In the nineteenth century, when nations were still becoming and not just being, Ernst Renan spoke on the topic of nations, “an idea which, though apparently clear, lends itself to the most dangerous misunderstandings.” His 1882 text, “What is a Nation?” is not the final word on the subject, but it contains some thoughts we might find helpful.
With nations, we might say that memory seems to be thick. Every national holiday is a moment of remembrance. Who we are as a people is in many ways defined by our ancestors. Think about the song “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” by Samuel Francis Smith. What land is it? It is the “land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrims’ pride.” When we want or need to go to war, we also draw on memory: “Remember the Maine, to hell with Spain,” “Remember Pearl Harbor,” “Remember 9/11.” Memory seems central to understanding a nation.
One interesting idea from Renan is that forgetting is also important. According to Renan, “Forgetting, I would even say historical error, is an essential factor in the creation of a nation and it is for this reason that the progress of historical studies often poses a threat to nationality.” Renan’s “forgetting” is not actual amnesia, but a type of cultural amnesia about the past, a decision to only lightly remember some things.
The past is important to nations, but it is most usable outside the discipline of professional history. Renan continues, “Historical inquiry, in effect, throws light on the violent acts that have taken place at the origin of every political formation, even those that have been the most benevolent in their consequences. Unity is always brutally established.” As Renan described, “the reunion of northern and southern France was the result of a campaign of terror and extermination that continued for nearly a century. The king of France was, if I dare say so, the ideal type of the secular crystallizer and produced the most perfect national unity there had ever been. However, having been seen from too close, the king of France lost his prestige; the nation that he had built damned him and, today, only cultivated minds know what he was worth and what he did.”
Every nation has episodes that must be somewhat forgotten, or at least delicately remembered, for people to feel comfortable in their country. The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre does not have to be denied, but it can hardly be the defining point in French historical memory. How can we properly remember the hard things? This comes up in America every autumn, with Columbus Day/Indigenous People’s Day and Thanksgiving. We feel the tension Renan describes between the burden of historical accuracy and the desire for a sense of national unity. The two are not easily reconciled. Howard Zinn would suggest that you do not reconcile them at all; he would say that you should not consider the history of the state your history. The narrative of America is not your narrative.
But this matter of “forgetting” is not just about your relationship to the state, it is also about your relationship with your neighbors. The nation is, as Benedict Anderson says, an “imagined community.” We may never meet the vast majority of our fellow citizens, but we are bonded together and need to believe that, too, if we are to live well alongside one another. And if we want to be sentimental for a moment, love also requires a certain amount of “forgetting.” 1 Peter 4:8 tells us that “love covers a multitude of sins.” That can be a silly practice, for as Erasmus points out in The Praise of Folly, anyone who loves or has friendships is a fool, because these people will hurt you and more than once and you have to carry on as though they haven’t and won’t in order for relationships to work. So if we want to go so far as to love our neighbors—not just share a nation with them—we may have to foolishly “forget” some things.
“Forgetting” can go too far, especially if it is almost entirely actual and not partially metaphorical. In Germany after the Second World War, many Germans wanted to forget about the Third Reich. They went so far with that that it eventually necessitated a new and very long German word, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, which is about the struggle and work of coping with and overcoming the past. This word comes from the later twentieth century, when German academics led society to begin to address the Nazi past. And, in fact, you will find that most of the consequences to German companies for participating in the Holocaust came later in the twentieth century. If all we do is forget, we do not have enough sense of where we have been to understand where we are going.
We may think of all “forgetting” as too easy acquittal, but some forgetting can be a sign of ambitious belief in a possible future. Every time we have a close election, someone will quote Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address at you: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.” In 1861, the Civil War may not have started, but several states had already seceded from the nation. No slaveholder was not an enemy to the enslaved and those who believed in the natural right to human freedom. John Brown had made himself an enemy to those who supported slavery. We were not all friends. But Lincoln was encouraging us to “forget”—at least deprioritize—the things that made us enemies and to focus on the bonds of affection.
