The Will to Forget

Rethinking Our "Long Peace"

When Tony Judt wrote presciently that we had entered at the beginning of this century “an age of forgetting,” he was lamenting “the difficulty we seem to experience in making sense of the turbulent century that has just ended and in learning from it.” Taking in the baffling overconfidence of the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of this one, Judt correctly observed that we were “swaddled in self-serving half-truths,” among them the jejune notion that we had reached the “end of history.” But for all of this callow hope, he also saw a revival of “political programs based on fear: fear of foreigners; fear of change; fear of open frontiers and open communications; fear of the free exchange of unwelcome opinions.” The forgetting about which Professor Judt worried seems now to be complete. The horrors of that turbulent and blood-soaked century are remembered, if they’re remembered at all, as we might remember episodes of a period drama. Yes, we may know the major events, even their dates, but they have no lessons for us, no application to the present, belonging to a more primitive time and to the strange people who inhabited it. Happily, whatever lessons there were have been absorbed and applied, leaving us to enjoy all of our gadgets and streaming services in peace. 

Human beings have never valued the lives of others less than we did during the previous century, undertaking a nightmare project of industrial-scale murder that liquidated hundreds of millions of people. “The hundred years after 1900,” writes Niall Ferguson in The War of the World, “were without question the bloodiest century in modern history, far more violent in relative as well as absolute terms than any previous era.” It is incredibly difficult today, even so soon after, to understand the enormity of the twentieth century’s horrors, the depth of the depravity. So much is lost when such events pass into their afterlives as pages in history books, and with every day that passes, there are fewer alive who bore witness. For those of us who did not, how do we go about imagining the real emotional impact of, for example, the mass murders of Mao, Stalin, or Hitler? Is it even possible? Human beings seem to lack the hardware to intellectually understand the scale of such tragedies, much less to feel their impact. Within the context of the twentieth century, the word horror is given its most literal use: the soulless disregard for human life that characterized the century seems to provoke an existential dread. How could we do this to each other? More fundamentally, what does it mean that we are capable of doing this to each other? Attentive students of human behavior have by now figured out that Homo sapiens is a uniquely, spectacularly destructive and dangerous species, driving the extinctions of many species of megafauna and likely of all other species of human.¹

In the twentieth century, we united those deadly characteristics with our aptitude for technological tools. Political scientist Rudolph J. Rummel has introduced the concept of democide to describe this phenomenon of death by government: “Democide’s necessary and sufficient meaning is that of the intentional government killing of an unarmed person or people.” Even excluding war-related twentieth-century deaths, the numbers cannot be processed by the human brain: even the most conservative estimates put the number of those murdered by their own governments in the hundreds of millions. We simply lack the language to speak meaningfully about such enormous losses of life, for in all of human history until now, we never needed this language. Murder on such a scale was impossible and unimaginable. Even if we assume Ferguson is wrong in his claim that not only absolute but also relative violence increased in the twentieth century, there are good reasons to regard the twentieth century as uniquely horrible and deadly. While it is true, of course, that there are many times more human beings alive in the twentieth century than there had been just a few generations before, it nonetheless seems wrong to conclude from this fact that the mass slaughter of hundreds of millions doesn’t represent a genuine increase in violence, as it is popular to argue. An increase in absolute violence alone should concern us just because each individual is fundamentally unique and irreplaceable. For the millions of additional people killed during the twentieth century, the increase in violence was a real, tangible fact—not offset by the fact that the global population during the twentieth century was greater than it had ever been up to that point. Naturally, the available data themselves give conflicting testimonies, depending on how one slices and dices them. As the philosopher John Gray writes, in strong disagreement with the Long Peace thesis, “The radically contingent nature of the figures is another reason for not taking them too seriously.” It is much more difficult than it may seem to make accurate inferences from the available data, which is far from complete even if we could agree on the kinds of conflicts and deaths to count, the appropriate period lengths to analyze (how we group years into categories gives us the ability to tell several different stories using the same data), etc. Further, Long Peace trumpeters like Pinker are too confident in their claims about the violence of prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies, who were probably not as violent or warlike as he has claimed, and who, in any case, were not capable of the rates of violent death churned out by the twentieth century; the capacity of governments to murder—quickly, efficiently, on a massive scale—increased dramatically with the advent of industrial modernity, culminating in the horrors of the twentieth century’s war and democide. For almost the entire history of our species, there was a natural upper limit on the number of people one could kill, a limit imposed by the nature of reality. Primitive weapons did not allow for the killing of much more than one individual at a time. It is also important to observe at this juncture that, as more and more evidence has emerged, the horrors of the twentieth century coming into sharper view, estimates of the numbers of the slaughtered have increased. This debate is so important because when we look at the last century, human beings are looking at a warning, a sign telling us, turn around now. 

It should not surprise the students of human behavior that so destructive a century was preceded by and coincided with an age of life-altering scientific breakthroughs. Far from being anomalous breaks with the modernist project of scientific government for the good of all, Fascism, National Socialism, and the several communist regimes of the century were instantiations of this project. It is maintained that the project itself remains worthwhile, that last century’s mass-murder regimes were something else, something different—and so nowise an indictment of political modernism itself. Oxford historian Paul Betts, who studies the cultural history of modern Europe, notes the post-war period’s “distinctly transatlantic campaign to neutralize the toxic cultural legacy of Nazism,” which frequently “meant recasting fascist culture as a ‘regressive interlude’ in an otherwise redemptive tale of modernism triumphant.” Betts suggests that this narrative obscures “the shadowlands of modernism,” that it mistakenly treats Nazism, fascism and their like as exceptions requiring explanations from outside of modernism. Betts and others argue that Nazism and fascism are much more accurately understood as representing modernism rather than departing from it. In his book, Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott similarly presents the view that Nazism should be recognized as an example of “authoritarian high modernism,” specifically of “a high-modernist utopianism of the right.” This reassessment of the past several decades is important because it confronts us with the uncomfortable fact that we have not repudiated the paradigm of ideas from which Nazism emerges—at least not fully. Scott places Lenin and Trotsky, for example, in the pantheon of high-modernists, those who aspired “to the administrative ordering of nature and society.” The massive democides of the twentieth century were part and parcel of this process of administrative ordering and social rationalization.

