Against Collective Memory

I'm finishing revisions to a lecture I gave just over a year ago now at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota on salutary oubliance, that is on the uses of forgetting as a deliberate means of advancing Christian unity in certain cases, including the absurdly stalled Byzantine-Oriental Orthodox dialogue.

In doing so, I am returning to works I discovered and noted on here a couple of years ago now, including those of David Rieff (whose fascinating book I discussed in three parts) and Bradford Vivian, one of the earliest authors to raise the question of why we insist on so much remembering when forgetting might be more useful.

We in the East have, as I argued here, far too much history--more than we can bear--on any number of topics, including the Council of Chalcedon, the Crusades, the Council of Florence, and the Union of Brest. The refusal to let go of some of these bogus historical narratives and grievances blocks the way towards any kind of reconciliation and unity--which is the whole point of hanging on to such pathologies in the first place, making them, in the very apt phrase of Vamik Volkan, a "chosen trauma."

Vivian has a new book out, and it is one I think Eastern Christians should pay attention before we continue, too glibly, to mouth that most tiresome of clichés about being condemned to repeat the past if we do not remember and bear witness to its horrors: Commonplace Witnessing: Rhetorical Invention, Historical Remembrance, and Public Culture (Oxford UP, 2017), 248pp.

About Vivian's book we are told:

Commonplace Witnessing examines how citizens, politicians, and civic institutions have adopted idioms of witnessing in recent decades to serve a variety of social, political, and moral ends. The book encourages us to continue expanding and diversifying our normative assumptions about which historical subjects bear witness and how they do so. Commonplace Witnessing presupposes that witnessing in modern public culture is a broad and inclusive rhetorical act; that many different types of historical subjects now think and speak of themselves as witnesses; and that the rhetoric of witnessing can be mundane, formulaic, or popular instead of rare and refined. This study builds upon previous literary, philosophical, psychoanalytic, and theological studies of its subject matter in order to analyze witnessing, instead, as a commonplace form of communication and as a prevalent mode of influence regarding the putative realities and lessons of historical injustice or tragedy. It thus weighs both the uses and disadvantages of witnessing as an ordinary feature of modern public life.

Towards a Theology of Forgiving and Forgetting (I)

Readers may recall that I spent a good bit of time last summer reflecting on David Rieff's book. His is one of several recent treatments of the power and importance of forgetting--Manuel Cruz being the author of another significant coterminous study reviewed here and some possible applications of it discussed here.

Just before either book appeared, there was a collection of academic articles published under the editorship of Hartmut von Sass and Johannes Zachhuber, Forgiving and Forgetting: Theology and the Margins of Soteriology (Mohr Siebeck, 2015), viii +225pp.

About this collection the publisher tells us:

Forgiveness has traditionally been associated with a duty to remember in order for reconciliation to be possible. Human failure, evil, and atrocities could thus only be forgiven on the basis of a saving memory. Forgetting, by contrast, had to be excluded in the interest of a truthful and genuinely new beginning. Historical experience, it seemed, supported this account. The essays collected in this volume seek to challenge this traditional picture - by elaborating on the notion of forgetting, by reappreciating its constructive or even necessary impact on our lives, by paying heed to the potential obstacles for reconciliation due to an unforgiving remembrance, by clarifying the relationship between remembrance and forgetting, which is not necessarily complementary, and by finding new ways of relating forgiveness to forgetting ultimately leading to the precarious question of whether even God forgets when he forgives. Contributors: Aleida Assmann, Agata Bielik-Robson, Brigitte Boothe, Paul Fiddes, George Pattison, Simon D. Podmore, Hartmut von Sass, Lydia Schumacher, Philipp Stoellger, Bradford Vivian, Johannes Zachhuber.

I will have more to say in the coming days about several of the chapters in this very valuable collection. 

David Rieff and the Duty to Forget (III)

Let us turn, finally, to such brief considerations of forgiveness in conjunction with forgetting as we find in David Rieff's In Praise of Forgetting (part II here; and part I here).

As we recall, Rieff (and other recent authors, including Manuel Cruz) says that forgetting:

• is more mature
• is more likely to bring peace
• is no more likely to ensure repetition of a traumatic, violent event than enforced remembrance is to prevent it

If all this is so, then it would seem that a fortiori forgiveness will do likewise, and perhaps do so with better results than forgetting alone. But Rieff does not attend to forgiveness as much as he does to forgetting. Nonetheless, he does end his important and stimulating book with a few lapidary suggestions.

As with his emphasis on forgetting, Rieff is a socio-political pragmatist with regard to forgiveness. Noting that few people are more uncontrollable or more dangerous than "a social group that believes itself to be a victim" (117), he argues that such "victims," whose collective memory has most likely been ginned up or exaggerated in key aspects, must learn to forget those episodes and, more important, the resentment that they engender. In this regard, Rieff's book could equally be titled "in praise of letting go of resentment" insofar as resentment often spurs victims to become perpetrators themselves. If they can let go of resentment and attempt something like forgiveness, then the cycle of vengeance can be broken--or, rather, quoting Borges, "'forgetting is the only vengeance and the only forgiveness'" (145).

