The morality of remembering

THIS stimulating, profoundly humane little book about the ethical dimension of memory could not have appeared at a more appropriate moment. Just about everywhere one turns, memories are driving events.

The memory of an olive grove destroyed or of a village razed incites violence in the Middle East; Koreans feel the Japanese do not sufficiently remember Japan’s crimes against Korea during World War II; many Jews accuse Catholics of forgetting papal indifference to Nazi atrocities; many Christians accuse Jews of not adequately remembering Christians who rescued Jews from the Nazis; President Bush recalls his father’s Gulf War; the Arabs, who still brood over the Crusades, will never forget our adventures in Iraq. Though it has been well over a year since Sept. 11, a debate now rages in America over how best to remember that violent day. It sometimes seems as though the present were being dreamed by the past, a past that cannot rest until all historical injuries have been exposed, punished or healed.

“The Ethics of Memory” comprises six lectures that Avishai Margalit, an Israeli political philosopher, has somewhat forced into book form in an effort to examine the role of memory in living a good life. The result is less a coherent argument than a set of brilliant, challenging interrogations and propositions.

At one point, Margalit arrestingly asks (I’m paraphrasing): How do we remember particular cruelty without reliving the emotions that cruelty once inflamed? To put it another way, how do we indict the forces that act against life without inciting the urge to take revenge? Working his way through this quandary, Margalit considers the question of emotion in poetry: Does the poet relive the emotion he is describing, or does he describe in cold detachment the emotion he once lived through? The really valuable aspect of Margalit’s way of proceeding is that he doesn’t hesitate to apply the special experience of a poet to the way all people think and feel.

The richness of Margalit’s approach lies in its avidity, in the author’s respect for every facet of existence; he can draw, in just a few paragraphs, examples from ordinary life and from momentous events. The drawback is that he sometimes makes such rapid associations and assertions that the reader feels like those cartoon characters who look down to see themselves walking on nothing but air and suddenly plummet to the ground.

Margalit writes in the tradition of British analytic philosophy, in which nimble conceptualizing has a tendency to outpace the solidity of the concept. Such elliptical velocity eventually mars his central idea, the distinction between ethics and morality, first devised by British philosopher Bernard Williams and amplified by Margalit. In Margalit’s formulation, morality is “thin” human relations, and ethics is “thick” human relations. Thin human relations, he says, are “our relations to the stranger and the remote.” They are supported simply by “the attribute of being human.” Thick relations, on the other hand, “are anchored in a shared past or moored in shared memory” -- they consist of “our relations to the near and dear.”

The question hanging over this book is whether anyone is obligated to care for anyone else to whom one is not bound by “thick” relations: i.e., by shared memories rooted in blood, common origins or an affinity of belief. If we assume, as Margalit does, that memory is a catalyst of caring, then what common memories can people draw on to help those to whom they are not fundamentally attached? Is the imperative of universal respect, based on the “thin” fact that we are all human beings, sufficient for coming to the aid of strangers who are being tortured or killed in a distant place? Margalit concludes that “while there is an ethics of memory, there is very little morality of memory.” He believes there is no memory or myth of human suffering shared by everyone in the world, nothing to compel all of us to help one another no matter how remote one human may be from another. Only “natural communities of memory” inspire such efforts.

Recalling Western indifference to the genocide in Rwanda and the indifference of the United States and its allies to the slaughter in Bosnia, it’s hard to argue with Margalit’s sober view of things. The memory of the Holocaust, or of the Armenian genocide, or of Stalin’s purges, or of European atrocities in Africa -- let alone the “thin” Christian idea of universal suffering and love -- did nothing to spur Western powers to immediate action.

But Margalit’s reflections, keen as they are, impatiently stumble across such concrete historical situations. It was in fact the Bosnian Serbs’ “thick” relations and their recollection of past historical injuries that led them to murder their Muslim neighbors -- a grim comment on the ethics of memory and on memory’s “natural communities.” On the other hand, although Western aid did not come in time to stop the murder of hundreds of thousands of people, it would not have arrived at all if a universal sense of historical human suffering had not galvanized it, which is a good argument for the efficacy of memories that arise from “thin” human relations.

At the same time, the belated American decision to engage the Serbs militarily also was stoked by countless media references to the Holocaust, to the Armenian genocide, to Stalin’s crimes. In other words, invoking particular memories by members of “thick” communities had the “thin” universal effect of saving distant strangers. Here Margalit’s thoughtful distinction between morality and ethics begins to blur. Contrary to Margalit’s justifiable concern that reliving, or imaginatively inhabiting, emotions inflamed by memory of past cruelty leads to revenge, in this case such inflammation was a moral necessity that led not to revenge but to rescue.

Margalit pursues a bracing, deeply satisfying intellectual odyssey through chapters on voluntary and involuntary remembering and forgetting, on the moral testimony of witnesses, on the ability to forgive and the capacity to forget. His book is a novel illumination of memory’s moral implications. But he traverses such difficult, boundless terrain that he has a hard time balancing his restless inquiries with full examinations. Though he concedes that “good ethical relations [i.e., caring among tribal members] can hold among immoral people,” he never wonders whether, in some cases, caring among members of the same community actually depends upon the anathematizing and even brutalizing of another community. That would give an ethics of memory a rather narrow ethical relevance.

Indeed, one can imagine a sequel growing out of the fresh ground that Margalit has broken: an ethics of forgetting. The memory of past cruelty and injustice may inspire a noble response to crimes of the present, but such crimes often are instigated by the memory of past mistreatment. Perhaps in this moment of a general licking of wounds -- national wounds, religious wounds, personal wounds, etc. -- it would be good to heed a particular conceit of Nietzsche, who wrote in his essay “The Use and Abuse of History” that in the matter of memory, he preferred cows to humans. The latter, Nietzsche mused, painfully and belligerently remember too much, while the former, though they lack the ability to philosophize and to criticize, seem blissfully -- and peacefully -- to remember nothing at all.

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From ‘The Ethics of Memory’

The modern man’s daily prayer, says Hegel, is reading the daily newspaper. In one of my own daily prayers I came across a report concerning the speedy and problematic career of a certain army colonel. The colonel was interviewed about a publicly known incident in his past, when he was the commander of a small unit. One of the soldiers under his command had been killed by so-called friendly fire. It turned out that the colonel did not remember the soldier’s name. There followed a flood of outrage directed at the officer who did not remember. Why wasn’t the name of this fallen soldier “scored in iron letters” on his commander’s heart?

I was struck by the moral wrath heaped on this officer simply for not remembering something, and it led me to think about the officer’s obligation to remember -- and if indeed he has an obligation.