Abstract
James V. Wertsch opens his new book, How Nations Remember, by recalling a puzzling conversation with a Russian colleague. The colleague wonders, why did President Truman drop the atom bombs? The author, an American, is confident in his answer: Truman dropped the atom bombs to force the Japanese into an early surrender, thus preventing the costly and bloody invasion of the Japanese main islands. As terrible as the bombs were, they were a necessary, perhaps even righteous, evil. The Russian gapes at his friend’s apparent naïveté – wasn’t it obvious to everyone that Japan was already defeated and was prepared to surrender even before the atom bombs were dropped? American leadership was aware of this fact, but dropped the bombs anyway. Their real purpose must have lain elsewhere: the bombs were meant to send an unambiguous, pre-emptive message to Stalin that America would be the dominant global power in the upcoming post-war era. To each interlocutor, his partner’s story seemed patently false, if not offensive. Neither the American nor the Russian was able to convince the other of the truth of his story, and the encounter ends at an impasse.
On the face of it, both Wertsch and his colleague were referring to the same event, but their respective stories each seemed disconcertingly alien from the other’s perspective. These two particular speakers, an American and a Russian, had not each invented his own narrative about the atom bombs; most members of their respective national communities would likely have produced similar stories. When members of different national communities confront one another with such incompatible collective memories, conversation partners can become locked in a ‘mnemonic standoff’ (p. 13). Finding one’s self in such a standoff can be particularly unsettling, Wertsch points out, because ‘... in contrast to attitudes and values, where we recognize group differences and can agree to disagree, memory is assumed to be about truth’ (p. x). Each side regards the other as, at best, hopelessly brainwashed or, at worst, as a bad faith actor. While the author and his colleague undoubtedly remained on friendly terms after their own standoff, conflicting collective memories can and do often fuel misunderstanding and animus between national communities.
In How Nations Remember, James Wertsch marshals a scholarly new synthesis on the problem of mnemonic standoffs, drawing upon theory and evidence from across humanistic disciplines as well as the social and psychological sciences, richly illustrated with cases from across geopolitical contexts. He attempts to answer three questions: Why are historical narratives often shared relatively broadly within national communities, but diverge so dramatically between them? Why are individual members of a national community so utterly convinced that their own narrative is obviously factual, while regarding alternative narratives as transparently false? Why do members of national communities cling so tenaciously to their particular narratives, impervious to disconfirming evidence and attempts at historical revision? To gain some traction on these questions, How Nations Remember centers the shared mental habits underlying collective memory for nationally relevant events, and the role these habits play in making mnemonic stand-offs so intractable and so bewildering.
A psychological frame to the problem, centring on mental habits, may seem to require some justification; a number of scholars of collective memory likely would take exception to it. Undoubtedly, the two different atom bomb stories arose in part because Russian and American officials, in order to shore up their preferred, self-interested historical narratives, told these respective stories in the form of textbooks, state holidays, museums and memorials, and other ‘publicly available symbols’ (Olick, 1999). Elites do run collective identity projects and can exert some degree of top-down influence over collective memory. If different stories learned in school were all there were to it, there would not be much room for psychology in explaining mnemonic standoffs. However, it would also be difficult to explain why alternate narratives would be so strongly resisted, and currently endorsed narratives clung to so tenaciously; why not just update our representation of the past based on new evidence?
Wertsch cautions that there is more at play here than successful indoctrination. For one thing, top-down control over hearts and minds can never be total or arbitrary. Institutional messages will always come up against the mental habits shared by members of a population, as well as the symbolic tools-for-thinking they have at their disposal. Memory Studies readers should recognize this habit-centred approach to collective memory from Paul Connerton’s (1989) influential How Societies Remember. The form of Wertsch’s title reflects this influence. However, rather than examining traditional embodied practices and rituals, Wertsch’s focus is on the shared narrative habits people use when they make sense of events by telling stories about them. Narrative habits are individuals’ tendencies to tell (and perceive) certain kinds of stories over others. These narrative habits, when shared widely by members of a particular community, will sometimes facilitate, sometimes hinder, top-down efforts to shape collective memory, depending on how well the message resonates with habitual ways of meaning-making. Despite manifesting at the level of individual psychology, these narrative habits ought to be understood as collectively shared cognitive frameworks for making sense of events. Being enculturated into a particular national community is, to a large extent, being conditioned into telling specific sorts of stories about that nation.
