Why do we need to remember?

Please forgive me if you find this post to be self-serving, but I wanted to test an axiom of the public history field on a wider audience.

The phrases "Always Remember" and "Never Forget" complete with the obnoxious redundancy and annoying capital letters are ubiquitous in the public discourse around memorialization. Scholars use fancy terminology (like lieux de memoire) to express roughly the same desire on a "collective" level. Some credit the vocal presence of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum with the proliferation of this sentiment, but it's easy to find echoes stretching back to "Remember the Alamo" and beyond. This sentiment has fueled the urgency behind the creation of every war memorial in the United States, but particularly memorials to controversial conflicts, from the Civil War to Vietnam.

So I pose this question: why are we so afraid of forgetting significant events?

And as a corollary: Are we more afraid people in the future will remember them differently?

Are People Becoming Overspecialized?

When I was driving home from my father's house one day, I heard a commercial for a service in the local area (which includes the town where I grew up) called "Captain Laundry". The commercial started with a couple devolving rather rapidly into a screaming match over who would do the laundry, because neither of them had any time to do it. "Captain Laundry" kindly makes itself available to come to your house and do your laundry and dry-cleaning for you, so you don't have to worry about it.

This rather irritating commercial got me thinking about the concept of comparative advantage: in economic theory, nations will supposedly specialize in those areas where they can produce more value than other nations. I wonder if this idea has started to permeate individual lives, as well.

There seems to be an increasing tendency to think that all of our actions have opportunity costs that are measured in real income. If you are better at one thing than at all other things, you should devote almost all of your time to doing that thing, because you will be able to make more money doing that. Since you command a premium in that one activity, you can then afford to pay someone else to do all the stuff you are slightly less good at, but in which they excel. Economically, everyone wins, because they get to demand the highest price for their time.

Does anyone else see this as being increasingly true? If so, do you think it is healthy for the human mind to be transformed into a one-dimensional task handler? Do we lose something of ourselves by devoting what is fundamentally a generalist intelligence and skill set to an increasingly limited scope of activities?

Inaugural Post

I don't even blog enough to my own blog, but I figured I might be more likely to if we had an actual discussion forum. Acting like a French salon member of the poofy-hair era is encouraged, but not required.

In keeping with a salon, I would like all posts to contain something of substance, the purpose of which is to provoke discussion. There is obviously nothing wrong with levity or snark (both are expected), but we can keep one-off links and random crazy to e-mail.

Also in keeping with a salon, all members should be prepared to read the occasional stemwinder. Depth as well as breadth are welcome here, although obviously you do not have to address every point of previous posters to contribute to a discussion. You may also expect some rather archaic subject matter, depending on the whims of the group.

I would like the group of authors to be relatively small. I have invited this particular group because each of us have a unique perspective on life and on potential discussion topics, and we are all intellectually inclined and earnest in our convictions.