The Metaphysics of Public Memory: A Reply to Dominique Venner

Venner lauds the (collective) memory of the Jews, the Japanese, and the Chinese, apparently referring to the current public utilization of their long national traditions. The important word here, I argue, is public, for we should not forget the ideological nature of memory.

An individual’s isolated memory is quite fragile, and unless its contents are repeatedly introduced into public discourse (thereby turning individual memory into “collective” or “public memory”), it has very limited power. At the individual level, a person’s memory is shallow, myopic, and, above all, vulnerable. But a constructed collective memory can be a very powerful and enduring sociopolitical tool.

No one among the Chinese, for example, actually remembers the Taiping Rebellion, yet because of Maoist appropriation of that conflict, today every young person in China learns from it the righteousness of revolution. The same holds for the Japanese: the failed invasions of Kublai Khan in the thirteenth century remain a centerpiece of the Japanese national myth. And the Jews, of course, maintain their unique coherence as a group by celebrating as holidays their historical conflicts with the non-Jewish world.

In all of these cases, memory is ideological, in that it reinforces the dominant sociopolitical system’s grip on the public.

Likewise, forgetting is also a vital ideological function. The fact that Moses, arguably the central figure in Hebraic lore, married a Midianite, a non-Jewish outsider, does little to further the racial character of modern Zionism; therefore, it has been “forgotten” at the collective level. Though anyone can read the book of Exodus and stumble upon that fact, and though it appears in the most sacred and popular of all Jewish texts, because it is a politically dangerous fact it will remain irretrievably absent from Jewish public memory—and that’s the memory that counts. Similarly, certain politically dangerous facts—facts of which we’re all aware—have been erased from the European and American public memories.

Yet the foremost problem is not, as Venner suggests, that Europeans have been “deprived of their memory”; it is that we have been supplied with an alternative, destructive memory.

“The prime danger,” writes Paul Ricoeur, “lies in the handling of authorized, imposed, celebrated, commemorated history—an official history. The resource of narrative then becomes the trap, when higher powers take over this emplotment and impose a canonical narrative by means of intimidation or seduction, fear or flattery.” He goes on to assert, rather insightfully, that “this dispossession is not without a secret complicity,” which is characterized “by an obscure will not to inform oneself, not to investigate the hard done by the citizen’s environment, in short by a wanting not-to-know. Western Europe and indeed all of Europe, after the dismal years of the middle of the twentieth century, has furnished the painful spectacle of this stubborn will.”[1]

One might say that, not only have we Europeans been dealt a destructive, ideological collective memory, we as a people suffer from a willing amnesia. We’ve willingly forgotten the traditions that made our people one over the millennia; we are passively complicit in the disappearance of what once forged our strength as a people. At the collective level, we simply don’t want to know the historically rooted values that made us unique, because the hegemonic Euro-American historical narrative that constitutes our public memory is now a tale of our race’s cruelty, hypocrisy, and ignorance. We have been told that ours is a terrible tale not worth learning.

In a healthy society it is the role of responsible public leaders to function as the arbiters and enforcers of a positive, progressive collective memory. Yet unlike the ruling classes of the Chinese, the Japanese, and the Jews, our elites have developed a public memory that favors our own dispossession and propagates the myth of our inherent racial guilt. We can find, I argue, the source of many of our people’s problems in this vicious public memory. Yet, as Venner notes, if we work to change the content of this destructive collective image of ourselves and our relationship with the world, it may also prove to be the source of our liberation.