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?
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3 comments:
I don't think that most of the time people use these phrases as a real entreaty for memory: these phrases are political speech, invoking the dead for a certain political purpose. "9/11 victims: we cannot forget you therefore, XXX"
Aside from the political speech, I think it's part of a normal human reaction to believe that the days we are living in now are the greatest, and most important -- we as a culture cannot forget what was important to me! (Does anyone still remember the Maine?)
Tangentially, there has been study about something called "snapshot memory" (note: may not be the actual term) -- the feeling of instant and perfect recall that you have associated with traumatic events. something like: "I'll forget the morning that I learned the world trade centers had been hit". back when I took this course in undergrad, studies suggested that these kind of memories were actually fairly accurate... so despite imploring, we're not likely to forget these things!
I'm going to agree with Dave here and say that a lot of times, the remembering slogans are more political than historical. They're used to whip up frenzy or to spur action, not to actually memorialize an event beyond its use in present application. And I totally agree that everyone thinks that they are living in the greatest, bestest, most coolest, totes awesomest time ever and how dare anyone suggest that our generation is not the pinnacle of human achievement. Thanks for that particular trend, Baby Boomers!
To answer your question slightly differently, however, I think the need to remember is largely because we're all more or less ego-centric. This isn't really a jab at humanity - just a point. You have to be to some extent or you wouldn't manage to put clothes on in the morning and make it to work on time. (Perhaps this is why nudist colonies are so creepily intertwined with each other?) We use memory as a way of shaping the way we view the world. Memory becomes the lens we view things through.
The tricky part to me is how easily we allow memory to become distorted. The way we remember things isn't always the way they occurred, as anyone who's tried to justify why he couldn't correctly recall details about the night he met his wife at their 20th wedding anniversary and then has to face the stare down of said spouse can attest.
All this is to say that I think there are correlations between personal memory and public memory. Most memorials (and I say this as someone who lives in a city that was literally built on the idea of memorializing everything) are representations of something that happened, not the thing itself. They're wishes; pretty pictures of the way we'd like to believe events happened. We make ordinary people or events into extraordinary stories because it helps to feed our need for national fairy tales or epics.
Our country is so young, we don't have ancient tales lost to history. Our Epic of Gilgamesh is the story of the pilgrims, or the founding of the country, or the shot heard round the world, all things that are depressingly mostly historically validated because people were actually keeping some form of records at the time. You'll note that there's no statue to King Arthur prominently displayed in London. England, as an example, has memorials but they tend to be less prolific than ours, limited to a statue or representation or two of a dead monarch more than anything else. They already has their larger than life "memories" that feed the need of the people.
I am not sure I agree with Clovis' comment that people think they are living in the best time ever, but I would agree that people tend to think that they live in the most important time (presumably because everything they care about happens to be occurring while they are alive). This can also manifest as feeling that you live in the worst, or at least most challenging, of times, and believing that the actions taken by your generation will determine the ultimate fate of the human species. Right or wrong, our generation feels this way now, facing the prospect of indefinite war in the Middle East and environmental catastrophe.
As such, I feel that memorialization is an effort to enshrine those events and people that mattered most to you in the shared consciousness of current and future generations. You insist that everyone must remember all of the important things that happened to you because, otherwise, you might not leave a legacy behind and the importance of your time will be lost. This may also be why grandparents generally cannot stop talking.
Do any of you think that there is an objective way to determine which events should actually be memorialized into human memory, history and ultimately, perhaps, legend?
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