Two-time CASBS fellow Fred Turner engages CASBS board of directors chair Abby Smith Rumsey before a live audience to discuss her new book "Memory, Edited: Taking Liberties with History." When the erasure or distortion of collective memory through storytelling hijacks fact, truth, and history itself, what kind of information infrastructures can effectively confront those false narratives? Turner and Rumsey explore the tensions between history and storytelling and resulting implications for political beliefs, actions, and our collective sense of reality.
Two-time CASBS fellow Fred Turner engages CASBS board of directors chair Abby Smith Rumsey before a live audience to discuss her new book "Memory, Edited: Taking Liberties with History." When the erasure or distortion of collective memory through storytelling hijacks fact, truth, and history itself, what kind of information infrastructures can effectively confront those false narratives? Turner and Rumsey explore the tensions between history and storytelling and resulting implications for political beliefs, actions, and our collective sense of reality.
ABBY SMITH RUMSEY
CASBS website bio | Personal website | Talk at Long Now Foundation in partnership with CASBS
MIT Press web page for Memory, Edited: Taking Liberties with History
FRED TURNER
Stanford University profile | Fred Turner's books | on Google Scholar |
Narrator: From the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, this is Human Centered.
When the erasure or distortion of collective memory through storytelling hijacks fact, truth and history itself, what kind of information infrastructures can effectively confront those false narratives? In this episode of Human Centered, a conversation with Abby Smith Rumsey, author of the new book Memory, Edited, Taking Liberties with History. Rumsey, chair of the CASBS Board of Directors, is a cultural historian with a PhD in Russian and intellectual history from Harvard University.
The new book follows up her 2016 book, When We Are No More, How Digital Memory is Shaping Our Future. In the episode notes, we're going to put some links with more information about Rumsey and her career, including a terrific Q&A that CASBS conducted with her in 2022. But two things on what you're about to hear.
Remarkably, this is the first original episode of our show recorded in front of a live audience. In October 2023, the CASBS community convened a special event surrounding Rumsey's book. This gave us an opportunity to leave the studio and do a field recording of sorts at the center's conference venue.
As you'll hear, this format allowed some 2023 to 2024 CASBS fellows in attendance to come to the mic and ask a few questions directly to Rumsey. Second, as followers of the show know, one thing that really sets apart our discussions is the curation of great interviewers and conversation partners for our guests, and we've done it again here. Engaging Rumsey is Fred Turner, a two-time CASBS fellow who is the Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University and the recipient of a 2022 to 23 Guggenheim Fellowship.
Turner is an authority on media technologies and the way they impact and shape culture as it evolves. He's the author of three books and notably wrote a terrific essay in Harper's Magazine that serves as a nice contemporary pairing with today's conversation about history. We'll link to that in the show notes as well.
In this conversation, Turner invites Rumsey to walk through her 1980s experiences in the former Soviet Union that informed much of her thinking and memory edited. Then they broaden it out from there, exploring the tensions between history and storytelling and their implications. Together, they question what happens when people or institutions acting as infrastructures of memory tamper with the collective sense of reality of people's own past.
Do we even need unity about a shared past? With the crumbling of historical fact and truth, what are the impacts on our current political beliefs and actions? How does an interrogation of the infrastructures of memory illuminate current understandings of polarization, democratic backsliding, or authoritarian resurgences in various parts of the world?
Let's listen.
Fred Turner: Really nice to be here. Thank you for having us. You know, there really is nothing finer than spending an afternoon on top of a hill, talking about the big ideas that shape the world around us.
And so we're going to have a chance to do that today. I'm really honored to be able to be in conversation with Abby. We're going to talk together probably for about a half hour, maybe a little bit more, not too much, and then open it up for questions.
So super excited. And we're going to cover a lot of topics, infrastructure, digital technology, communism, the good stuff. So, all right, so, so, you're trying to give you a little sense of the book and also a little sense of Abby's background.
So you wrote this book in 2019, just after you had done a very well-regarded book on digital technology and public memory. Why did you write this book and what did you hope to do with it?
Abby Smith Rumsey: Well, I wrote the book, it was 2019. That's right, and I think, honestly, I wrote the book because I was so frustrated and angry at the way that the United States was, first of all, so divided, and remember, this was Trump's time, and having grown up in Western Pennsylvania, kind of aggravated that, so there were so many people I knew out here and elsewhere who actually looked at the plight that these people were in as insignificant and their views as, well, more like ignorant, let's say, and I knew what the fentanyl, the loss of jobs in Western Pennsylvania and the fentanyl epidemic had done. People in Pennsylvania who could get out did.
