In Praise of Forgetting Historical Memory and Its Ironies

The conventional wisdom about historical memory is summed up in George Santayana’s celebrated phrase, ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ Today, the consensus that it is moral to remember, immoral to forget, is nearly absolute. And yet is this right?

David Rieff insists that things are not so simple. In his view, rubbing raw historical wounds – whether self-inflicted or imposed by outside forces – neither remedies injustice nor confers reconciliation. If he is right, then historical memory is not a moral imperative but rather a moral option. Sometimes it may be called for; but sometimes, he argues, it may be more moral to forget.

Ranging widely across some of the defining conflicts of modern times – the Irish Troubles and the Easter Uprising of 1916, the white settlement of Australia, the American Civil War, the Balkan wars, the Holocaust and 9/11 – Rieff examines the uses and abuses of historical memory.

Speaker biography:

David Rieff is a New York-based journalist and author. A past contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, he has also written for The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Le Monde, El Pais, The New Republic, World Affairs, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, Foreign Affairs and The Nation. He is the author of numerous books, including Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West, A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis and The Reproach of Hunger: Food, Justice and Money in the Twentieth Century.

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