That is, of course, rather weak tea. Christians would have a much stronger, more robust theology of forgiveness based on its divine example and dominical mandate.

As I continue to think with and through Rieff, Cruz, Ricoeur, Vivian, Volf, and others on these questions, I have in mind two test cases: the Union of Brest-Pseudosobor of Lviv trajectory in Russian-Catholic relations and imaginings; and then the Crusades. I shall have more to say about both later.

David Rieff on the Duty to Forget (II)

As I noted previously, among its several virtues, David Rieff's new and important book, In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies, forces us to overcome any romantic or idealistic claims that enforced historical remembrance of certain, especially traumatic, events, in itself makes the world a better place.

The notion of collective memory comes in for unrelenting criticism from Rieff, and in my view this is wholly justified. He disputes flatly the idea that there is such a thing as collective memory as genuine memory of actual events which the collective itself experienced directly. (This is a problem I have long wondered about in all the papal calls for the "healing of memories," especially among and between Christians. How can the "memories" of, say, the entire Greek Orthodox Church be healed apart from healing each person one at a time if, that is, they have such "memories" in the first place--rather than having "acquired" them as part of their national identity kits?) This is indeed Rieff's point also: collective "memory" is an instrumentalist notion packaged into national identities and political ideologies; as such it is tendentious, narcissistic, unambiguous, unequivocal, and one-dimensional. It privileges power over truth; it does not scruple over historical accuracy, or acknowledge any ambiguity. This is what makes collective memory so useful to politicians and convincing in the hands of nationalist ideologues, and precisely what makes it so dangerous also.

Instead of an almost unquestioning insistence on remembrance, whose utility is assumed but almost never demonstrated, Rieff spends considerable time arguing that certain memories for a time may be useful in trying to prod people to repentance and reconciliation, but these cases will likely be short-lived and can only be determined on a case-by-base basis. There is, then, no room for blanket insistence on wide-spread collective remembrance by everyone forever.

Equally Rieff is not a one-sided polemicist in the other direction, insisting on blanket and widespread forgetting. He recognizes that remembering may have its place, and may be of limited use to some people.

Its utility, however, is in fact likely to be highly limited, and time-bound. Wide-spread insistence on collective remembrance has little if any demonstrable track record in making the world a better place. Collective remembrance in and of itself gives us no clues, no tools, no guidelines, as to how to prevent a future recurrence of, say, a genocide or other traumatic or violent event.

What might work better, then? Here Rieff turns to both forgiveness and especially forgetting. According to Rieff, both have considerable virtues and both have advantages that collective remembrance does not.

Forgetting, says Rieff:

• is more mature
• is more likely to bring peace
• is no more likely to ensure repetition of a traumatic, violence event than enforced remembrance is to prevent it

We insist (and legally so in some cases--e.g., France's Gayssot Act and later legislation mandating memory and criminalizing denial of, e.g., the Holocaust) on a "duty to remember," notes Rieff before asking: Why not a duty to forget? Would that not be socially useful also?

Related to a duty to forget is the question of forgiveness. Rieff does not give this as much attention, and in our final installment we will look at this in more detail before teasing out some of the implications of all this for both Christian and Muslim "memories" of such as, e.g, the Fourth Crusade.

Continues. 

David Rieff on the Duty to Forget (I)

As it happened, I was sitting out toward dusk on perhaps the loveliest summer evening so far, finishing the reading of David Rieff's powerful and important book In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies before coming in to the news of the death of Elie Wiesel, whose efforts to ensure perpetual remembrance of the Holocaust come in for critical scrutiny in Rieff's book.

Rieff's book is one of several to have emerged stressing the importance of forgetting--indeed, the moral imperative and duty to forget, at least some conflicts at least some of the time--as I have noted on here in drawing attention to Manuel Cruz's book, inter alia. Though this work--as I noted here--does not deal much with Christian approaches to history and memory, nor to conflicts involving Christians, I have been engaged for some time in thinking with authors such as Rieff to see how useful their work could be to the on-going project of Catholic-Orthodox healing of memories as well as to Christian-Muslim relations in the context of (entirely bogus) "memories" of the "Crusades."

Rieff's book is a subtle, careful work that does indeed make the case for forgetting, but not in a simplistic manner. He recognizes the importance of memory and remembering, but severely puts to the question any notion that collective memory is a coherent and tangible reality instead of a political cipher, a metaphor, and, on balance, a rather dangerous tool of identity always in service of some agenda or other.

Moreover, he asks--as Cruz did--whether and where all this emphasis on remembering has made the world a better place. Did insistence on not forgetting the Armenian genocide of 1915 prevent the Ukrainian terror-famine of 1932-33, the Holocaust of 1939-45, or more recent genocides in Rwanda, Cambodia, the Balkans in the 1990s, and elsewhere? Has insistence on remembering the Holocaust solved the problem of anti-Semitism? Have no Jews anywhere been killed since 1945, or at least 1948 and the creation of the state of Israel in part as a way of saying "Never forget!" and "Never again!" to the Holocaust?

