Remembering and Forgetting

How was the Breivik trial and the way Norway dealt with these mass murders perceived in the USA? Comparisons are now being made with the killings that took place in Aurora, Colorado in July 2012. This was also no classic gun rampage, but — like Breivik‘s murders — a calculated mixture of organised mass murder, attacks and the apparent proto-cultural ‘self-assertion’ of an individual against the community.

Wearing military-style clothing, a former university student killed 12 people and wounded 58 more. The 70 dead or wounded victims, whose ages ranged from 6 to 51 years old, made Aurora the biggest mass killing by a lone gunman in American history.

Because the assassin begged the police for mercy, he was arrested at the scene without putting up any resistance. This was in contrast to the normal outcome of such situations in America and goes against the country’s unwritten rule that such offenders are shot dead at the site of their crime.

That would be the equivalent of more than 150,000 new gun sales per year amongst a population of just over 5 million people (equivalent to the population of Norway) and with a similar population density.

America‘s main coping strategy in the wake of Aurora was to recognise the need to answer the following questions: how many killing sprees or mass murders actually take place in the USA each year? 

The difference between smaller societies and huge nations is a key factor here. For Norway, Breivik‘s mass murders were something highly unusual, while in the USA such killings are practically a day-to-day cultural phenomenon. Statistics show that in the USA somebody goes on a killing spree or carries out mass murder — as opposed to serial killing — on average every two weeks.

Gun sales went up by 43 percent in Colorado in the week following the Aurora massacre compared to the previous week.

According to the internationally-recognised definition from the US Bureau of Justice Statistics in Washington DC, mass murder is when more than 4 people are murdered at one and the same location within one event and in a relatively short space of time.

According to official statistics and studies by the University of Virginia and the Northeastern University in Boston, (headed up by James Fox and Jack Levin, who suggested that this kind of phenomenon first started to become a “naturalised, long-term” cultural phenomenon around 1966), there were on average three mass murders or spree killings per month in the USA between 1976 and 1985 with more than 1,700 victims in total during the ten years that were studied.

While Europe‘s backward-looking cultures instinctively try to come to terms with a past event through remembering and keeping it fresh in people‘s minds, the more forward-looking US culture — in keeping with the American spirit and sense of self-identity — tends to try to overcome the past with a ‘one-time solution’, mostly through the violent removal of the perpetrator. The event is usually then deliberately forgotten about in order to concentrate on the future.

In Europe, the perpetrator is usually imprisoned and protected from revenge attacks and then becomes the centre of attempts to come to terms with what has happened. The perpetrator‘s psyche is analysed and is necessarily culturally propagated. In America the perpetrator is usually killed and systematically forgotten. In Europe people tend to remember the names of the killers, while in the USA the identity of most mass murderers remains unknown and does not generally form part of a collective memory.

The differences in the extent to which such murders are ‘embedded’ in society, along with the sheer numbers, mean that cultural coping strategies in the USA are quite different from those practised in Europe.

One of the main reasons for this is the sheer number of murderers. Norway dedicated 13 months to coming to terms with one single mass murder. If the USA were to devote the equivalent amount of political, psychological, cultural and media effort to each of its spree killings and mass murders it would spend its whole time on exercising constant, unremitting coping strategies.

In terms of the overall picture in America, Aurora was one of the few exceptions to the unwritten rule that anyone who commits spree killings or mass murder can expect to be killed on the spot and is only likely to be arrested in exceptional circumstances. If a police officer is wounded during the operation, then death is an even more likely outcome for the perpetrator. In accordance with an unwritten rule that is actively supported by the Republicans and silently supported by the Democrats, anyone in the USA who shoots a police officer will, with few exceptions, be hunted down and killed.

Since 1980, 80 percent of assassins have either been shot or have committed suicide or suicide by cop (deliberately allowing themselves to be shot by the police). In contrast to Breivik, who is incarcerated in a state-of-the art facility that was specially built for him at a cost of millions, many of the remaining 20 percent face the death penalty. The same principle of ‘eradication’ applies, just with a time delay.

This ‘process’ of ‘eradicate, draw a line and move on’ is anchored in a particular US civil religion and mythology that emerged from the country’s pioneering expansion westwards from the 17th to the 19th century. Is this a less suitable response than the European method of remembering and appropriating, as Norwegian politician and diplomat Jan Egeland seems to think?

At the end of 2011, the Obama administration was the first to officially apologise for what happened and to begin the long, slow process of paying reparations for injustice, confiscation of land and murder. Prior to that, every administration since 1776 had either ignored the subject or more-or-less denied that it had ever happened.

There can in fact be many advantages in an approach that represses and forgets in order to focus on the future – as America has historically done using violence – and if it is accepted that this is the price that must be paid for the past. It can be particularly advantageous in terms of speed of development and unfettered societal progress. However, when it comes to the long-term resilience of open societies, there is also a disadvantage that should not be underestimated. This is the fact that this approach becomes a key part of the collective unconscious, as we know from the post-modern social analyses of Deuleuze and Guattari, Lyotard and Lacan. 

