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Remembering to Remember
Presented as the Phi Beta Kappa Oration
Martha Minow
June 8, 1999
Because this week will be filled with moments to remember, my topic for today is memory. Now, it is not clear precisely what you will remember of this day and this week. I think we can all admit, it won't be what I'll be saying in the next portion of an hour. I myself do remember the entirety of a commencement address given at Georgetown University many years ago, by columnist Art Buchwald, and I will recite it: He looked out at the crowd and said, "Graduates, we the older generation are leaving you a perfect world. Don't louse it up!" And then he sat down.
I don't expect you to remember that, or anything else I say. But something of this momentous time in the life of you graduates, and you family members, will become part of your memory books; it's just not clear exactly what. As writer Elizabeth Bowen put it,
The charm, one might say the genius, of memory is that it is choosy, chancy and temperamental; it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chewing a hunk of melon in the dust.
The image of a photograph for what we remember is especially apt now (how many of you brought a camera?). Scholars in the field of memory studies have articulated the notion of the "flashbulb memory." It describes the circumstances of learning about a surprising and consequential event such that people actually remember, vividly, where they were when they heard the news. The classic example from my generation is the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. We all to this day can say where we were when we heard. Gary Larson penned one of his Far Side cartoons depicting a group of forest animals sitting around and talking about where they were when they heard the traumatic news about Bambi's mother being shot; the snake commented, "I was under a rock, getting ready to shed."
Apparently a special-purpose biological mechanism helps to engrave those intense memories of surprising and upsetting news, but the mechanism is similar to what occurs with ordinary memory. Even without psychological "flashbulb memories," the physical photos you take this week will prompt your memories and frame and enhance them for you.
And so you will recall this time, this place. Indeed, most people's memories contain benchmarks using notable dates, such as when we graduate, have a child, start a job, take a big trip...and we situate other events, in our minds, on a time-line relative to those benchmarks. Except sometimes we get a bit confused. My sister was recounting her decades-old trip with her husband to the pyramids in Egypt when she suddenly interrupted herself to ask anxiously, "What did we do with the kids?" She quickly remembered her children had been born several years later--but they certainly had become so much a part of her life she couldn't quite remember what it was like without them.
Memory is the brain's attempt to make sense of our experience. "Memory is the scaffolding upon which all mental life is constructed," concluded two participants in Harvard's interfaculty initiative on Mind, Brain and Behavior. And Daniel Schacter, chair of the psychology department, reminds us: "Our memories belong to us, They are uniquely ours, not quite like those of anybody else."
Memories from late adolescence and early adulthood apparently are among the most vivid and important for people, though the elderly tell more complexly organized and richer stories about their pasts than do the young. Thus you will remember this time well, but you will speak more eloquently of it forty years hence! And of course, members of Phi Beta Kappa have the best memories; if only I could remember where I put that key!
There is something about moments of life transition that make us especially alert and attentive in ways that then organize what we remember. When asked to describe memories of their first year at college, Harvard and Wellesley College students recounted mainly specific episodes--the time the professor sang in class, that conversation that ended at 5 a.m.--and over 30% of the reported memories from the first year occurred in September. When asked about memories across all four years, the students devoted nearly 40% of their reported memories to freshman year. The new, the unfamiliar, that which is not already scripted, this we tend to remember.
Perhaps those are the times we replay in our minds, imagining how to do it again, the same, or differently. Late in life, actress Tallulah Bankhead said, "If I had my past life to live over again, I'd make all the same mistakes--only sooner."
Looking back on this time, you will have intense emotions, some positive, and perhaps some negative. What unique, personal memories will you make of this graduation week, what scaffolding for not just this page on the calendar, but for your entire time here? You may well remember some of what you learned in classwork, lab work, fieldwork, and paper work. What you crammed during reading period, though, will not endure. It's not just, as author Amy Tan writes, "I can never remember things I didn't understand in the first place." To be remembered, new learning must be attached meaningfully to some already present knowledge.1 For this and no doubt other reasons, you probably will remember friends, romances, and victories and defeats on playing fields and stages of many kinds.
I will take this time, however, to comment on some recent academic work. The topic, still, is memory. Breathtaking findings of neurobiology bring us closer each day to understanding the physical operations of memory--while simultaneously teaching us the crucial roles of narrative, culture, and history in memory's actual work. Thus, there are two big break-throughs in the study of memory, in recent memory. The first is the recognition by researchers in a wide range of fields that no single discipline has the key to memory's mysteries. The second, emerging as a consensus among scholars across disciplines is that memories are not retrieved, but constructed, not simply encoded for future use but produced by complex interactions between people and their worlds. The consequences of these insights for large human projects of collective memory and of justice will occupy my ending comments.