The groundwork for this argument lies in the author’s earlier work on the two-level (or two ‘voiced’) nature of collective remembering (e.g., Wertsch, 2002). In a nutshell, people acquire narrative habits for telling stories about their nation. Narrative habits are a sort of procedural memory for how to tell stories, and one telltale indicator of their presence is the use of stereotyped plots, or ‘schematic narrative templates’, which in the context of national memory may guide remembrance of many specific historical episodes. For instance, in his earlier volume, Voices of Collective Remembering, Wertsch (2002) explained how Russian speakers often recruit the ‘Expulsion of Alien Enemies’ template in talking about various episodes in their history – not only Napoleonic and Nazi invasions, but the invasion of ‘foreign’ ideologies like communism and capitalism, all of which had to be repulsed at great cost and with great bravery. Similarly, in the current volume, Wertsch argues that a Chinese ‘Century of Humiliation’ schematic narrative shapes recall for many episodes in Chinese collective memory. This template draws on collective memory of Western and Japanese colonialism in China to guide the interpretation of events like the (ostensibly accidental) American bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade as acts of all-too-familiar imperial aggression. Schematic narrative templates, such as the Expulsion of Alien Enemies and the Century of Humiliation are culture specific tools-for-thinking and offer ‘particular affordances ... [that] channel mental processes in particular ways’ (p. 59). They are inherently selective, scaffolding attention to and recall of elements that are critical to the schematic plotline and leading people to ignore or forget elements peripheral or contrary to that narrative.
How Nations Remember, however, expands in several important ways on this earlier work on symbolic mediation by schematic narratives. One key move is to situate schematic narratives as sociocultural tools-for-thinking in the context of the cognitive unconscious. Mediation by schematic narratives, Wertsch proposes, is automatic and typically quite rapid, occurring without subjective awareness that the schematic narrative is being employed to make sense of a situation. That is, mediation takes the form of an unconscious System I process, what Kahneman (2011) terms fast thinking. Fast thinking allows us to form rapid judgments about complex situations, but the processes themselves are subjectively transparent. In this instance, people employ the mediating tool – that is, the schematic narrative – without being aware that it is ‘co-authoring’ their story (MacIntyre, 1984: 162). This unconscious mediation applies both when people remember past events, and when they interpret current ones. The potential for conflict arises from the fact that people enculturated with different nationally characteristic schematic narratives will each experience what subjectively feels like a direct perception of reality, rather than a cognitive product mediated by culture-specific tools for sense-making. Interlocutors may fail to converge onto a consensual perception of reality.
Wertsch’s synthesis of symbolic mediation, schematic narratives, and the cognitive unconscious represents a new point of leverage whereby collective memory researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds can find points of common reference and collaboration. On one hand, it provides a sophisticated model for thinking about how rapid unconscious processing can be shaped by complex cultural tools-for-thinking, which often take nationally characteristic forms. Psychological research on fast thinking has tended to focus on mediation by relatively simple heuristics, rather than more complex, but equally fast and transparent cognitive tools like national narrative schemata. This strategy for introducing culture and cultural variability into the study of the cognitive unconscious suggests an exciting route by which experimentalists might expand beyond our habitual tendency to design studies based on assumptions of cognitive universalism. It encourages us to take seriously the idea that different mnemonic communities, in addition to remembering different content, will have different unconscious – but predictably structured – habits for making meaning of events and recounting nationally relevant stories.