Indeed, this is the central paradox of America’s present, anchored in its past: America destroys original cultures and ignores minority and group rights in favour of the uniqueness, cultural and ancestral dependence, powerful truth and distinctiveness of the individual, and, in doing so, radically favours the future over the past and the present through the principle of eradication.

But at the same time, and indeed because of this principle of suppression and forgetting in relation to the collective in favour of the individual, an unconscious has been developing over the decades and centuries that is rooted in this very principle of suppression.

America destroys original cultures and ignores minority and group rights in favour of the uniqueness, cultural and ancestral dependence, powerful truth and distinctiveness of the individual.

The non-analysed, suppressed genocide of the Native Americans has had a huge influence on the collective future-oriented unconscious of America. But does this kind of unconscious make society more or less resilient? Is it the European or the American approach that can claim to have had a more powerful, lasting and positive effect on the robustness of their societies?

This is why Europe still has a culture of the past, while America has a culture of the present. Europe’s over-enthusiasm for remembering and archiving simply creates more and more mythological ballast, which ultimately weighs it down, like Breivik, who has become a negative icon. On the other hand, America’s destruction of its present and future in order to create more space for its future creates suppression, which in turn leads to a problematical unconscious that continues to work because it is not capable of dealing with itself.

Or, to be provocative, we could say that the past, even if we have come to terms with it, causes division. This is because it is associated with individual points of view, which in free societies are and must remain irreconcilable, in that what has already happened cannot be changed.

However, a future that is achieved at the cost of destruction can bring people together because it is associated with possibilities and ambitions. In the same way, culture, in its oneness with politics and the boundaries of community in the sense of the classic nation state, can hinder the development of some forms of humanity that represent the only hope for the 21st century, because it is divisive. Meanwhile, technology, which is increasingly replacing culture, can unite humanity because it serves to destroy the past. In principle, and with no exceptions, these two facts are tragic. And they are both extremely painful, not only for the individual, but for the community as a whole.

The past, even if we have come to terms with it, causes division.

Open societies that are built on the past, such as those in Europe, are in effect built of the foundations of ongoing conflict, because the past is divisive. This is convincingly argued by French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard in his chief politico-philosophical work, “The Differend”. Their present is three-dimensional and ‘physically’ rich, and continues to be constantly enriched because they contain all of the past and their perception of the present is that a rich past has brought about the present – it is the fruit of the past and so is ‘infinitely’ valuable.

However, open societies like the USA that are built on the future are founded on the principle of a living, ‘motivating’ civil religion, on broad ideals that have the future at their heart, such as the American right to the pursuit of happiness, along with individual space, the development and expansion of individuality, the freedom to strive to be the best you can be. In principle, these types of civil religious ideals tend to have a unifying effect because of collective ambition and the pleasure, even pride, in what might be possible in the future.

Because America has a can-do mentality, civil religion is perceived as being directly associated with the striving of the individual and of society as a whole. The deeply-held belief in America is that crises and traumas cannot be effectively overcome without civil religion, that is to say a trust in the ability to directly experience future possibilities and the mythological legitimisation and embedding of these possibilities in the collective unconscious. 

This is why much higher value is placed on motivation and the activation of ideals when faced with a traumatic event, whereas in Europe the contemplation of ideals means falling back on concrete certainties in an in-depth analysis. So we have two entirely different ways of looking at and coming to terms with specific events.

The same applies to Europe’s spiritual, cultural and social history. Without community-shaping mythology, there would be no civil religion, and without civil religion there would be no social kit and no common foundation of fundamental ideas on which to base society, even if the role of civil religion is less pronounced and also less clearly visible than in the USA.

We have to assume, therefore, that the resilience of a particular society, at least at its deepest levels, must also be dependent on that society’s civil religion and therefore on its collective myths, whatever shape or form they may take. 

Während dies für die Realpolitiken der USA ein täglich präsentes, ja selbstverständliches Faktum ist und auch direkt in Tagespolitiken, Argumentationsformen oder Wahlkampagnen umgesetzt wird, hat Zentraleuropa unter dem Eindruck der Totalitarismen des 20. Jahrhunderts, die unter anderem auf einer Usurpation des Politischen durch (falsche) proto- und zivilreligiöse Überlegenheitsansprüche begründet waren, diese zu Recht lange Zeit skeptisch oder gar mit Zurückweisung betrachtet. Sicherer als die Arbeit mit zivilreligiösen Komponenten schien die Arbeit mit säkularen tagespolitischen Themen.

We have to assume […] that the resilience of a particular society, at least at its deepest levels, must also be dependent on that society’s civil religion and therefore on its collective myths.

What makes the Breivik case so special is the fact that, as one of the first postmodern and secular European nations, Norway has for the first time in European post-war history recognised the fundamental significance of the civil religious aspects of the case and also expressed it in political terms by systematically incorporating the civil religious layer into their attempts at national healing. Norway’s focus on values in dealing with the mass trauma was nothing less than the rediscovery and reactivation of civil religion as a political force within Europe.