problems in the article are not problems of history, rather they are problems of people who refuse to learn from history. People who refuse to learn are doomed, whether they have history or not.
austerity 11y ago
It's not the memory that is the problem, but the collectivist mentality. I "remember" a lot of history but I know better than to associate myself with dead people of the past or to hold my contemporaries responsible for anything that happened before they were born. Sounds easy enough, right? Apparently not when you have pack animal genes and a bunch of politicians eager to exploit it to their benefit.
catnaroek 11y ago
This shameful piece could have only been written by someone who has forsaken their own human condition, reducing their sense of purpose in life to the biological imperative to “survive”. In the interest of “surviving”, people can do all sorts of dishonorable things, like adopting a servile attitude with those who covet (or, even worse, have already stolen!) what is rightfully yours, while turning a blind eye to the plight of your own kind. Fortunately, throughout history, there have always been people with a sense of duty to the collective to which they belong, and will prioritize that duty over opportunities for self-advancement. So not all hope is lost.
- mindcrime 11y ago
  turning a blind eye to the plight of your own kind. Isn't the whole notion of "your kind" simply another biological imperative rooted in kin altruism?
  - catnaroek 11y ago
    Nope. Identification with those who share your language, culture and history... this is very much acquired during the socialization process, not something imprinted in our genes.
- twoquestions 11y ago
  I don't know who has wronged you or how, but all the bloody vengeance in the world won't make you feel any better, nor will it undo what has been done to you. Punishing the individuals responsible for specific acts is all well and good within reason, but collective punishment is wrong.
jhoechtl 11y ago
The book "Delete - The virtue of forgetting" comes here to my mind. It deals about the inability of content on the internet to "rot" http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/jun/30/remember-delete-forget-digital-age http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/jun/30/remember-d...
Htsthbjig 11y ago
Memory is not history. Memory includes emotions and history should just remember facts. We should never forget facts. We should never forget that Europe fought wars against the Muslims, specially since nothing in the Muslim world has changed since the Q'ran was written. I had visited lots of Muslim countries in Africa. It is mandatory there that you wake up in the middle of the morning to pray whenever you want it or not. It is mandatory for them not to represent the prophet Muhammad in any way. You can't make a film with an actor representing Muhammad, or you will just be killed by someone. It is mandatory for them not to eat pig, probably because hygienic conditions 1600 years ago in Arabia. Idem with circumcision. This is not even the past, it is present time. Some people, like the author of this article want us just to close the eyes to reality and accept millions of foreign people with obsolete beliefs into Europe just looking away from the consequences of this. This only comes from absence of knowledge. This man wants to make virtue from ignorance. War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.
- dang 11y ago
  We've asked you before not to conduct religious flamewars on Hacker News. There is no place for them here. Really, please stop.
_glass 11y ago
The gist of this article is misleading. Instead of forgetting, one should be ruthlessly open, but also meta about memory. There is a relatively new historical research area, that shows how important historical events are remembered, not what really happened. It is phenomenological, interested about how people really feel. In modern geography, you have the same strain of imagined spaces. How is Kosovo as a place? The power of that place over the real administrative boundaries. Combined with the other major boundary of reality time, we can be very meta about this and establish a better understanding of our discourse. I think it is better to fight ignorance than openly practice it.

82 points by sasvari 11y ago

It is important to remember as much history as possible, since it gives us an understanding of the range of human activity, and the outcomes of pursuing particular policies. The mistake is to take it personally.

