In Praise of Forgetting : Historical Memory and Its Ironies

A leading contrarian thinker explores the ethical paradox at the heart of history's wounds.

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 and immoral to forget is nearly absolute. And yet, is this right?

David Rieff, an independent writer who has reported on bloody conflicts in Africa, the Balkans, and Central Asia, insists that things are not so simple. He poses hard questions about whether remembrance ever truly has—or indeed ever could—“inoculate” the present against repeating the crimes of the past.

Key Arguments and Insights:

• Rubbing raw historical wounds, whether self-inflicted or imposed by outside forces, neither remedies injustice nor confers reconciliation.
• Rieff argues that historical memory is not always a moral imperative but rather a moral option—sometimes necessary, sometimes harmful.
• He provocatively suggests that collective remembrance can be toxic and, in some cases, it may be more moral to forget.

A Wide-Ranging Examination:

Rieff explores these ideas by drawing on some of the defining conflicts of modern times, including:

• The Irish Troubles and the Easter Uprising of 1916
• The white settlement of Australia
• The American Civil War
• The Balkan wars
• The Holocaust
• 9/11

His contentious, brilliant, and elegant essay delivers a pellucid examination of the uses and abuses of historical memory. This indispensable work of moral philosophy challenges deeply held assumptions and invites readers to rethink the ethics of remembering versus forgetting.