The Memory of Evil
From my years in middle school, I recall one occasion when a teacher used the word "evil". It was a history teacher, and he said that we were about to study one of the rare examples of pure evil. The subject was Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. I was struck by his opening description. As far as I could recall, no teacher had ever called anything "evil" before. None ever did so since then either, until I went to philosophy classes in which examples of "evil" things would appear occasionally, mainly in metaethical discussions.
Incidentally, the teacher was right to use the word, but wrong that this was a rare example. Humans have committed great evil throughout history, including many senseless genocides. It's just that one that we today tend to remember the most. Of course, we in America also work to keep alive the memory of slavery, Jim Crow, gender oppression, and other wrongs.
I don't care whether you deem the word "evil" appropriate for all these things, though. My question is: How important is it to remember past wrongs? Is a strong cultural memory of past misdeeds a good thing or a bad thing? I suspect that the memory of evil has been greatly overvalued, and perhaps it's more important to be able to forget.
Reasons to Never Forget
Some say that we need to remember evil to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. I'm skeptical that we've learned the lessons of the past, even for those episodes that we constantly have drummed into our minds.
To take an example, here is what you might hope that people learn from studying World War II and the Holocaust:
Beware of charismatic leaders who exploit scapegoats.
Don't give anyone absolute power.
Don't blame a whole, huge category of people for your problems.
Society is not divided into good and bad races, genders, or other groups like that. Individuals must be evaluated as individuals.
Don't just follow orders. Use your conscience.
Here is what people actually learn:
Beware of Hitler.
Don't give absolute power to the Nazi Party.
Don't blame the Jews for your problems.
The bad race is the Germans. More broadly, white people, especially white men.
Don't just follow an order to push Jews into gas chambers. Only blindly obey orders that are democratic. And finally:
A great rhetorical tactic is to compare anyone who disagrees with you to Hitler.
You may find that cynical. I just don't see that we have learned the first set of lessons above. This is to say that I doubt that the memory of evil is working as advertised. Surely, because of our memory of the Nazis, the actual Nazi party will never take over again. But that doesn't mean that, say, a right-wing nationalist party that scapegoats some other group won't take over.
Part of the reason may be that we hear a lot about a small number of historical evils, rather than learning about many different evils. Maybe we would draw more general lessons if we knew more examples.
It may also be that the evils we learn about are too close to home -- the perpetrators and victims are too easily identified with existing tribes in our own society, some of which we may belong to, and others of which we may see as rival tribes. Thus, we already have feelings about these groups, and we too easily turn stories about them into tools for carrying out present conflicts. We might be better at learning the lessons of history if we mainly studied completely foreign groups.
Reasons to Forget
Anyway, here is my main thought: historical amnesia is undervalued. Maybe some other, more rational species would learn history, and just take note of past mistakes and resolve not to repeat them. But that's not humans.
When humans learn about past wrongs, we ask which group perpetrated the wrong, and which group suffered it. If we identify with neither group, then we acquire a prejudice against the group that perpetrated the wrong.
If we identify with the victim group, then we feel resentment, hostility to the perpetrator group, and a desire for vengeance. We may also wish to blame the perpetrator group for whatever misfortunes we are suffering. If the victim group is a minority in a larger society, this may prevent the minority from assimilating to the majority culture, and thus from succeeding in that wider society.
If we identify with the perpetrator group, then we may either feel guilt and self-hatred, or we may instead decide to embrace our supposed identity as oppressors. “Hm, I keep hearing about how my group oppressed one group or another. I guess I’m on the pro-oppression side.”
Of course, these are not the only ways of responding. Some humans react more rationally and learn valuable lessons from the errors of the past. But I think a good number of ordinary people react as stated above. Perhaps the lesson is that knowledge of historical evils should be reserved for elite intellectuals.
For instance, how long will the Israeli-Palestinian conflict go on? It will go on as long as people in both groups remember the wrongs of the past. The score will never be settled. The issue cannot be solved; it can only be forgotten. If everyone were suddenly struck with amnesia, then they could live together in peace. If you don't identify with either of these groups, you can probably appreciate this point. But if you do identify with one of these groups, you probably think of course it's crucial to know about the atrocities committed by the other side.
With that in mind, there's a case to be made that children in the Middle East shouldn't learn history. (Cue the sound of millions of children cheering.) Or more precisely, they shouldn't learn their own history. The history of the rest of the world is fine. (Children stop cheering.)
To take another example, perhaps we should stop teaching American students about the history of slavery. More plausibly, we could teach less about it. We could spend less time on it and give less emphasis to it, along with the other injustices of the past. "You belong to a group whose history in this society is mainly about suffering and being oppressed, by that group over there" is not exactly a helpful lesson to drum into students' heads. This is not the path to creating a harmonious society or helping those students to succeed.
Notice that the problem isn’t that this information is harmful to white people. True, it makes white people look bad (given humanity’s tendency toward stereotyping and assigning group blame), but it does not stop white people from succeeding in this society. The problem is that this information is harmful to black people.
The picture of black people's role in this society as primarily that of 'victim of white people' is part of the reason for the oppositional culture in which black youths try to avoid "acting white", which might include such things as enrolling in honors courses or speaking standard English. (See: https://www.educationnext.org/actingwhite/.)
The irony is that the people who are most vocally concerned about helping minorities are also the people who are most eager to drum into everyone's heads these messages about the evils of the past, and about how America does not allow minority individuals to succeed. Of course, if you think you can't succeed, then you probably won't.
Back to Reasons to Remember
Now, I am certain that some people will find all of this outrageous. (It wouldn't be a proper FakeNous if they didn't, would it?) I'm not sure what exactly they'll say. Perhaps they will say that we need to all be vividly and frequently reminded of the evils of slavery, Jim Crow, and so on, in order to prevent those evils from recurring. But I really don't think that is a realistic concern. There is zero chance that America is going to decide to re-institute slavery, if only we diminish our teaching about slavery in high schools.
Maybe they'll say that the rise of alt-right nationalism is due to inadequate education about the evils of racism. But I don't think so; I think it's more likely that the rise of the alt-right is a reaction to the left's messages about racism. Here is a secret about humans: for most, loyalty to one's own comes before ideals of impartial justice. If convinced that their own group characteristically does X, where X is something they previously regarded as immoral, many humans will switch to the view that X is perfectly alright, sooner than conclude that their own group is bad. As well, all the messages about race just entrench the intrinsically terrible idea that your identity is your race.
Or maybe people will say that we need to remember past evils so that we can fix current problems, because those past evils are the cause of many current problems. I just don't think this works. Whether or not current problems are due to past injustices, we're not fixing any of them by keeping the memory of those injustices alive. What we're doing is allowing the past to continue to ruin the future.
Maybe knowledge of past evils is simply necessary for an accurate understanding of society. Fair enough. But that only suggests that theorists who are trying to form a general understanding of society need to know both the good and the bad elements of the past. It does not suggest that ordinary lay people need that knowledge.
Or maybe the reason is propagandistic: talking about past injustices in this society is an effective tool for creating leftists. It makes people angry at society and ready to support radical political agendas; never mind what it does to people personally. Indeed, the evilness of our society is itself a central tenet of modern leftism. How are they supposed to transmit that ideology without talking about our society's past misdeeds?