pascalmemories 11y ago
Not taking it personally is probably the important take-away. I always recall Frank McCourt in Angela's Ashes talking about "the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years" as it summed up much of the logic and reasoning [I mean that ironically] that led to thousands of murders in Northern Ireland. (edit: For clarity, I think Frank McCourt understood that very well and that's why it wrote it as he did.) Young and impressionable people are prone to learning about historic injustice and they trying to right the wrongs by perpetrating new injustices. That's not what learning history is supposed to do - an understanding of history is about learning how society ended up the way it is now and trying to use that to improve society without repeating terrible mistakes that lead to death and mayhem in the past. It's vital to learn history, but it's vital to learn context and the bigger picture too. Without that, it becomes the source of hatred that undoes the evolution of society (sadly there are too many examples readily available of that happening).
- meric 11y ago
  800 years is a bit of a stretch, but history can very well be personal. My Chinese great-grandmother was an opium addict who got kicked out of her village along with my grandmother and her sister after my great-grandfather died. That opium was imported by British merchants who the Qing government desperately tried to stop in the mid-1850's but failed and lost the wars. My great-grandmother, raising my grandmother as a single parent, was unproductive as an opium addict even during the best of times, could not support my grandmother and her sister during the Japanese invasion of China. First she abandoned my grandmother's sister, and then my grandmother was left in the orphanage for a few years. Later my grandmother was picked up by her relatives, but her sister never seen again. The lack of interaction with a father during my grandmother's upbringing meant when my grandfather had an accident working as a technician, and could not return to work, he did not receive the emotional support he could have received from my grandmother at the time, took it too hard on himself, and ended his life. That is why when I was growing up my mother treated me as both father and son at the same time. As her children we were supposed to look after her emotional needs, while our own were neglected. Listening to my grandmother's stories of having to hide every time the bomb siren went off because the Japanese were bombing the city, her starvation in the orphanage, children dying everyday, abandonment by her mother, loss of her sister, having an opium addict mother, how can I not be empathetic? It doesn't mean I have to take action or hate people for it, but how can history not be personal when it affects me and my family so deeply? Hell, I probably even wouldn't be here today if not for the turmoil in China's early 20th century causing many specific migration movements.
  - mwfunk 11y ago
    I don't think that's what was meant by not taking it personally. If you were "taking it personally" in the sense being discussed here, you would be holding modern-day British citizens accountable for the opium imported by the British merchants in the 19th century, maybe even actively plotting their demise. Everyone is personally affected by history, but this article is more about holding grudges against people or nations for centuries after the events that spawned those grudges. We need to understand history to understand how it shaped us and how we can avoid repeating events that we don't want to repeat, but we also need to resist the urge to allow injustices of the past to become an emotional impetus for present and future conflicts.
    - catnaroek 11y ago
      No, that is fundamentally wrong. Every self-respecting nation holds grudges, and bids her time until the time is ready to avenge them. Also, 100 or even 200 years are the blink of an eye in a nation's history. I'm particularly distressed by the fact my country doesn't do so, which is in great part why I find it much easier to identify with my Chinese ancestors (even though I only have partial Chinese ancestry) than my fellow countrymen (who are a spineless bunch).
      - ktRolster 11y ago
        >No, that is fundamentally wrong. Every self-respecting nation holds grudges, Every rational nation doesn't hold grudges, and merely does what is beneficial at the time. Trying to avenge wrongs done to your grandparents or farther back is one of the dumbest things you can do.
        Radim 11y ago
        This is naive beyond belief. Reciprocation is a fundamental concept in keeping social systems healthy and balanced. Read up on the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (or any number of the copious academic research on this subject; but PD is a great entry point). "Merely doing what is beneficial at the time" is just bad advice, both on personal and social (national) level. "Spinelessness" is only a part of it; worse, such greedy strategies lead to poor socioeconomic results in the long run.
- irish_lad 11y ago
  Ehh not some much. The attempted crushing of the Civil Rights movement by the then sectarian government of Northern Ireland and the subsequent esclation on all sides is much more "responsible" for the decades of troubles there than lingering memories of 800 years. If you found your street under attack by the police, homes burned out and forced to become a refugee (as was happening with State backing in NI in the late 60s) it's not so easy to dismiss it as "history"
ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
And to hold grudges for what happened to your supposed ancestors 800 years ago.
- Spooky23 11y ago
  Easy to say now. If you were a Catholic in Northern Ireland in the recent past, subject to arbitrary harassment and systematic discrimination, you might feel differently. In a sense, every day you wake up is one more day tacked on the those 800 years -- dozens of generations of abuse.
  - ktRolster 11y ago
    > If you were a Catholic in Northern Ireland in the > recent past, subject to arbitrary harassment and > systematic discrimination, you might feel differently. That's why you don't let your feelings dictate your actions. Listen to your feelings, sure, but if your feelings tell you to do something stupid, shake your head and wake up.
  - vacri 11y ago
    You're describing a situation where it is still personal. Whereas for the people in the RoI, the English menace is no longer in living memory.
    - Spooky23 11y ago
      Absolutely. My grandparents were born in Ireland and were children during the 1920s. They were more live and let live, but my older uncles who were of military age and more aware of what was going on had a distinct distaste for most things British.
- CM30 11y ago
  You mean like a significant amount of the 'social justice' movement, that seem to be hellbent on attacking people based on their ancestors being such and such hundreds of years ago? Some of the exact people who the Guardian itself seems to like appealing to?
mc32 11y ago
One could argue the English could have held a grudge against their subjugators in the manifestation of the Normans who took all the English lands and made it their own as well as foisted their new-to-them old French influenced Norman language. They could have held that grudge but they didn't. They subjugated and were coöpted by the Normans and then forming this new hybrid identity went on to become one of the greatest empires on Earth. Had they gone with the precursors and the likes of Winstanley I'm not certain they'd have accomplished so much and the English the Anglosphere begot by said empire would not exist today nor the world we enjoy today. The world would be much more fragmented, if not more Frankish and perhaps Spanish.
- abiox 11y ago
  to this very day they still have all those extra U's and -re's instead of -er's. ;_; can't say i'm all that romantic about notions of empire, though.
  - mc32 11y ago
    No, but empire did set the stage for the world we have today and the set of people we have today. In other words the rebirth of the West and the focus away from state (serf-lord) and religion to science and advancement (progress) results in us (the whole set of people alive today), the product.

wangii 11y ago

History would be less fun without interpretations which is confused with remembrance in this article.

goodcanadian 11y ago

It is not enough to remember; you must also understand and learn from history. The memory of World War Two does not make Germany and Japan my enemies. On the contrary, it shows why we MUST be friends.

