Occasional heresies: In praise of amnesia

“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”

Karl Marx wrote these words to assert that the present is not a tabula rasa—blank slate—on which present generations can write anything they want. He elaborated:

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”

But what if history were a blank slate? What if that nightmare of the dead generations could be lifted? What would be the result?

Could such a thing be done? No, not completely. The world I encounter this morning was fully made, give or take the odd detail, when I went to bed last night. The national government Americans live under today was created two centuries ago.

But was it really? True, we still nod to the Constitution of 1787. But we've amended it a bunch—27 times, to be exact—and we’re constantly reinterpreting it. The way we elect our presidents bears but the slightest resemblance to the way George Washington was elected.

To the extent we still observe our hoary charter, we make deliberate decisions to do so. We could do what the generation that wrote the Constitution did: rip up the existing social contract and start over. We don't, but not because we can't.

The book of Leviticus prescribed the custom of the jubilee year. Every fiftieth year, the Israelites would reset their social clock. Slaves were freed and debts forgiven. Essentially a curtain of amnesia was drawn down upon the people of the Hebrew God in Canaan.

Thomas Jefferson imagined a version of this for the people of nature’s god in America. Jefferson thought laws should last only a generation. Each generation should make its own laws. Each generation might learn from the past but wasn't bound by the past.

Estate taxes are a step in the same direction. They diminish the ability of families to accumulate wealth over generations. Each generation has to earn at least some of its own keep, with higher tax rates demanding greater initiative on the part of heirs.

Estate taxes point toward a more comprehensive social amnesia. If young people of each generation began the race of life at the same starting line, rather than staggered according to family wealth and position, the race would seem fairer to many people, and the outcome would be more beneficial to society as a whole. Nepotism has its virtues, but efficiency is not among them.

Besides erasing social advantages, amnesia would also impose a statute of limitations on grievances. There are good reasons legal systems employ statutes of limitations, starting with the increasing unreliability of evidence with distance in time from the criminal act. But a deeper reason is that it's counterproductive for society as a whole to let grievances fester forever. Eventually the aggrieved need to be encouraged, or compelled, to get on with their lives.

Some amnesia occurs naturally. Young people absorb only a fraction of the memories of their elders. The cultural references of my youth are not the cultural references of my students. The touchstone events of my coming of age in politics are ancient history to them. 

Holocaust denial has been considered a serious historical and political problem, understandably. But these days it's less important than Holocaust forgetfulness. Opinion polls in America show that older people are more sympathetic to Israel than younger people. Older people grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust and have a clearer cultural memory of it. Younger people are less likely to think of Israelis as victims of Nazis than as victimizers of Palestinians. Israelis have reason to lament the forgetting, Palestinians to welcome it. Amnesia cuts both ways.

Perhaps it's odd for a historian and history teacher to be weighing the virtues of historical forgetfulness. Isn't the problem that people know too little history, rather than too much?

Yes, up to a point. But one undeniable advantage of an agreed upon policy of amnesia is that it would curb the history wars that have made battlegrounds of history classes during the last few decades. An amnesia rule would eliminate the incentive to transpose today's political fights into the past.

Of course, it would also eliminate the need for historians.

I guess the idea needs work.