Continues. 

Eternal Memory?

Eastern Christians, especially those of the Byzantine tradition, very commonly remember their dead, both personally and liturgically, by singing "Eternal Memory!"

That prayerful phrase admits of wider usage than we may perhaps consider, especially when weighed down by the crushing weight of personal grief. What of, e.g., the memories of the destruction of an entire people, as in the Armenian genocide, the Nazi-orchestrated Holocaust, the Soviet destruction of many Christians--especially Catholics--or the Holodomor? What are the risks of forgetting those? Do we need to be reminded not to forget? Must we pray that all memories are eternal, never forgotten in order never to be repeated?

Two recent essays suggest we need such a reminder. Anne Applebaum, author of such important books as, Gulag: A History and Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956, has an essay in Commentary, "Russia and the Great Forgetting," which I commend to your attention.

And Daniel Gross has an essay in The New Yorker, "A Historian Who Fled the Nazis and Still Wants Us to Read Hitler." Both Gross and Applebaum, in their ways, remind us of the potentially great socio-political costs to the forgetting of recent totalitarian pasts in Russia and Germany.

The questions of memory and forgetting have come to preoccupy my thinking a great deal over the last year and more, especially in the contexts of Orthodox-Catholic relations, and Orthodox-Muslim relations. In such contexts as those, one often finds the same issue raised against the West by both: the Crusades. If you read the regular public utterances of ISIS, e.g., you see language of "the Crusaders" invoked with some regularity.

Such invocations, of course, are not brought about by people with actual personal recollections of living through the Crusades 800 to 1000 years ago and more now. These are culturally and religiously traduced "memories" designed and used for present political purposes on a broad level and, at the same time, often used on a more individual level for certain psychological reasons. This is the question that especially interests me: what is going on--at both an individual, and often unconscious, level and at a broad cultural level--when people make such invocations? What does that process tell us about them and about their psychological state, and about their political agendas?

One person who has done fascinating work in this regard is the sociologist and psychoanalyst Jeffrey Prager, whose 1998 book Presenting the Past: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Misremembering I have briefly discussed previously on here. It is a deeply suggestive one that carefully explores some of these questions by means of a case-study of one of his early analysands. The work he has been doing in this book and elsewhere has opened up vast and rich terrain for scholars of, say, Orthodox-Catholic and Orthodox-Muslim relations (to say nothing of the Crusades) as well as the phenomenon of modern ethno-nationalism and the various founding myths of nation-states.

Prager cites recent psychological research that has shown the alarmingly malleable quality of memory and the fact that it can be, and often is, manipulated to serve our agendas both individual and cultural. He cites the psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, whose emerging research in the early 1990s I remember (!) reading as an undergraduate in psychology then. In works such as Witness for the Defense: The Accused, the Eyewitness and the Expert Who Puts Memory on Trial, she has shown repeatedly that even so-called eye-witness recollections are often far from reliable. Her work should give us all pause and force a great deal more humility and circumspection in those who insist that their recollected version is the only correct one.

Monotheistic Reconciliation

Jews, Christians, and Muslims are both similar and different in their understanding of sin and reconciliation. A new book explores those similarities and differences: R. Bieringer and D. Bolton, Reconciliation in Interfaith Perspective: Jewish, Christian and Muslim Voices (Peeters, 2011), 216pp.


About this book, the publisher tells us:

Reconciliation in Interfaith Perspective: Jewish, Christian and Muslim Voices brings together scholars from Jewish, Christian and Islamic backgrounds to discuss the concept of reconciliation from within their respective traditions. These scholars focused on whether a common understanding on reconciliation is possible between the Abrahamic religions. In this volume the papers are arranged in two parts. The first contains generalized studies that approach the topic from a broad perspective. The second presents specialized studies that focus on specific issues like Islamic normalcy, the relationship between forgiveness and ethics or a comparison between Eastern and Western Christianity. The Jewish equivalent of reconciliation is discussed by Adele Reinhartz and Didier Pollefeyt. Reimund Bieringer, Roger Burggraeve, Yves De Maeseneer, David Pratt and Nico Schreurs focus on various aspects of the Christian understanding of reconciliation from many different perspectives. Finally Zeki Saritoprak and David Bolton as well as Marcia Hermansen and Julianne Funk Deckard deal with Muslim equivalents to reconciliation. The various studies brought together represent a great diversity of perspectives on reconciliation. While reconciliation is primarily a Christian concept coming from the Pauline tradition, it is important to see that similar ideas are present in both Judaism and Islam. Though differences remain, the contributions do demonstrate that not only is an Abrahamic trialogue on this subject possible, but that it is beneficial for all involved and that it has undoubted potential for further development.