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Peter D. Kramer and Andrew Solomon

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from: Andrew Solomon

Haven't We Established That Repression Is Dangerous?

Posted Tuesday, July 10, 2001, at 1:48 PM ET

Dear Peter,

I'm going to try to do one of those associative leaps and pull our topic back into the news. While we've been dwelling on how much fact belongs in fiction, it seems that elsewhere in the world there's been a debate about how much fiction belongs in fact. Did you see the piece in today's Times about the Japanese refusing to revise their history books to include acknowledgement of atrocities committed during World War II and in Nanjing? It's always shocking to discover how many lacunae there are in what gets taught as objective fact. I remember the feeling of total chaos that reigned in Russia in the early '90s when people began to discover that the history they'd been taught at school, all the facts they'd dutifully memorized for their classes, were simply wrong. Their children were suddenly learning other things entirely. People were so angry, angry at the time they'd wasted learning fictions, and often angry at this new generation that threw those fictions out the window. Of course Mao insisted that everyone learn false agricultural techniques, and magazines published during his dire rule showed bizarre photographs with "proof" of the scientific integrity of theories that were in fact ridiculous. Scary stuff, no?

I had a revelatory experience at the Museum of Natural History a few weeks ago when I took my nephew there. I was looking at the Tyrannosaurus, who was shown leaning forward with his tail up in the air. In my day, he stood with his tail on the ground. And there was a wall label that said, "For many years, scientists assumed that Tyrannosaurus Rex dragged his tail behind him. Modern science, however, has shown that he adopted a posture. ..." And I thought to myself: I am 37 years old. Modern science is NOT something that has happened since I finished school. Modern science, thank you very much, is what I grew up learning. Obviously this had to do with the advance of knowledge and not with anyone willfully lying to anyone, but it's disorienting when the facts change. It's hard to make the adjustments.

Anyway, back to malicious deception, which was my theme yesterday and is still gripping my imagination today for some reason. I feel bad for the Korean women whose stories aren't being told in Japan, the ones who were sex slaves during World War II and whose suffering is not acknowledged even 50 years after the fact. I feel at least equally bad, however, for the Japanese. Isn't it a fundamental precept of modern psychology that repression, societal or personal, this not knowing the dark things in your own past, is dangerous? That whitewashing leads you to hell and future errors? I don't think you need to punish people for what they did; I really admire the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa so much. Couldn't Japan manage to acknowledge what happened, at least in textbooks? Name no names; point no fingers; just say that something terrible happened and do all you can to make sure it never happens again.

Andrew

the breakfast table
entries
123456789101112131415161718
from: Andrew Solomon

Haven't We Established That Repression Is Dangerous?

Posted Tuesday, July 10, 2001, at 1:48 PM ET
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Peter D. Kramer is a professor of psychiatry at Brown University and author of Listening to Prozac and the new novel Spectacular Happiness. Andrew Solomon is the author of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression (read a "Book Club" discussion of it here) and also of the recently reissued novel A Stone Boat.
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Reader Comments From The Fray

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[Notes from the Fray Editor... or perhaps we should call them footnotes. There was a recommendation for David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest here, and a splendid line from Tim Button here: "Footnotes are justifiable in philosophy, but philosophy as a whole is very hard to justify." KC is expecting footnotes to these exchanges. The Fray team would like to recommend Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as having the best footnotes ever. We were glad to see that the poster Shark agreed with us: he is looking like the new star of the "Breakfast Table" (eat your hearts out Neill Hamilton and Amber) with his cutting-edge offer of a Kaus-like Star Poster skipping service. Find it here, on the WillV post below, and here.]


You wrote about anarchists who capture the popular imagination? Obviously, you didn't know about the merry band here in the Fray, a group that perfected popular anarchy long ago. Come join us as those from the left, center, and right are terrorized for intellectual pretensions, grammar and punctuation, and bourgeois status symbols. Your sequel could write itself.

--WillV

(To reply, click here.)


It has been suggested that liberals backing down on their opposition to nuclear power is equivalent to conservatives backing down on the rights of children who cannot yet defend themselves against abortions. I'm not going to bother with the actual debates, but I would like to say that liberals and conservatives alike view the nuclear power question as a balance of risk vs savings. Nuclear power is cheap, plentiful, and the electricity is the same either way. The only questions are these: can the plants be run safely, can the waste be disposed of safely. These are practical concerns, and as the need for power increases, the risks seem less ominous. If we were to suddenly find unlimited sources of sulfer free oil, or a way to cheaply produce reliable solar energy, conservatives would find the risk of nuclear power unpalatable. Nobody opposes nuclear power on moral grounds, everybody has practical concerns.

Abortion, infanticide, pornography, etc: These are moral issues, not practical issues. No conservative would say that he opposes abortion because there are too few babies being produced. Moral issues are fundamentally different from practical concerns.

In any case, conservatives and liberals frequently change their positions on practical issues, as things become palatable or circumstances change. When they start giving up moral positions, there had better have been a revelation, because abandonment of a moral position out of expediency is ... immoral

--Ben Kirkup

(To reply, click here.)

 (7/9)

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