Lincoln truly understood the paradoxical relationship between memory and forgetting in maintaining a nation. Consider the “Gettysburg Address.” Lincoln begins with “fourscore and seven years ago,” calling up the memory of our Founding Fathers. It is a strong appeal to the past and to the nation he wants to preserve. He advances to the present, acknowledging the Civil War and the consecration of this battlefield, achieved by “the brave men, living and dead, who struggled here.” We “can never forget what they did here.” For us to remember what they did, we must remember the Civil War—a moment of a divided nation. How can we remember that moment and the sanctity of this field of battle without being caught up in our differences and our time spent as enemies? Lincoln tells us that, “from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” This nation will have a new birth and our memory of this time of division will be like a crucible, one in which our divided parts were brought together. We are not forging a new nation. Somehow this break in national unity will be brought into a narrative of continuity. We will have to remember and honor the sacrifices made at Gettysburg, but we will have to “forget” that all the dead there were killed by Americans, acting as enemies to each other.
Forgetting, especially as a form of love for our neighbors, is not free. James Baldwin understood this very well. In The Fire Next Time, a letter to his nephew, he acknowledged the difficulties and oppression experienced by African Americans, “the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.” And yet, he explained to his nephew, integration was not going to be matter of white people accepting black people. “The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love.” Baldwin told his nephew that the people he must forgive “are, in effect, trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.” But they are “brothers” nonetheless.
It calls to mind Jacob and Esau. Jacob was a deceptive brother, who took Esau’s birthright and conspired to cheat Esau out of his father’s blessing. Jacob was, in so many ways, an enemy to Esau. Jacob saw it in himself. When he came across Esau again later in life, he was filled with fear and sought his favor. Esau surprised him. In Exodus 33:9, he said to Jacob “I have plenty, my brother; let what you have be your own.” Jacob had acted as Esau’s enemy, but Esau did not deal with him as he deserved. He dealt with him as his brother. No doubt he remembered being robbed by Jacob, but he was able to forget it, too.
At any given time, some of us in this nation are enemies. Whether it is a close election, a cutthroat economic system, a divide over wars, territorial claims, or something else—sometimes we are opponents and we are fighting, implicitly or explicitly. How can we do the hard work of forgetting in the right way, even for people who do not deserve it? How can we “forget” the things that make us enemies in order to focus on the things that make us friends?
Proper forgetting depends on the idea of a nation itself. For Renan, “a nation is a soul, a spiritual principle” built on two things, the past and the present. “One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present consent, the desire to live together, the desire to continue to invest in the heritage that we have jointly received.” We need both remembering and forgetting. Forgetting is made possible by the desire to live together and to build on our shared past. In America, as mad as we get, most of us won’t leave. Every election cycle, people promise to move away. For the most part, they don’t. They shouldn’t. It is a sign that most of us don’t want to be from somewhere else.
According to Renan, “A nation is therefore a great solidarity constituted by the feeling of sacrifices made and those that one is still disposed to make. It presupposes a past but is reiterated in the present by a tangible fact: consent, the clearly expressed desire to continue a common life. A nation’s existence is (please excuse the metaphor) a daily plebiscite, just as an individual’s existence is a perpetual affirmation of life.” In The Fire Next Time, Baldwin tells his nephew, “this is your home, my friend; do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become. It will be hard, James, but you come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity.” We “forget,” or overcome our past and present division, by persisting as a community and making sacrifices for the common good. We take the past into consideration and account for it, but we spend more time in the present, attempting to build a shared future. The question is not whether we were or are enemies, but whether we will allow enmity to define our lives indefinitely or if we will instead practice the judicious forgetting required to pursue the common good. A nation is what we make of it.
Image credit: Emanuel Leutze, “Washington Crossing the Delaware” (1851) via Wikimedia Commons