Our contemporary minds want desperately to derive from the historical facts a model that can neatly separate the evils of Nazism, fascism, and communism from twentieth century progressivism. But attempts to build such models are confused and anachronistic, for as Scott shows, it only stands to reason “that much of the massive, state-enforced social engineering of the twentieth century has been the work of progressive, often revolutionary elites.” Scott goes on:

The answer, I believe, lies in the fact that it is typically progressives who have come to power with a comprehensive critique of existing society and a popular mandate (at least initially) to transform it. These progressives have wanted to use that power to bring about enormous changes in people’s habits, work, living patterns, moral conduct, and worldview. They have deployed what Vaclav Havel has called “the armory of holistic social engineering.”

It is not so easy, it turns out, to confine violent social control to only those areas that accord with contemporary sensibilities. In history, authoritarian ideas travel together: with an interest in welfare went modern warfare; with an interest in public health went eugenics (and thus the horrible racism and antisemitism of the Nazis). “Eugenic thought represented the culmination of this urge towards discipline of the individual for the sake of communal or racial well-being.” The childlike naivety with which we treat the Nazis today tells the story: they were evil monsters, obsessed with backward, unscientific ideas. But while their ideas were certainly backward and unscientific, they didn’t see it that way, just as the Progressive Era progenitors of eugenics in the United States regarded themselves as the champions of science, technology, and progress.

Although how and why we forget remain little understood, new research suggests that “that the brain is wired to forget.” In order to generalize from specifics, to make the important connections that will help us survive, “our brains engage in controlled forgetting.” People who don’t forget as much—for example, people with highly superior autobiographical memories (HSAM)—“can’t extract themselves from specific instances.” They’re constantly “overfitting,” unable to filter out the unimportant “noise” in the information they’re receiving and processing. This inability to forget, to filter out the billions of minute details that accumulate over a lifetime, means that people with HSAM are often anxious and find it difficult to be productive and at peace. Forgetting is central to our ability to function effectively in reality and thus to our overall happiness. To University of Cambridge neuroscientist Michael Anderson, it is “absolutely stunning that neurobiology has treated forgetting as an afterthought.” The mechanics of remembering and forgetting are calibrated to allow us “to abstract and summarize,” just as a map should include only the “information necessary to its function.” Scott explores this example of maps to show that they frequently go well beyond their stated objectives, transforming the facts they contain rather than merely describing or summarizing salient facts about the landscape. This is not a problem inherent in the process of mapmaking, but a problem of “power possessed by those who deploy the perspective of that particular map.” Here, there is an analogy to the mechanics of remembering and forgetting (if an admittedly imperfect one): just as the powerful may manipulate the process of something like mapmaking to serve particular social or political ends, so does the very structure of remembering and forgetting exercise an often-malign influence on the course of human history. Our need to forget—and it is a real psychological one—may be exploited, even if subconsciously, by people who seek power over others, by people who want a more powerful state that can be used to realize their preferences.

It is worthy of remark at this point that political scientists, the very people who study the state, tend to favor a larger, more powerful state, one capable of carrying their favored models of distributive justice into being. We might imagine that they’d have a finer appreciation for the empirical data bearing on the questions of what the state really is and what it is designed to do. The truth is that their attitudes about the state are not susceptible to evidence or interrogation, but are the corollaries of certain moral instincts (almost all of which, it should be noted, are laudable in and of themselves). For almost everyone, politics—and thus our attitudes about the modern state as a type of polity—bottoms out in values, fundamentally subjective and irreducible. So even if your practical recommendations require a state unlike any that has ever existed, there’s no reason to discard your plan; after all, we’re talking about, for example, the moral imperative of making sure everyone has access to decent health care. Something must meet this need, so it must be the state. This way of thinking is riddled with problems. It is not just that the state is not well-suited to serving certain ends—namely, promoting the common good and upholding peace, law, and order—it’s that the historical state has always worked directly against those ends. It is far and away history’s worst murderer, with no competitor even approaching its destructive, anti-social behavior. It is simply the most dangerous institution human beings have ever created. In a very concrete, empirical sense, the modern state just is the mass-murder state, defined more by its bloodlust than by any of its other qualities.

At the level of the individual, forgetting may be good and healthy, allowing each of us to move on. At scale, however, it will prove catastrophic; at the level of societies or nations, the natural and inevitable process of forgetting can lead us to facially absurd choices—like turning to history’s most dangerous and lawless institution to promote order and peace. Even the faintest sense of the scale of the tragedy would lead to massive demonstrations in favor of a much smaller and less powerful central government. While optimism about the future may have its place, willful ignorance of humanity’s worst-ever century can lead only to more callous destruction of human life. Faced with a bloody warning, humankind may decide to rethink the unlimited power and progress gospel, shared by both the modern state and multinational corporations.

1. The history of anatomically modern humans is difficult for people today, seeing ourselves as the reigning rulers of the world, to understand, for not very long ago, we were very small in number and unable to have any major impact on the world. Indeed, scientists have long suggested that the eruption of Toba some 70,000 years ago nearly drove our species to extinction, though there is some dispute about the impact of the event on humans.