But first, the news. Contemporary memory studies reap new developments in biology, chemistry, and physics. Brain-imaging techniques and analyses of neurons illuminate how dendrites branch out to receive information across synapses and how certain key areas of the brain are highly involved in deliberate recollection even though other areas can also be involved.
As exciting as this work is, it alone cannot solve the mysteries of memory. Psychologists, among others, make crucial contributions. Psychologists demonstrate how people over time gain expertise not only in particular activities, like games and science, but also expertise in the self, as they develop autobiographical memories. Psychologists did the studies of flashbulb memories, of college students, and of older people I had occasion to cite a minute ago--remember? Researchers in the field have been especially pivotal to emerging understandings of defects or failures. They teach us that forgetting, or never coming to remember some 90% of our experiences is crucial, efficient, and normal, because of what would otherwise be overwhelming sensory overload to the human system. Even commonplace items fail to lodge themselves in people's memory. One study showed that fewer than half of those people studied were able to pick out the exact copy of a penny from fifteen possible designs.
Psychologists demonstrate how confident people can be when they are simply wrong in claiming to remember something, and how sincerely people can turn stories they have heard or statements they themselves have made into richly detailed narratives that they believe they truly experienced. The grandfather of modern psychology, Jean Piaget, wrote of what he had thought was one of his own first memories: a failed kidnapping attempt focused on him, which left his brave nurse a scratched but successful protector. Yet when he was 15, Piaget's former nurse wrote his parents to confess she had made up the entire story and inflicted the scratches on herself. Piaget concluded "I, therefore must have heard, as a child, the account of this story, which my parents believed, and projected into the past in the form of a visual memory."
Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus writes that the science fiction film, Total Recall, actually is closer to the truth that most people know. In the film, Arnold Schwarzeneger cannot afford his dream vacation to the planet Mars so he opts for the less expensive version--a contract with the company Rekall, Incorporated to have memories of traveling to Mars implanted in his brain. Putting aside the rest of the plot, Loftus writes that it is already possible under certain circumstances for people to be fed misleading information which then affects their recall of events without tipping them off to the tampering itself.
Psychologists offer insight and potential treatments for people suffering from amnesia, brain damage affecting short-term memory, and repetitive, intrusive flashbacks and numbing from past traumatic experiences. It turns out William James was nearly literally right when he wrote in 1890 that "An experience may be so exciting emotionally as almost to leave a scar on the cerebral tissue." Psychobiological mechanisms, including exposure to neurochemicals, are involved in traumatic remembrance and post-traumatic stress disorder. Stress-related hormones probably account for some of the extraordinary and persistent power of remembered rape and sexual abuse, wartime battles, and Holocaust concentration camp horrors.
Psychologists offer at least one kind of explanation for why a Holocaust survivor would report, "I have children...I have my family, but I can't take full satisfaction in the achievements of my children today because part of my present life is my remembrance, my memory of what happened then, and it casts a shadow over my life today." Psychotherapists emphasize how no known narrative structures exist to allow survivors of trauma to locate and organized their experiences as victims. Psychologists offer trauma survivors anti-anxiety drugs, relaxation training, linguistic encoding to enhance voluntary control over symptoms, and talk therapy, often in support groups.
Philosophers, too, make vital contributions to contemporary studies of memory. Philosophers, of course, have long focused on memory; Plato treated it as crucial to wisdom; Saint Augustine as central to the soul; for Locke, Descarte, and Bernard Williams, memory is the constant in personal identity over time. Clarification by philosophers of different dimensions of memory--such as the capacity to recall propositions and the capacity to act with a previously-learned skill--assist efforts to model human memory by computer scientists and cognitive theorists.
For many people these days, their computer's memory is as important as their own. Computer science gives us powerful metaphors as well as practical simulations and demonstrations of memory. As a leading physicist recently commented, "People grow older but computers seem to grow younger. New shiny powerful machines replace previous shiny models before they have a chance to grow dull."
