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https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2019/04/20/memories-of-disaster-fade-fast>
"Collective memory for past calamities is of more than just academic
interest, precisely because resilience to future calamities is thought
to depend on it. Most research on the subject has been conducted by
social scientists who have tracked the durability of memories over
years—at most a decade—usually by means of questionnaires. Researchers
at the Czech University of Life Sciences, in Prague, led by
environmental historian Václav Fanta, have approached the problem
differently, investigating how memories of disasters shaped decisions
over several generations.
[…]
To be deterred from placing themselves back in danger, people have to
hear disaster tales from eye witnesses who can convey the visceral
emotion of having lived through them. The group’s findings thus suggest
that one way of teaching history more effectively might be to bring eye
witnesses into the classroom. That approach will not work for ever, of
course. Over time, witnesses’ own memories fade, and then the witnesses
themselves expire.
The forgetting that Dr Fanta sees with respect to historical floods
might also explain the recent rise of vaccine hesitancy and right-wing
extremism, he suggests, as the survivors of now-preventable infectious
diseases and Hitler, respectively, die of old age. Having not
experienced those realities, or heard about them first-hand, many people
alive today have quite simply forgotten the horror."
Via Kam-Yung Soh, who wrote: "An interesting article about why we tend
to forget the lessons from history."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://www.xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
http://www.glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
http://www.sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
