The great knack for unremembering

Neo has a wonderful post, The Great Fires and the forgetting.

One of the earliest posts I ever wrote on this blog (in January 2005) was called “The tsunami and the forgetting“. It was about the phenomenon of people forgetting—and certainly forgetting the details of—huge and terrible disasters, even recent ones.

Here’s an excerpt:

We hardly hear about the tsunami anymore, although for a while it dominated the news. The tsunami was videotaped in a staggering variety of manifestations: from the tall towering waves of Japanese art, to rolling swells that almost resembled a normal tide coming in–except for the fact that this particular tide just kept coming and coming and coming. We viewed forlorn beaches where villages had once stood, and saw keening mourners whose anguish was almost unbearable to watch even on the small screen.

Over and over, newspeople, relief workers, politicians, and officials declared this to be an unprecedented catastrophe. But in the annals of history there have been far greater catastrophes (at least in terms of number of deaths), and many of them have been almost utterly forgotten–although some of these have actually occurred relatively recently…

Only those of a certain age might remember the massive 1970 floods in Bangladesh which killed 300,000 people…An earthquake in the city of Tianjin in China in 1976, in the bad old days when almost no news emerged from that country, was reported to have killed at least 255,000, and more likely 655,000. How many of us have even heard of the city, much less the earthquake? Those with longer memories than I might even recall the flooding of the Yangtze in 1931 that caused at least three million deaths–and this was in a time when the world’s population was far smaller than it is today.

Stranger still is the lack of common knowledge about the 1918-9 influenza epidemic that disrupted most of the world (with the exception of Africa and South America) at the same time WWI was ravaging Western Europe. It was an event medieval or even Biblical in its apocalyptic scope. How many people died worldwide? Estimates vary, but the most conservative state that the death toll was 25 million. Other estimates go much higher, up to 70 million or even 100 million. And, as this transcript [dead link] from a fascinating PBS documentary on the pandemic relates, “As soon as the dying stopped, the forgetting began.”

I thought of that post again in the wake of the Camp Fire that tragically and horrifyingly has taken so many lives, although the number is of course dwarfed by those previous tolls.

And then I was surprised to read a headline saying that the Camp Fire was the worst since 1918, when the Cloquet Fire in Minnesota caused 453 known deaths (there may have been many more), destroyed 38 communities, and displaced or injured over fifty thousand people.

And until yesterday I’d never even heard of the Cloquet Fire. Had you? Maybe if you live in Minnesota you have, but has anyone else?

I discovered that there were some similarities between the Cloquet Fire and the Camp Fire. Although we don’t usually think of Minnesota as a dry state (at least, I certainly don’t), it had been experiencing a drought and high winds, and it happened in the fall.

And then, reading about that fire led me to links about another destructive and out-of-control forest fire in Minnesota (with the same conditions of drought and high winds), the Hinckley fire of 1894. I’d never before heard a thing about that one, either. But I came across an article from a 1977 issue of American Heritage that was one of the most riveting, intense, bloodcurdling tales of horror and heroism I’ve ever read.

Please read the whole thing. Our ancestors were tough, tough people.

She's right. It almost feels like the more capacity we have for storing knowledge, the less inclined we are to remember it, echoing Plato's tale of Thamus and Theuth. Theuth brings his new invention of writing to King Thamus of Egypt and is bragging how great an assist it will be to memory. Thamus counters:

So it is in this; you, who are the father of writing, have out of fondness for your off-spring attributed to it quite the opposite of its real function. Those who acquire it will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on writing to bring things to their remembrance by external signs instead of by their own internal resources. What you have discovered is a receipt for recollection, not for memory. And as for wisdom, your pupils will have the reputation for it without the reality: they will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant. And because they are filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom they will be a burden to society.

I think Ben Rhodes was unconsciously channeling Plato when he described journalists. To paraphrase only slightly “And as for wisdom and knowledge, 27-year-old journalists will have the reputation for it without the reality: they will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.”

The Galveston Hurricane, the Johnstown Flood, ship sinkings innumerable, the Schoolhouse Blizzard, the Halifax Harbor Explosion, even the Great Molasses Flood, the 1938 New England Hurricane, the Monongah Mining disaster, the Sultana sinking, etc.

All well documented, and indeed, most with multiple books about them, and yet all generally gone from public memory despite the hundreds of deaths and the thousands and tens of thousands of lives affected.

I first really focused on this capacity for unremembering in the early 1990s. In university in the early eighties, I had a particular interest in African history. When the Burundian massacres occurred in 1994, it was startling to me how little reference was made to the fact that this was just the latest in a cycle of slaughters from the time of independence, and then again in the seventies.

I have been experiencing this pervasive, almost willful unremembering even more recently. The tragedy of the 1980s day-care hysteria ought to be still relatively fresh. Again, articles and books galore, but so little held in the public consciousness. One of the great rallying cries of that hysterical period was "Believe the children." While sentimentally appealing, it was rubbish then and it is rubbish now. There is no truth which is inherent simply because of the age or gender or race or religion of the speaker. "But children wouldn't lie" was the currency of the day. And innocent people were convicted and sent to jail and lives destroyed over accusations about things which had never happened, and for many of the claims, could not have happened. That was not much more than twenty years ago.

In the past year, first with the MeToo movement and then with the Kavanaugh hearing, we had the return of this brain-dead rallying cry. "Believe the women." We saw how that turned out with the day-care hysteria in the eighties. We know how this story ends.

We saw how that turned out with the Duke Lacrosse team false accusations, then the UVA rape hoax, and even with the ongoing suits, settlements and overturned charges arising from the evisceration of due process rights on university campuses through the federal Dear Colleague letter of 2011. The Dear Colleague letter was an illegal enshrinement of "Believe the women" with dozens of subsequent miscarriages of justice, lives derailed, and millions of dollars in settlements.

We know this; and yet we choose to forget.

Likewise with the current bickering over the California fires with journalists trying to make the case that it is all an unexpected consequence arising from AGW. California has always been a drought prone region. Its very recent history of the past 150 years has coincidentally been one of the moister interludes and it is now beginning to dry out again. We know this.

We also know that there has been in environmental circles a sustained and national advocacy for reformed forestry management practices to reduce fuel loads for some forty years at least. We know that California itself has been slowly working on revising its forestry management practices for the past decade with the recent release of recommended new practices. We know that zoning and land use laws have been a major concern for several decades in terms of allowing building construction in zones prone to earthquakes, mudslides, and fire.

We know all this and yet, from the reporting, we seem prone to forget. We foist this onto a political platform and ignore history and real knowledge.

Iowa Hawk summarizes it as:

Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving.

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) May 9, 2013

True to a point. But it seems to me like there is something else more fundamental going on here. Perhaps it is simply human nature to suppress bad news or memories of tragedies. Perhaps it is some form of psychological coping.

I don't know. But I do know that it is striking how prevalent the great knack for unremembering is.