AnimalMuppet 11y ago
> On the contrary, it shows why we MUST be friends. If possible. WWII also showed that trying to be friends at any price can work out quite badly.

x5n1 11y ago

I take the stance of my Jewish friends, when they say never again. That's what history is suppose to teach us, NEVER AGAIN! Yet we still have not worked out how to make that happen for all these government based power plays. All power needs to be distributed far and wide so that no one has power. That's a very good way to ensure people can't bring harm to others at every level of society/.

clock_tower 11y ago

It would be very convenient for the British if their historical (and, like in Northern Ireland, contemporary) crimes were forgotten, wouldn't it?

mynameishere 11y ago

He who controls the past controls the future What this guy is getting at, in a necessarily stupefying way to confuse and tire the reader, is that we should remember certain events and not others. No doubt the lists of things to be forgotten and propagated will be determined by people as enlightened as himself. But on that count he's calling for the status quo making the article that much more dull.

tim333 11y ago

There's a lot of flexibility as to what you can focus on. If some group attacked your ancestors you can build up a grudge against the group and want to fight back or you can resent war and try to stop that in general. Both positions tend to get campaigned for by political groups.

hmahncke 11y ago

This topic is the subject of Kazuo Ishiguro's book "The Buried Giant" where a long-married couple explore medieval England to understand why everyone has forgotten their history, and discover that it was probably for the best. Never thought that would be on-topic at HN.

ktRolster 11y ago
Have you read it? Is it worth reading?

ktRolster 11y ago

The problems in the article are not problems of history, rather they are problems of people who refuse to learn from history. People who refuse to learn are doomed, whether they have history or not.

austerity 11y ago

It's not the memory that is the problem, but the collectivist mentality. I "remember" a lot of history but I know better than to associate myself with dead people of the past or to hold my contemporaries responsible for anything that happened before they were born. Sounds easy enough, right? Apparently not when you have pack animal genes and a bunch of politicians eager to exploit it to their benefit.

catnaroek 11y ago

This shameful piece could have only been written by someone who has forsaken their own human condition, reducing their sense of purpose in life to the biological imperative to “survive”. In the interest of “surviving”, people can do all sorts of dishonorable things, like adopting a servile attitude with those who covet (or, even worse, have already stolen!) what is rightfully yours, while turning a blind eye to the plight of your own kind. Fortunately, throughout history, there have always been people with a sense of duty to the collective to which they belong, and will prioritize that duty over opportunities for self-advancement. So not all hope is lost.

mindcrime 11y ago
turning a blind eye to the plight of your own kind. Isn't the whole notion of "your kind" simply another biological imperative rooted in kin altruism?
- catnaroek 11y ago
  Nope. Identification with those who share your language, culture and history... this is very much acquired during the socialization process, not something imprinted in our genes.
twoquestions 11y ago
I don't know who has wronged you or how, but all the bloody vengeance in the world won't make you feel any better, nor will it undo what has been done to you. Punishing the individuals responsible for specific acts is all well and good within reason, but collective punishment is wrong.

jhoechtl 11y ago

The book "Delete - The virtue of forgetting" comes here to my mind. It deals about the inability of content on the internet to "rot" http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/jun/30/remember-delete-forget-digital-age http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/jun/30/remember-d...

Htsthbjig 11y ago

Memory is not history. Memory includes emotions and history should just remember facts. We should never forget facts. We should never forget that Europe fought wars against the Muslims, specially since nothing in the Muslim world has changed since the Q'ran was written. I had visited lots of Muslim countries in Africa. It is mandatory there that you wake up in the middle of the morning to pray whenever you want it or not. It is mandatory for them not to represent the prophet Muhammad in any way. You can't make a film with an actor representing Muhammad, or you will just be killed by someone. It is mandatory for them not to eat pig, probably because hygienic conditions 1600 years ago in Arabia. Idem with circumcision. This is not even the past, it is present time. Some people, like the author of this article want us just to close the eyes to reality and accept millions of foreign people with obsolete beliefs into Europe just looking away from the consequences of this. This only comes from absence of knowledge. This man wants to make virtue from ignorance. War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.

dang 11y ago
We've asked you before not to conduct religious flamewars on Hacker News. There is no place for them here. Really, please stop.

_glass 11y ago

The gist of this article is misleading. Instead of forgetting, one should be ruthlessly open, but also meta about memory. There is a relatively new historical research area, that shows how important historical events are remembered, not what really happened. It is phenomenological, interested about how people really feel. In modern geography, you have the same strain of imagined spaces. How is Kosovo as a place? The power of that place over the real administrative boundaries. Combined with the other major boundary of reality time, we can be very meta about this and establish a better understanding of our discourse. I think it is better to fight ignorance than openly practice it.