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| Content | | | | The Big Forgetting | The Master said, "I am not one who was born in the possession of knowledge;
I am one who is fond of antiquity, and earnest in seeking it there."
Confucius, Analects VII, 20
Nowadays, Confucius’ words sound hopelessly old-fashioned. This famous Chinese philosopher considered learning and accumulating knowledge a virtue; he himself strived for wisdom all his life. In today’s world that is so highly developed and sophisticated, Confucius would assumingly feel somehow forlorn and misunderstood.
Everywhere we hear that this is the Asian or Chinese century; however, I think this century is above all an era of collective bad memory, maybe considered the times of “the big forgetting” in history. David Brooks, editor of the New York Times, whom we owe this excellent observation (probably he lives in a country where everything that is older than 100 years is considered “antique”) goes even so far to say: “In the ear of an aging society memory will be the new sex.”
That seems a little bit unfair because the loss of memory is not the older generation’s fault. The now-grandparent generation might not be able to show all their knowledge due to some fewer brain cells but they have studied in a way that was much more following the Confucian ideal. For example, they still learned stuff by heart; a teaching method that is almost distinct and will lead to the situation that young people nowadays grow up without literature or poetry as part of their daily life. (Although my nephews and nieces love it when I recite poems for them, they consider it weird that I still memorize them…)
It has become legitimate to forget people, appointments, or tasks. Everybody is so busy, everybody has so many things to manage, everybody suffers from stress - no wonder that now and then we tend to forget something or somebody.
This lack of memory is mirrored - as always - by the media the memory capacities of which seem to last only a couple of days (exceptions prove the rule, of course). Although it has never been that easy to do research about facts and historical developments, only few journalists make the effort to search the archives. As a consequence, many events are depicted not in the historical context or as a part of a development, but kind of stand-alone happenings that lack any reference. No wonder people feel overwhelmed by globalization and have difficulties to get it.
David Brooks had another smart vision: the Big Forgetting will also have an impact on international relations. Diplomats will study countries according to their national habits of memory loss: Americans forget their sins. Russians forget their weaknesses. The French forget that they have forgotten god. And in the Middle East people forget everything but their resentments.
If Brooks is right, then tu felix Austria. We Austrian always excelled in forgetting. History could teach us this lesson - if anybody still remembers…
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