Twenty years ago, the then-new field of cognitive science transcended disciplinary boundaries by drawing directly on computer science, physics, biology, philosophy, and psychology. Computer science gave us images of memory as computer files, stored and retrieved. But this image could not account for the subjective experiences of consciousness and memory. The newer view rejects the passivity implied by the metaphor of the stored and retrievable computer files.9 Individuals select, consciously and unconsciously, what to remember in ways that reflect their particular desires and hopes and the cultural patterns and teachings of their own society. Martin Conway writes: "Events that do not impinge upon the current themes, plans, and goals of the self, and that do not correspond to existing autobiographical knowledge structures, may simply not be encoded into long-term memory."
More basically, cognitive scientists now tell us that memories "are not encoded, stored, and retrieved as wholes but rather are created at retrieval using components like the narrative, imagery, emotion," and goals at the time of retrieval and encoding. Someone's fears and hopes affect her memories. Lorene Cary writes in her memoir of being one of a few poor African-Americans at a prep school: "My memory is a card shark, reshuffling the deck to hide what I fear to know, unable to keep from fingering the ace at the bottom of the deck when I'm doing nothing more than playing Fish in the daylight with children."
People change, and the meanings of their past experiences change as their ways of interpreting the world shift. The college rowing championship comes to mean something very different to the person 20 years later who has abandoned the sport, or who has instead become a journalist covering the sport. I'll leave for another day consideration of the precise ways in which individual and collective memories converge and diverge, but the same phenomenon of the present shaping memories of the past also affects collective, national remembering. The history of slavery simply is not told the same way by someone in 1864 and someone in 1964 even when the same years and events are the focus of attention. Starting with the assumption that slavery is bad--and the knowledge that everyone thinks so--shapes the sounds and tones of the history.
The constructed, interactive feature of memory was put bluntly last year by Steven Lynn and Kevin McConkey, who wrote that "a virtual consensus now exists among memory researchers that memory is a dynamic medium of experience shaped by expectancies, needs, and beliefs, imbued with emotion, and enriched by the inherently human capacity for narrative and creation." Narrative possibilities and constraints frame what is remembered and how. The structure of discourse, learned by each of us since childhood, affects recall. Cultural practices, social contexts, a family's conventions of dining room conversation each deeply influence what and how people remember. Stories reinforce a group's identity and compose the frameworks individuals use to make the past meaningful.
This interdisciplinary consensus demands that anyone interested in memory learn about narrative theory, autobiography, cultural studies, and historical methods. Suddenly, computer scientists and biologists, physicists and chemists are coming to see the overarching work done by storytelling and the compelling need to identify notions of truth and integrity that are compatible with acknowledgment of cultural contexts and multiple perspectives. For the search now must move on to ask how there can remain a fundamental integrity to recollection. Does their constructed quality make them fabricated? Attending to the real references behind memories will provide some of the answer, but here the work of the humanities on the relationships among fiction, narration, and fact become indispensable.
Literature, art, and media studies offer ways to understand what remains true in memories. Scholars have criticized Shakespeare "for doctoring the record in his history plays--especially in the notorious case of Richard III." Scholars of cultural studies examine how made-for-t.v. docudramas and films by people such as Oliver Stone disturb the borders between history and fiction, while shaping what many viewers believe to be true--about the Vietnam War, the assassination of JFK, the philosophy of Malcolm X, or a president with a serious zipper problem. The turn to narrative by many scholars in the human sciences reflects acknowledgment of the ways that each person is shaped by history and culture, and the search for truth must include this recognition within the frame of study itself.
Students of narrative teach us how compelling human stories foreground individuals rather than forces and social structures--even if this misrepresents what really happened. Sociologist Michael Schudson points out that the Watergate scandal for many is a story beginning with a burglary and ending with Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford triumphantly publishing front-page news. This picture that leaves out many more extensive legal violations committed by President Nixon, his aids, and supporters, and omits entirely the nearly two years of legislative hearings and action unearthing what happened, indelibly changing American government.
The idea of distorted memory requires a baseline comparison with something that is true. Admitting the influence of present motives on recollection guides the search for truth in the fields of history and law. The historians' craft acknowledges but seeks to confine the influence of the present on the study of the past. Historians similarly struggle with the magnetic pull of narrative in their own work, and what that pull does to the note-cards that do not fit the narrative line. Hayden White teaches historians, and others, of meta-narratives: the familiar, cultural stories that underlie the histories that a society finds possible to read and to tell. Scholars topple victors' history to tell the story of those who lost struggles for power. Currently, many historians are themselves studying collective memory. There are newly written histories of rumor and community mythologies. We learn how Louis XIV's censor declared that changes in the political situation may "make it necessary to suppress or correct" information about the past. Rather than flashbulb memories, we get airbrushed ones, like the photograph so altered in Kundera's masterful novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting that only the hat of one individual remained. This image comes to mind with 1994's commemorations of World War II, joining Americans and Brits fifty years later but excluding Russians who didn't fit the narrative the Western Allies wanted to tell.
