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

"while alert to the possibility that history can be abused, as it unquestionably was in the Balkans in the 1990s, most decent people still endorse George Santayana’s celebrated dictum: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The consequence of this is that remembrance as a species of morality has become one of the more unassailable pieties of the age. Today, most societies all but venerate the imperative to remember. We have been taught to believe that the remembering of the past and its corollary, the memorialising of collective historical memory, has become one of humanity’s highest moral obligations...

Remembrance, however important a role it may play in the life of groups, and whatever moral and ethical demands it responds to, carries risks that at times also have an existential character....

These are the cases in which it is possible that whereas forgetting does an injustice to the past, remembering does an injustice to the present. On such occasions, when collective memory condemns communities to feel the pain of their historical wounds and the bitterness of their historical grievances it is not the duty to remember but a duty to forget that should be honoured...

An example of this is the so-called pacto del olvido (pact of forgetting) between the right and the left that, while never formalised, was essential to the political settlement that restored democracy in Spain in the 1970s after the death of the dictator General Franco. The democratic transition came on the wings both of rewriting and of forgetting. The myriad avenues and boulevards that had been named after Franco himself or his prominent subordinates following the fascists’ victory in 1939 were renamed. But instead of replacing them with the names of Republican heroes and martyrs, the Spanish leaders chose to use names from the royal past...

The general tendency among human rights activists, including members of the judiciary such as Garzón, has been to present law and morality as inseparable, at least in cases when the matter under consideration is clearly within the jurisdiction of a court. And because most of them assume that justice is the essential prerequisite for lasting peace, they tend to downplay the risk of any negative political and social consequences flowing from their actions."

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/mar/02/cult-of-memory-when-history-does-more-harm-than-good

This is a really interesting thesis. I wonder if another way to look at it would be a sort of society-level PTSD or trauma-induced anxiety disorder, where thoughts of past experiences come unbidden and you end up living in your fears, hiding from your triggers.

So, the question isn't so much "can we forget" (the answer there is no, not without healing) and more "can we engage in therapy, and can we learn to recognize and react healthily to these moments when they happen in the future?"

And then also - how can we recognize that some reactions are toxic and unproductive, but also recognize that these traumas are continuing to happen?

Related: Decolonize, not diversify, education