Social Amnesia and American Corrections and Rehabilitation
Just as individuals have mechanisms to forget inconvenient truths or traumatic events from the past, so does the community, nation and globe. Just as the child violently abused might loose recall, so may a society loose the truth of its past. So can institutions.
Because I throw the term “social amnesia” around so freely, I want to take a little time to give it a chance to become part of your tool-set for interpreting the world at large. As amnesia is one of the defense mechanisms of man (or woman) so social amnesia is a defense against collective traumas. Perhaps it is most like our reactions to vicarious trauma which is at some distance from the individual. Perhaps its course is like the background violence that (still) surrounds life in many settings too much like the “nasty, brutish and short” Hobbes supposed of earlier times. If you believe Hobbes was looking back from the city on the hill of modern enlightenment, please remember that they still hung convicts in cages and left heads on stakes on London Bridge and other places for the people to see.
A careless Wikipedia read could lead you to think Russell Jacoby coined the term in the mid 1970’s. This professor was still at home or going to his first school when Velikovsky, a doctor trained in psychiatry by Freud’s pupil Wilhelm Stekel, came up with “cultural amnesia.” Alas, the doctor has been a victim of the process. The story goes that his sidelining was because of bad geology (sin of anti-uniformitarianism) and orbital science (the effects of electro-magnetism along gravity, a theory since rehabilitated). Catastrophes just never have happened as he enquired of in Worlds in Collision, they screamed. Myths are myths, not edited history, they whispered. It’s one thing to disregard an old man doubling down on his writings out of his expertise.
It’s another to ignore the reason he was interested and to forget his area of study back in Vienna. It was his expertise that made him view an inability to accept past catastrophes as the source of man’s aggression. He theorizes the greater amnesias take a time to develop. Just as with some persons, all seems to be going well, the wound healed until one day something triggers the full blown response. Hold off the forced ignorance of Freud’s early suppositions, bear with me through a little Barthes and we will end up in current America, recycling the past with new labels and calling it progress. We will even find it easily relatable to penal reforms.
The essays of Roland Barthes are about modern myth making. The Nazi made a mythic history for their race, although Aryans are technically from the far steppes and dark skinned. The Iranians and the average citizen of India are typical “Aryans.” Author Winfried Sebald recounts his Bavarian school experience of being shown holocaust photos which no one could explain or contextualize. He remarks of the amnesia for 600,000 mostly civilian deaths from our carpet bombings.
Amnesias of the United States are seen with histories of who came her and why. It is easy to not ever know that several off the first vessel to live in that Thanksgiving celebrating first colony, were mutineers on board and eventually hung after returning from exile. They don’t teach that at the D.A.R. The south is will rise again (it was never much above swamp level for many and others had clay not productive farmlands). We are going to make America Great (again) even as we have always had to fight to keep the drowning alive (unless they were natives – noble but in our way), even as forecasters on the rooftop tell us we are in a post-industrial world and living wage manual labor is truly retired without pension. Educators are still designing systems to pop out better citizens. Few parents are familiar with the names Steiner and Montessori who already invented the basic design of that wheel.
Two more phrases need to be introduced: “forceful repression of memories” and “willful ignorance.” Pictures of Stalin often had once allies taken out the scene, a history of Pacific Northwest canneries had plates depicting the Chinese reworked into Norwegians. Not only have books been banned in the USA, but one scientist’s books were burned in the early 50’s.
The German war machine kept revising schedules as the allies advanced and even as bombs hit the work camps, delivery date promises were put to the calendar. In its declining years the evil Soviet empire had the joke about the people pretending to work and the government pretending to pay them. As they lost their collection of soviet states, the annual government cookbook, celebrating all the union’s cultures edited the ingredients so they could be made with the limited canned goods of those who stood waiting for the potato trucks, the farm trucks or word of their arrival. These were the free people, not those in an eastern front WWII camp! The cookbook was full color illustrated.
Barthes proposes mythologies as social control and a way to separate society from reality (the actual circumstances of the present) and place it in a dreamlike, timeless state, “once upon a time.” In this state the ills are promised to be leaving us, the goods returning, and all the while we hear no solid plans, we have nothing to critically examine and evaluate. It is like so much ad copy – all sizzle and no steak. It is an attempt to “keep it all together.” Trauma degrades executive function, the intelligence that plans and schedules and follows through. Traumatized individuals also have trouble with recounting their live on a time line, remembering if a year was one of the good, or not. If this sounds like the dissociated identity and sensorium of severely traumatized persons, you are getting the idea.
