A Mr. Richard Feder of Fort Lee, New Jersey asked, “Hey Tomser! Why do you think we focus on the significance of World War I when the Spanish Flu, starting in 1918, is estimated to have killed twice as many people?”. In response, I gave a typically shallow and glib answer, saying, “I think as humans we are attracted to stories, and the WWI stories are just more compelling than stories of the flu”. As I thought about this more, I realized that this is a material question. Why do certain events resonate in our collective memories and others not, even if they should, and how this has changed over time?
I read a book a number of years ago (don’t ask me the title) where the author posited the theory that humans had evolved in respect of memory. He claimed that humans had traditionally relied on what they could personally recall to remember what they needed to, and developed the skill to retain it. Now, he argued, humans rely on sources outside the brain for memory storage, changing not only how we access memories, but our actual anatomy.
I am not sure that I bought the biological aspects of this argument, maybe because they went over my head (which they did). But the idea that we had, to a large extent, outsourced our memories has stuck with me. Whether we like it or not, our understanding of events, and even the importance of events, relies primarily on sources external to us. That is true for things that happen to us directly, where we often rely on such items as photographs, but even more so for things we were not directly involved in.
Outsourced memory has been a expanding process that went into hyperdrive in the 20th Century. As travel and communication became easier, we all of a sudden had a wealth of information at our fingertips about what was going on not only in the next town, but on the other side of the world. With the advent of the internet, that knowledge could be instantaneous. (For example, a quick search disclosed multiple days of on-going violent protest in the Solomon Islands. Who knew.).
The problem is that this is more information than any individual can digest. We have access to everything, but must filter the news somehow. We cannot do that ourselves, and so have to rely on sources which we hope are relatively honest and accurate. Those sources must also pick and choose what they cover and emphasize, even within individual stories.
This conundrum is multiplied when it comes to understanding historic events. For example, there are thousands of books, websites, movies, etc. about World War I, more than any individual, even an obsessive, can absorb. And that is just if we isolate it as a topic. What about everything that led to WWI, like Austria-Hungary’s 1908 Annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, or the Moroccan crisis of 1911? And what about everything that followed, like the partitioning of the Middle East, German hyperinflation, not mention the Spanish Flu?
So, we are stuck with what comes across our path. What books are recommended to us, what movies are streaming, what internet sites Google chooses to highlight. Those decisions are going to be largely driven by what is accessible and popular, not by what is the most insightful or thorough.
I recently encountered this with the book The Bomber Mafia by Malcolm Gladwell, covering debates within the American Air Corps about bombing strategies, leading to the incendiary bombing of Japanese cities in the months before the atomic bombs were dropped. Gladwell paints this as a morality tale between two Generals with competing views of the morality of bombing non-combatants.
It is an interesting, readable book, but, as pointed out in a review by a history professor, is incredibly simplistic. The debate was more one of tactics, not morality, and encompassed many more players than the Generals Gladwell highlights. However, as the Professor also points out, Gladwell’s best-selling take is likely to become the defining narrative of these bombings because of his popularity and the book’s accessibility. A more nuanced history will have to wait, and even then is unlikely to be read by many people.
This historical culling is also impacted by the fact that the moving image is generally more memorable than the written word. Movies and television play an outsized role in determining what historic events are burned into the public conscious and which are not. This can spark great public debate, as did the airing of Roots in respect of slavery, but can also leave less dramatic incidents out in the cold.
The other problem with a reliance on moving images is that those making these films and shows are driven as much to entertain as they are to enlighten. This means cutting historic corners. Dunkirk was a movie that sought to depict a key landmark in WWII as realistically as possible. Yet, in watching the movie you would think that there were only about a dozen planes in the sky during the retreat, rather than the hundreds that were there. It was just dramatically more satisfying to focus in on a handful of pilots. History be damned.
More insidious are movies that get the factual record horribly wrong, but manage to instill those errors in the public conscious. The most notorious of these are, of course, Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind. Both are great movies, and both distort the realities of slavery and reconstruction. Both also were hugely influential on how Americans viewed the Civil War for decades (No, Woody Wilson, it was not all “so terribly true”).
So, back to Mr. Feder’s original question, from which I wandered so aimlessly. Much of what we remember as a society, and how we remember it, is out of our hands. For the most part we have to rely on others to present materials for our consumption and absorption. We can fight this on a personal level by taking in multiple narratives of an event, and by reading historic accounts that may challenge accepted wisdom, but there is only so much time in the day. And even then, that wouldn’t change societal focus. So there we are. Feel better now Mr. Feder?