Conflicts over what kinds of memorials to build--exemplified by the fight over the Vietnam memorial--become themselves occasions for historical reflection about whose histories to remember. Maya Lin's vision placed a gash in the land, a wall polished and engraved with the names of those Americans who died in the war. It offended many who sought greater majesty and appreciation for those who served. Veterans groups organized to fund and commission a more representational sculpture of men in combat. Another group stood for women veterans organized to fund and commission a similarly representational sculpture. Some critics continue to object to the omission of any tribute to the Vietnamese people themselves. Meanwhile, the crowds visiting the wall find that it permits stunning occasions for personal and collective grief. Many comment on the power of seeing themselves reflected against the names in the polished marble. Some visitors produce paper rubbings of the names. Others leave distinctive personal objects as tributes to those named. The Memorial has become one of the most visited places in the country, and figures prominently in films and television. The struggle over the Memorial provided avenues for provocation, catharsis, remembrance, and many occasions for people to tell neglected stories about the war.
Historians remind us that it is possible to account for multiple versions of the past without abandoning its facticity, the weight of what happened. And the discipline of history exemplifies, indeed depends upon, the incessant need for each new present to revisit, reinterpret, and re-envision the past.
Historians teach us that for each full individual who acts and affects the world, there is also a contingent social world, mediating the individual's beliefs, hopes, ways of seeing, and ways of remembering. Ralph Waldo Emerson was one-of-a-kind, but something in his world made it possible for him and his friends to talk and write of transcendentalism, and indeed, to experience their own sensations of uniqueness and transcendence. For every biography, there are objectively discernable institutions, cultural practices, traditions, and artifacts that influence the person's sense of self and understanding of the past.
Law may seem an outlier in this survey of disciplines contributing to the study of memory. But memory is central to law, and legal scholarship and learning offers avenues into it. Doubts about the reliability of memory shape the Anglo-American trial, the rules of evidence, and the practice of cross-examination 17 But remembering the past--the past decisions of courts, past reasoning of judges--is central to legal methods. Negotiating a duty of fidelity to the past with the inevitable guide of the present, law at the most general level has much to teach about what can remain true about a remembered past. The incessant debate about the role of original intent by the Constitution's framers in Constitutional interpretation long ago anticipated the modern consensus about memory: the past is not there to be retrieved but instead reconstructed and reassembled.18 Nonetheless, some things can be traced back to the Constitution, and some things cannot.
Very specific contemporary legal debates center on doubts about eyewitness testimony and about recovered memories, proffered by adults claiming long-ago experiences of child abuse. Legal institutions distinguish the purposes for which memories are offered in part by the degree of certainty required and in part by the allocation of proof burdens. Scholars of memory could learn from these devices; notably, the burden of proof represents a public choice about who should win and who should lose in the face of continuing uncertainty.
It was under such rules that the Israeli Supreme Court overturned the conviction of John Demjanjuk, convicted of being Ivan the Terrible, remembered by survivors of the Treblinka concentration camp as a cruel and merciless Nazi war criminal. With no doubt that such an Ivan did exist, the Court nonetheless found too much doubt about whether the particular defendant was that Ivan.19 The memories of the survivors could be acknowledged and honored without throwing the weight of the state against one man. Indeed, one week ago, the U.S. Department of Justice filed new charges against Demjanjuk, and alleged that he was a guard at three concentration camps and lied about this on his citizenship application. Some observers now say whatever his role, the past is too distant, the man too old for prosecution to make sense. The case thus prompts a useful public debate about how the nation and world should respond to the past.
Laws can set rules about the kind of questions asked in the courtroom--and the kind of experts allowed to speak there--to guard against pseudo-memories of child abuse while respecting that most people who have actually experienced repeated incidents of violent and traumatic abuse retain at least some memories of that abuse.
As a public instrument dealing daily with private lives, law also affords lessons about what produces collective memories for a community or a nation. Social and political decisions determine what gives rise to a claim; these decisions not only express views about fairness to individuals, but also communicate the narratives and values across broad audiences. Whose memories deserve the public stage of an open trial? Is the adversarial trial the only mechanism for giving public voice to private pain?