A journalist from various war zones claimed its time to buy an exit ticket and avoid a national psychotic break when a certain hyper-nationalized music that simultaneously sounds like from anywhere on earth takes over. The first time I heard recording of this phenomena I was astounded. He understood what Barthes was warning about, a confluence of the local and a universality. He was less trusting mythology could contain the repressed or was even intent on doing so. He was not going to fall for the local mythic version of the Spectacle and die.
Barthes only knew French style wrestling when he wrote of the parallels to mediaeval morality plays. He does an excellent, convincing job. I personally find it impossible to forget President Trump’s relation to World Wide Wrestling, and my memories of Iron Sheiks, Capitan Americas German “Huns” and a whole theatric repertoire who played emotions for all the family, like a revival preacher, or a recruiting agent for the good guy’s forces.
Isis is repeating the Old Man of the Mountain (Hassan al Sabbah) while Lord’s Army promises child soldiers sex and drugs while on duty not just after. Books remind us of the short psychic distance from Hassan, whose name gave us the words assassin and hasheesh, to the Muslim Brotherhood (they have not hit the news here since the Egyptian Spring). It’s a span of roughly half a millennium. Yet we ask where Isis came from “all of a sudden.
Gruder’s Law of Political and Social Amnesia says we forget at the same accelerating rate at which our knowledge increases. In his calculations we are down below 10 years for a doubling of forgetting and he is appalled at how much political history some forget in a year
I have a friend, Kathy Day, who attends national conventions or appears before congress in the persona of Dorothea Dix as a reminder of how long (about 175 years) we have retread the same grounds of reforming the treatment of our mentally ill and attempted to remove them from our prisons. She focused on the indigent ones. Today we have the term street people and we recognize the prevalence of mental illness among them. Today the three largest mental institutions are Riker’s Island and the Jails of Cook and Los Angeles Counties. Interventions come and go from favor. So much just gets ignored (“it’s just how the world is”) or repackaged (“new and improved”) and put back under the Christmas tree.
In 1843 Miss Dix addressed the Massachusetts Legislature: “I proceed, Gentlemen, briefly to call your attention to the present state of Insane Persons confined within this Commonwealth, in cages, stalls, pens! Chained, naked, beaten with rods, and lashed into obedience.” Think solitary confinements, the restraint chair and large canisters of riot gasses. Think suppression of symptoms, not healing.
In the book American Penology, Karol Lucken explains social amnesia as “the tendency of American penology to ignore history and precedent when responding to the present or informing the future… discarded ideas are repackaged; meanwhile, the expectations for these practices remain the same.” One might, as I do, not accept his premise that the reasons for all the work was to increase control over the nation rather than provide for life liberty and happiness, it is easy to accept his reading of the history of repackaging. It is easy to accept counter mythologies that take hold in reactionary periods of retributive justice and erase the past as meddling by some opposed polity. Not surprisingly he notes the disparity between promises and deliverables. Programs that never are well funded or quite as personally matched as they should be.
In 1954 the American Prison Association became the American Correctional Association. Offenders were carefully filtered into the just right placements and courses of corrections to rehabilitate them. Soledad was built with fences, not walls. Today of course they have razor wire. Chino was pointed out as an exemplary therapeutic community. It was composed of small, decentralized units, each with a resident therapist. Evaluative research at the time indicated it worked to resocialize its “consumers,” to use the latest term that has come into vogue. Today there is the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Three year recidivism hoovers around two thirds.
Meanwhile, though the rhetoric remains, rumors of turning the tide are still premature. Were the programs bad? Did the parties fudge their findings? Did the Grinch decide he had to intervene? It all mixes in our Corrections/Rehabilitation system and it is common to hear laughs or potshots over the use of either word. Though it all, for this century, we have understood, and sometimes admitted, that incarceration is criminogenic. We now whisper that it harms the jailer as well as the jailed. We are starting to have the discussion that both are traumatized merely by seeing it from the inside.
Willful ignorance and refusal to know what is really going on are not traits of only those regularly abandoned, beaten, used for sex or otherwise betrayed by parents or other full grown people or brutes. Spinning stories to divert distress can happen to societies.