Conciliation Via Amnesia

There's a fascinating article in this weeks Economist on the Pope's recent visit to England, and how easings in the old Catholic/Anglican rivalries made it a surprisingly non-controversial event. This isn't the product of rapprochement, peace treaty, or interfaith dialog. It's a much more mundane matter of amnesia - the British "national genius for forgetting rather than forgiving."

"...the tradition of sectarian enmity was not so much purged from the body politic as mislaid. Anti-Catholic prejudice was rife in polite English society until surprisingly recently: countless families can tell tales of scandals or feuds triggered by a mixed Anglican-Catholic marriage, up to the 1960s or 1970s. Sectarianism lingers on in Northern Ireland, bits of Scotland and some English cities like Liverpool. Yet in much of England, people under 40 cannot remember why Catholicism caused their grandparents such alarm."

This small glimmer of hope deserves to be analyzed and applied elsewhere.

"An optimist might see a chance there for Islam, another conservative religion currently causing alarm. A bit of affluence here, a bit less defensiveness there, and before you know it, the English cannot remember why a minority worried them so much. It is a muddled, imperfect solution (just ask Catholics offended by this week’s pope-bashing). But with the English, muddle is often as good as it gets."

If it's true that forgetting's as good as forgiving, one can't help but contemplate the Palestinian/Israeli mess. If a Palestinian state were established, and a thriving Palestinian middle class fostered, might a few generations of muddle dampen the vindictiveness?

Well, Bloody Mary reigned back in the 16th Century, so that one took a while, but a mere two generations after the holocaust it's hard to imagine Jews socially rebuffing Germans, much less dreaming of returning to Austria to retake the family land. As with England, this may well be attributable to a secular, thriving middle class with more to do than lick old wounds (it's fortunate that the Jewish "Never forget!" slogan has remained a call to beware man's inherent dark potential, rather than a call for Germans to be despised for all eternity).

But cultural factors seem to make different people forgive - or at least forget - at different rates. Few of my secular, middle class, thriving Armenian friends or acquaintances can make it through a half hour conversation without making reference to the 1915 Armenian Genocide.