Memories we share across this country are constructed as often by televised trials as by libraries, museums, monuments, and history books. Should this notion of construction inspire more deliberate, conscious efforts to invent a past for ourselves as individuals and as members of a society, nation, and world?
Here I turn to the consequences of new thinking about memory for the large human projects of collective memory and justice. If, as the emerging consensus tells us, recollections are always constructed by combining bits of information selected and arranged in light of prior narratives and current expectations, needs, beliefs,21 then the histories we tell and the institutions we make create the narratives and enact the expectations, needs, and beliefs of a time.
Two paradoxes emerge. Our memories are constructed but no one person can choose how; and our memories are not simply retrieved and yet neither are they free floating, entirely manipulable to present interests.
Two truths, though, must remain bedrock. First, some versions of the past are wrong. Those who deny the Holocaust are wrong, even if not every survivor's eyewitness testimony, 50 years later, accurately identifies a Nazi commandante. We can and we do create arenas for articulating, contesting, and improving public memories. Disputes over what kind of museums of American history should be built on the mall in Washington, D.C., and what form a Vietnam War memorial should take reveal the richness of memory, not its fragility. A liberal pluralist society must make it possible to fight over memory not to fabricate it, but to enlarge which truths should be remembered.
The second bedrock truth is that failure to remember can impose unacceptable costs. Failure to remember triumphs and accomplishments is a loss. Failure to remember injustice and cruelty is an ethical violation. It implies no responsibility and no commitment to prevent inhumanity in the future. And even worse, failures of collective memory stoke fires of resentment and revenge. Michael Ignatieff offered this explanation of the conflicts surrounding the former Yugoslavia:
[T]he past continues to torment because it is not the past. These places are not living in a serial order of time but in a simultaneous one, in which the past and present are a continuous, agglutinated mass of fantasies, distortions, myths, and lies. Reporters in the Balkan wars often observed that when they were told atrocity stories they were occasionally uncertain whether these stories had occurred yesterday or in 1941, 1841, or 1441.
He concludes that this "is the dreamtime of vengeance. Crimes can never safely be fixed in the historical past; they remain locked in the eternal present, crying out for vengeance."
This reminds me of William Gladstone's comment, "The problem in Ireland is that the Irish will never forget and the British will never remember."
My own work in recent years has focused on the possible legal responses to mass violence, such as the Holocaust, South Africa's Apartheid, the genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda, the mass killings and forced movements of people going under the bizarrely antiseptic name of "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia and Kosovo. I am convinced that the twentieth century will not be remembered for these mass atrocities, but may be remembered for the creation of international human rights tribunals, truth commissions, and reparations legislation. South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in particular, illuminates how healing it can be for individuals and for a nation to create public memory of atrocity. One individual who was blinded by an apartheid-era police officer spoke before the commission and then was asked how he felt. He replied: "I feel what has been making me sick all the time is the fact that I couldn't tell my story. But now I--it feels like I got my sight back by coming here and telling you the story."24 Last week's election in South Africa shows the steady growth of an inclusive democracy in that nation of continuing challenges.
Lawrence Langer is right; "the logic of law will never make sense of the illogic of genocide."25 But legal institutions can offer armatures for memory, and frames for the kinds of acknowledgment that prevent both forgetting and vengeance. No human institutions are perfect. Political wrangling, selective prosecution, the limits of admissible evidence, and the danger of victors' justice mar international criminal trials. Truth commissions may be too tepid, too ineffectual, even as they gather stories of too-often silenced victims. Reparations risk trivializing atrocities and focussing on money when money can never redeem the past, even if they help nations, banks, and other powerhouses perform the moral and political task of coming to terms with their responsibilities to the past and present.
My closing thought is simply this: we each may not have control over what we come to remember, but we each can play a role in shaping what we all work to recall. I remember a story about a cynical young man (who clearly had not fulfilled his moral reasoning core requirement). He came into a town determined to discredit the town's sage, a man renowned as the wisest person in the world. This young fellow decided to summon the inhabitants, and hold a bird in his hand and say, "Wise man, is the bird dead or is the bird alive?" If the sage responded the bird was dead, he would open his hand and let the bird fly away. If the sage replied that the bird was alive, he would choke it to death. With all the people of the town assembled, and the bird in hand, the young man cried out, "Wise man, is the bird dead or is he alive?" The wise man wisely responded, "The fate of that bird is in your hands."
The fate of our fate IS in your hands. It's not that "we've given you a perfect world, don't louse it up." We've given you a flawed, only partly remembered world; memory is in your hands.