Will we ever learn? The problem of collective amnesia

“We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing.”

— Gore Vidal

"When men cannot observe, they don't have ideas; they have obsessions. When people live instinctive lives, something like a collective amnesia steadily blurs the past" — V.S. Naipaul.

   What do you do when memories fade, or were never accurate in the first place? What happens when memories are painful and/or contradict long-held beliefs? It's one thing for that to happen to a single person, but what causes an entire society to forget important facts and lessons? This is where the phenomenon of collective amnesia comes in. 

The human brain is an amazing evolutionary marvel. It allows us to store memories and retrieve them at useful times to create learning. Very few species have this ability- relying mainly on instinct. But humans not only have learned so much about their world, they've managed to create historical documents so that others can use them to move things even further. This is the march of knowledge, but it has its limits.

Memory, even in computers is finite. In order to store some things, others have to be deleted. The brain has the unenviable task of figuring out what to save and what to pitch, day after day after day. Often this works fine, and the most precious bits of history and knowledge are preserved and passed on to future generations. But more and more, in the age of compartmentalized knowledge and algorithms, we are losing important parts of our identity to collective amnesia, or social forgetting.

For many decades, the US Civil War and Jewish Holocaust were undeniable tragedies that told a very dark stories. They were etched into historical records and presented as important lessons for the future. It took a long time, but as those memories faded and the last living participants passed away, more and more I am seeing defenders of both horrific events, especially the Holocaust. Anti-Semitic violence is on the rise, and Holocaust deniers are going viral on social media. One recent study of Gen Z and Millennials found that over half couldn't say how many died in the Holocaust (6 million), and nearly half couldn't name one death camp, but could report that they'd seen denial information in their feeds.

As economies become more precarious, it's common for societies to look for a scapegoat to blame everything on. Right now it's immigrants who are facing the brunt of discrimination and violence. Excusing the excesses of the Holocaust may be a preamble to making folks feel better about persecuting others. We shall see.

The 20th century was filled with many consequential events, but many of them are being forgotten or glossed over.

• The space program that got us to the moon has stalled for lack of interest.

• The wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan should have been lessons that tempered American military ambitions, but very little seems to have been learned from those conflicts.

• The hard-won fights for feminism, the right to vote, and for women's control their own bodies now seems to be in reverse, with men rebelling against things that they believe have gone too far.

• The landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 is slowly dying thanks to Supreme Court rulings removing protections against racial discrimination.

• Apparently very little was learned from the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 except that politicians could use it to settle scores in Asian countries while cozying up to Saudi Arabia, where most of the hijackers came from.

• The Covid epidemic of 2020 that killed over 1 million Americans is already fading from memory as science and the Center For Disease Control are under attack and losing grant money.

Some of this may be backlash from reforms that America wasn't ready for, and some of it may just be due to the nation's steady drift to the right for the last 45 years. It doesn't seem likely that things will find a new equilibrium any time soon. Much of that is because of historical amnesia and recency bias.

Recency bias is the cognitive distortion that prioritizes information that is more recent in making decisions, even if it's inferior to historical information. And in an age of information overload, it's much easier to toss aside lessons from the past because they seem less urgent.

Our brains can only handle so much and it makes sense to forget some things that won't matter. But how can you know what will matter in an uncertain future? You can't.

We have to rely more on historians and historical records. People may think they know better than people did in the past, but we are just as susceptible to mistakes and biases as they were. We must learn from our mistakes.

In the 1980's, President Reagan promised that tax cuts would grow the economy and help everyone. The data from that tax cut show minimal effect on GDP and a widening of the wealth gap. Given the failure of this policy, you'd think people would have learned something. But instead, it was repeated in 2001 and 2003 under President Bush, and again in 2017 and 2025 under President Trump, all with the same results. Nothing was learned except that rich people love tax cuts.

In the 1970's, scientists warned about the Greenhouse Effect, where increasing carbon from fossil fuels in the atmosphere would gradually lead to a warming climate. Fifty years later we appear to have learned very little, even though some maintain heroic attempts to establish alternative energy sources. Our climate is already changed, but amnesia has led to many not being aware that summers weren't always that hot and storms weren't always that destructive. How long can moving the goalposts of weather extremes last before someone realizes how bad things are? Even in the famous story of the boiling frogs, in real life the frogs jump out of the pot when things get too hot for them.

In my own life, I've hopefully learned from most of the lessons that life has thrown my way. I realize that human memory is unreliable, but the brain is pretty good at latching onto the things that make the most difference. I wish cities, states, nations, and global entities could incorporate historical mistakes more often so that we could stop repeating them.

Albert Einstein is often quoted as having said "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results". (Though evidence is inconclusive that he ever said it.) We've known what racism, genocide, war, tax cuts, and fossil fuels have produced in the past- why we still cling to them is a mystery to me. We are born knowing nothing, and our purpose in life is to learn and grow. Conveniently forgetting the lessons we didn't like only postpones them for a while, and they can come back twice as powerful.

Might as well get busy and learn them now.