However, Wertsch is undoubtedly writing for a broader audience than experimental psychologists, although we do have much to gain from his offerings. His goal in shedding light on the sociocultural psychology that helps to supercharge mnemonic standoffs is, ultimately, to enable us to operate in an increasingly cosmopolitan world where, nonetheless, deep national schisms remain. By situating narrative mediation in the fast-thinking cognitive unconscious, Wertsch helps explain why our own national community’s narratives feel so intuitive, like a straightforward representation of reality, and why mnemonic standoffs can be so dumbfounding, if not enraging. The fact that the schematic narrative mediates representation of an event is significant. The schema provides psychological meaning for events that would otherwise be isolated incidents in the absence of this organizing framework (p. 27). If not supported by deeply engrained, habitual ways of sense-making, attempts to ‘try on’ alternate narrativization of events will always feel at least a little false, unintuitive, and difficult to maintain (e.g. did America begin in 1619 or 1776?).
Examining mnemonic standoffs through the fast-thinking framework also gives us some leverage on the questions raised above as to why conflicting narratives are perceived as so bewildering and obviously wrong; if the schematic narrative is what gives the episodes subjective meaning, alternative ways of organizing and attributing meaning to the events may be perceived as nonsensical. Events that flout the national narrative may either disappear from collective memory, or, in some cases, may require extra effort-after-meaning, to use Bartlett’s (1932) phrase, altering their qualities in memory. Wertsch’s argument that flashbulb memories of 9/11 may arise in part because that event violated a deeply internalized national narrative about American invincibility is particularly thought-provoking in this regard. Importantly, addressing the systematic biases that arise from deeply engrained narrative habits may not be as simple as enriching history education. Just as a community’s collectively held narrative habits and symbolic resources powerfully moderate top-down efforts to control collective memory, narrative habits also constrain the power of historical education: soberingly, ‘analytic history ... may be a weak antidote to the unconscious mental habits associated with a narrative template’ (p. 133).
How Nations Remember offers many other useful new concepts for collective memory researchers and practitioners who need to be able to manage mnemonic standoffs in contexts of diplomatic negotiation, among others. These include a discussion of dialogicality in schematic narratives, which do not typically exist within a vacuum, but respond both to other competing narratives and to different strands internal to themselves. A discussion of national narrative quests suggests a way to think about collectively endorsed teleological aims and values that structure collective memory and collective future thought. The concept of the Privileged Event Narratives (PENs) may usefully explain why some episodes in collective memory – The Great Patriotic War for Russians, events during the Century of Humiliation for Chinese – become such cultural touchstones, used to interpret many events that, to an outsider, seem only tenuously relevant. A ‘privileged event’ is a specific, concrete historical episode, but one that resonates with the more abstract national narrative template in such a perfect manner that it becomes the prototypical case. PENs are particularly influential, in that they combine ‘real people, events, suffering ... and a deeper cultural resonance of the story derive[d] from the fact that a narrative template is involved’ (p. 145).
The mediation of national memory by schematic narratives, and the apparently irresolvable conflicts that arise when incommensurable narratives come into contact, raises the difficult question of how to manage mnemonic standoffs when the stakes are high. It is not entirely desirable (even if it were possible) to step outside any narrative framework, which would likely come at the cost of losing any sense of coherent meaning in events. However, ‘[s]trong confidence in one’s own story and the inability to believe that anyone could believe anything else are core ingredients of what it means to live in different mental realities grounded in different national narratives’ (p. 89). If we are to live together, contact on at least some points of consensual reality are necessary. Rather than trying to resolve the problem of mnemonic standoffs, however, Wertsch suggests a more modest (and pragmatic) set of guidelines for managing them in the interest of cooperation towards shared goals. Although these guidelines are perhaps most concretely relevant for diplomats, policy makers and professional negotiators, I suspect most readers will find that the general problem is recognizable even in more mundane conflicts between different ‘mental realities’. For these wise and practical suggestions, I refer the reader to this beautifully written and erudite book, in the hopes that it may help our global mental realities become slightly less incompatible.