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. 

On the Difficulty of Living Together (I)

This book's slender size is deceptive insofar as On the Difficulty of Living Together: Memory, Politics, and History, by the contemporary Spanish philosopher Manuel Cruz, is an at times dense and at others diffuse set of arguments about the relationship between memory, history, identity, and the politics of the future. This latter point really distinguishes this book, in my view, from other recent treatments of historical memory and forgetting insofar as the author insists that all too often debates about historical memory are so caught up in the past, or with preserving a particular version of the past, as to ignore entirely the question of what kind of future we want to have.

The author takes issue with a number of arguments as to why historical memory is said to be important. The act of remembering, he insists, cannot be an end in itself. Nor can it be simply a prophylaxis against future repetition of past horrors such as the Holocaust. As he puts it toward the end of the book, merely insisting something must not be allowed to happen again "leaves out the unavoidable matter of the necessary means" (73). In other words, to say "Never again!" to, eg., the Armenian Genocide tells us nothing as to how we may avoid such a thing from happening a second time.

Memory itself is not some neutral, innocent, or harmless repository of "what truly happened." It is shifting, not to say shifty, and always in the service of a narrative, an identity, and a politics. In that regard, memory is a tool of power, and here he quotes Goethe approvingly: "Writing history is a way of getting rid of the past" (21).

The author attempts something of a "small typology of memory" (44), noting five types of defenders of memory: those who insist memory has value in itself; those who see the past as legitimizing the present (e.g., defenders of modern European nation-states); those who link memory and justice; those who associate memory with necessary mourning; and those who use memory as a tool of criticism, denunciation, and a challenge to conscience.

One point the author returns to several times, albeit with great sensitivity given the tremendous controversy that would surely attend a more explicit argument, is that memories of historical injustices, and especially their victims, must not be always and everywhere assumed to be "absolute innocents" (51). To such people we must not extend what he calls an "excess of empathy" (55), allowing some past horror to excuse them of present responsibility. Part of his concern here--though he is less than forthright on this point--seems to be how often victims become victimizers. If victims are treated as untouchables, as moral innocents whose past suffering guarantees them immunity from present and future criticism, then politics will reach an impasse.

Cruz wants to put into question an over-reliance on historical memory insofar as it provides the resources for a settled, homogeneous identity in the present. He insists that "memory is, itself, a setting for conflict. Therefore it cannot be used to defend a harmonious and unitary image of identity" (65).

As I noted above, the real concern of this book is that "it may be more urgent for us to be able to reopen debate about the future" and so asking ourselves about the possibilities and prospects of "living better" (67). Cruz's project may be summed up nicely thus: "a future without any idea of the past is inane...[and] a past with no idea of the future is inert" (68).

In the end, Cruz insists that today more than ever we need the historian, for "he has the authority to reclaim forgetting," which is a way of "draining history" (95). Why should we want to forget, and to drain history? We need to forget certain things because they weigh us down from pursuing a better future.

As I continue to think this through, I will, in future installments, test out some of these ideas via a case-study method, using well-known examples of historically contested events among Eastern Christians.

Is Christianity Constitutionally Incapable of Forgetting?

I have noted on here several times previously my ongoing interest in the practices of remembering and forgetting, especially among Eastern Christians and Muslims with references to things like the Crusades, and the divisions between Orthodox and Catholics. I have found several recent books of use in thinking through some of these issues. None of these authors entertains any explicitly theological or "religious" interests or questions--apart from some mention of the Holocaust of course--but their works are nonetheless useful to those of us who try to grapple with theological problems such as long-standing "memories" of division and hurt at the hands of fellow Christians, or Muslims, or others.
As I continue to make my way through such books as Manuel Cruz's On the Difficulty of Living Together: Memory, Politics, and History as well as David Rieff's In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies (and several others I have mentioned previously) there emerges a central and properly theological question hinted at in my title: is Christianity capable, is it morally permitted, to forget when its central act, when the "source and summit of the Christian life" is precisely the act of grateful remembrance, of eucharistic anamnesis, of thankful memorialization? Given such powerful weight attached to "remembrance," have many of us derived therefrom some inchoate sense that forgetting is a morally reprehensible act?

I will explore more of the implications of both books once I have finished them. For those who are interested in such questions as remembering and forgetting, especially publicly and culturally, both Rieff and Cruz have written short but powerful essays very much worth your time, and I commend them to you.