Precarious Memories, Sapiens & 2020

Why we creatures never tend to learn from history? From world wars to pandemics have already happened multiple times but yet we refuse to remember it leave alone learning from it. 

One thing I am certain about the future... well future as in this time next year, most sapiens would have eradicated the memories of Coronavirus and what we went through in 2020 (except the ones who lost their loved ones). 

By refusing to talk about it and think about it, they not only purge their memories but also deprive themselves of developing gratitude for ordinary times.  This is one of the fundamental issues with our brains and it is as dangerous as a nuclear bomb. 

Jen Gerson has an insightful column on the same - you will forget 2020. But you'll remember the parties to come: 

As our dread year 2020 lumbers to its preordained end, I can't help but think about the tricky matter of memory. Why is it that some crises and events seem forever etched into the stories that societies tell about themselves, while others fade into nothing? This has been an unbearable, even apocalyptic year for so many of us and yet I can't help but shake the sense that I will soon be shocked by just how aggressively we will pursue forgetfulness. Once the jabs are in and the bodies tallied, what words will be forbidden? What things will we not talk about?

The 1918 pandemic was another one of those terrible crises that society seemed too-eager to forget once it was over — in stark contrast to the First World War, which although horrific, actually cost fewer lives than that terrible flu. Historians like Alfred W. Crosby have pointed out that the pandemic was not only missing from many modern history texts, it was largely absent from the writing of many of the great Golden Age authors of the '20s. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway — the flu is barely mentioned. 

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I think we seek to forget the stories that make us feel helpless, and the ones that seem to pull us apart. This happened in 1918, too. Diaries that recollect that event seem to suggest that the lockdowns and fear; the sense that one could not help each other or one's neighbours, left the social fabric forever altered. As noted in this Atlantic article, John Delano, a New Haven, Connecticut, resident, said in 1997: “They didn’t visit each other, bring food over, have parties all the time. The neighborhood changed. People changed. Everything changed.”

When one watches anti-mask protests and witnesses friends and family fall to the intellectual ravages of conspiracy theories on social media, does that not feel a little familiar? No one wants to memorialize a time in which it's impossible to think well of oneself and his neighbours. 

I think we're going to forget 2020. I think we're going to go to some effort to ensure this lost year stays that way.

In other words, Sapiens want to forget stories where they are not superheroes and heroes. Once again, it baffles me how we made it this far.