Book Review: Forgetfulness

[osprey_archer]

Just about the only good thing about Francis O’Gorman’s Forgetfulness: Making the Modern Culture of Amnesia is that it reminded me of Svend Brinkmann’s Stand Firm: Resisting the Self-Improvement Craze, which I then reread with much pleasure and profit. I even highlighted a quote from Brinkmann that I think sums up what O’Gorman wanted to say in his own book: “The accelerating culture is at one and the same time preoccupied by the moment and the future, but it is definitely not particularly bothered about the past.”

Unfortunately O’Gorman never does say it as clearly or succinctly as that. He is often irritatingly non-specific, particularly when he’s being nostalgic. He thinks we ought to have more respect for the past, and eventually it emerges that what he means is that we ought to look at the past as a potential source of value and inspiration - as the ancient Greeks and Romans looked at Homeric epic, evidently, which may well be true but I find it hard to trust O’Gorman - rather than seeing the past as a cesspool of pure misery and approaching historical analysis as “a search for what are classified as another person’s hidden assumptions that are not ethically acceptable.”

I ought to be an easy sell on this argument: I quit grad school in part because I found this sort of analysis so annoying. If you’ve already decided what you’re going to find once you’ve unpacked all your sources (moral depravity and dehumanizing assumptions usually), why bother spending all that time analyzing it?

And I still can’t believe that so many extremely smart people can spend so much of their time dissecting the flaws in historical reform movements - spoiler alert: they always seem to reify the status quo somehow - without ever stopping to think “Gosh, do you think my reform-minded work might inadvertently reify the status quo too?”

But O’Gorman is remarkably coy about what valuable lessons he thinks we ought to learn from the past. Brinkmann wrote a whole book about valuable lessons we could learn from the ancient Stoics; surely O’Gorman ought to be able to pony up with at least one insight. But no, it’s all unmoored theorizing about the Value of the Past, the sort of word fog that slips out of your head almost as soon as you read it. Truly an aptly named book.

Comments

[brigdh]

Ugh, this sounds like a very annoying book. Unspecified "lessons of the past" are one of the things that annoys me the most.

[osprey_archer]

It's soooo frustrating. And whenever the author doesn't specify, I am always filled with the certainty that the lessons they want us to learn from the past are the wrong lessons, and they're not specifying because they know that would drag a firestorm of well-deserved opprobrium on their heads. Which may not be true at all! But it's always my suspicion.

here from network

[kore]

I ought to be an easy sell on this argument: I quit grad school in part because I found this sort of analysis so annoying. If you’ve already decided what you’re going to find once you’ve unpacked all your sources (moral depravity and dehumanizing assumptions usually), why bother spending all that time analyzing it?

Haha, wow that sounds familiar. Oh, grad school.

That Brinkmann book sounds neat.

[asakiyume]

“Gosh, do you think my reform-minded work might inadvertently reify the status quo too?”

Riiiiight? Why **don't** people ask this? It reminds me of Flatland: when the two-dimensional protagonist is lifted up into three dimensions and can see that yes, there are actually three dimensions and how different the world is from what he experienced, he says, "Wow! And I suppose there could be four, five, six, who knows how many dimensions," to which the three-dimensional being says, "ooooooh no. Just three." LOL.

[osprey_archer]

RIGHT THOUGH. You'd think the question would at least flicker across people's minds.

Although probably it does and they rationalize it away because the stakes are so high if it turns out the answer is yes. But you'd think even that might make people more understanding of the imperfect reformers of the past: they too were dealing with lots of pressures that doubtless distracted them from what we might see as the pure moral good.

Re: here from network

[osprey_archer]

I suspect this goes hand in hand with grad school advice to skim the readings. It's hard to come up with a thoughtful critique of something you haven't really read, unless you come in with a nice one-size-fits all criticism that you can apply to practically anything.

Re: here from network

[kore]

SERIOUSLY, and grad school really encourages skimming, too -- I remember seeing it suggested as a study aide, "just skim a book or chapter for what is relevant to your paper/thesis". And of course the different schools of interpretation encourage that kind of pigeonholing -- the structuralist analysis, the Derridean (sp) analysis, the post-Marxist analysis, whatever. Of course all those approaches can be illuminating, but idk, it always seemed like academics got forced into little 4X4 pockets of territory and had to defend them like guard dogs. Although of course probably that was also the result of market pressure on universities, too.

tl;dr Grad school IRONICALLY left me with a deep and abiding mistrust of theory.

[kore]

(Flatland! Such a great book.)

Re: here from network

[osprey_archer]

I think theories often work to help people connect the dots, as it were. Research gives you all these data points and they have to be organized somehow and shoving them into an existing pattern is easier than trying to cope with all this weird disparate stuff. Never mind that the pattern may not fit, or that anyone who has read books in this pattern before probably can indeed lay out the whole argument of the book just by skimming the introduction.

So in that sense the advice to skim makes sense, but at the same time it just shows how much academic dreck gets published. Which is another thing that sapped my enthusiasm for academia: I couldn't stand the thought of spending years writing something, which would in the end be so paper-thin that people could get the meat of the whole thing just by skimming the introduction. And that only so they could write a critique of it in their own book that no one would ever read, except to skim the introduction.

[asakiyume]

I agree! Totally cool thought experiment and went places I hadn't expected.

[asakiyume]

It often feels to me in whatever domain we're operating (so, not just academia but oh, say, Twitter!) that people are more interested in making pronouncements, specifically judgments (this is Bad; this is Good; this person is Wrong; this person is a Victim etc.) than they are in listening to what other people have to say. On the Internet at least--but I do think this applies to academia as well--having a shiny opinion or judgment is what seems to be most likely to earn you attention.

Sometimes if you allow yourself the luxury of not having an opinion, then it's just *interesting* to see the times and situations other people operated in. Like you say, reformers of the past were dealing with lots of pressures, and those were interesting! Some feel so familiar; others are strange . . . it's worth just experiencing those through their written record. (I guess saying "it's worth..." is making a judgment too. . .)

[osprey_archer]

In the judgment sweepstakes "it's worth" is probably a pretty low on the attention-grabbing scale, though. If you want to gain attention it seems to work better to denounce things as THE WORST, or at least come up with clickbait headlines like "You won't believe how heartwarming this is!" Everything should be either terrible or amazing.

No wonder we've become such a polarized country.

[asakiyume]

No wonder we've become such a polarized country.

WORD.