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In this issue's John Harvard's Journal:
This Was the Year - Images of Commencement - Honoris Causa - A Taste of the Talk - Martha Minow: The Uses of Memory - Neil L. Rudenstine: Challenges to Come - Alan Greenspan: The Value of Values - Commencement Confetti - Living Wages - Radcliffe's Rebirth - Merger of the Century - Community Policing - Hemorrhage at the Teaching Hospitals - Human Rights, Front and Center - Undergraduate Advising Examined - Big Doings at Widener Library - University People - Brevia - The Undergraduate: Saying Good-bye - ROTC Resurfaces - Friendships Forged in Strenuous Rivalry - Springing into Sports

Click here for the full text of this address.
Minow

The Uses of Memory

Martha Minow, Ed.M.'76, professor of law and a professor for the Core course "Children in Their Social Worlds," delivered the Phi Beta Kappa Oration in Sanders Theatre on June 8. Her address, "Remembering to Remember," began with a memorable commencement address by humorist Art Buchwald: "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." She then reviewed the roles of brain imaging, psychology, philosophy, computer science, and other fields in explaining how memory is constructed, narrated, and shaped by culture, complicating the search for "a fundamental integrity to recollection." Minow concluded by turning to the insights of history and law; excerpts from this section of her analysis follow.

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.... Scholars topple victors' history to tell the story of those who lost struggles for power.... 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....

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.... Meanwhile, the crowds visiting the wall find that it permits stunning occasions for personal and collective grief.... 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....

Law may seem an outlier in this survey of disciplines contributing to the study of memory. But memory is central to law...and 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....

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. The memories of the survivors could be acknowledged and honored without throwing the weight of the state against one man.... Despite renewed U.S. charges against Demjanjuk last week, some observers now say that 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....

Here I turn to the consequences of new thinking about memory for the large human projects of collective memory and justice....

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 Kommandant....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....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.... 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."

My own work in recent years has focused on the possible legal responses to mass violence....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."...

Lawrence Langer is right: "the logic of law will never make sense of the illogic of genocide." But legal institutions can offer armatures for memory, and frames for the kinds of acknowledgment that prevent both forgetting and vengeance....

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.... 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.


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