The rest led lives of despair, so well described by sociologists and others. So I think that I was, first of all, moved. As an American, I was just moved to do something, and also, I was, I was, the one thing that I knew I could do was point out the dangers of playing around with historical accounts. I could see that we weren't just going through another round of history wars. We were actually engaging in a fight over who owns the country and the future of the country. And it was reflected in the way that people talked about history.
And so, as an historian, I was also thinking about the fallacies of dating our beginnings in 1776 or 1619 and the common fallacy that people have. That origins determine what we are and what we do, which I think is one reason why we had this battle. I think in the beginning of the book, in the first couple of pages, I talk a little bit about my experience in Russia, in the Soviet Union.
When I had a roommate in Leningrad who came back from the market, this is where we got food. And she spent hours there and she came back with some vegetables and things that most Americans would find really hard to know what to do with, let alone eat. And she was very proud of the fact that she had bought a kilo of butter. And she asked me how often butter was available in our stores. This was in 1983. I said, always. And it was so beyond her imagination that she sort of stopped and took a beat and said, no, really. I know that you're a patriot, I expect that, but you don't need to lie. And I said, I'm not lying.
And she just grew indignant. And I realized that I had just proved everything to her that she had ever heard about capitalists, that they were liars, that they were braggadocios, etc. And so, although I was studying medieval history and I was being denied documents, that I expected, but to see the effect of this false reality, these people living in a completely false reality on their daily lives, it was frightening to me when I realized that we were at that point in the United States where these things kind of reminded me of that departure from reality.
And it was one thing to have a totalitarian regime impose that plot on a population, but to have Americans, so many of us, find these false histories and embracing them avidly, I really hadn't understand what that was about.
Fred Turner: Yeah, it's really interesting. It's interesting too when I look at the longer arc of your career, to see the shift in your work from thinking about infrastructures that might be bulwarks against the loss of memory and the loss of history toward this moment that you just described, which is a moment where you have two people in a room sharing stories, and it's stories themselves that have erased the past. And there's a tension all through the book between story and, you know, people in my world would call infrastructure structures.
Let me turn back, you know, when I told a friend of mine who's a librarian that we were going to have this conversation, he said, you know, in the library world, she's a hero. It was wonderful. He's a freedom of information librarian. He's great.
But, you know, that got me thinking that so much of your work before this book was about identifying and talking about how different particular infrastructures, physical, digital, otherwise, made it possible to challenge false narratives as they came up. You know, on your website, you have this beautiful sort of temple image that's really a library. And, you know, it's from the 19th century and it has all these different parts of thought built into a building.
But in this book, you really turn towards studying mostly Russian artists, novelists, politicians, other Eastern European artists, Gerhard Richter, for example. Why? What do you think about the role of artists and novelists and politicians in preserving or not preserving history and memory as distinct from or perhaps in relation to the kinds of infrastructures that you've worked on for so long?
Abby Smith Rumsey: Yeah, well, I will say just as a segue, you know, when I came back from that year in Moscow, rather than pursuing a career in medieval Russian history, I decided that I really wanted to work in the other aspect of scholarship, which is ensuring a good evidence. And I was very lucky to sort of find my way into a job at the Library of Congress. And also it was exactly the time when the Soviet Union was collapsing and digital technology was coming in.
And, I mean, you can't imagine how stimulating a time that was. And just as a historian, being able to see, without a doubt in my mind, that we would be going through a period when we would adapt a new technology, and it would just, it would shatter the culture that we knew. So, and of course I was concerned that technology was being laid out before people, and it was very exciting and nobody, especially the industry, thought about preserving any of this material.
And they still don't think about it. So as a historian, anybody who uses evidence, how scary is that? What happens to your data?
You know, how long is that going to last? So, I mean, all of that's very creepy for me and very motivating. But in this particular instance, I wanted to draw on my experience in a part of the world which was so different from ours. You know, it's not like the Far East. It's similar enough, but it's very, it's different from ours. I could see everything as sort of an oblique angle.
And talk about a culture in which there was such control of conversation and public life. In fact, there was no public civic life, even under the czars, that one reason why art and literature is so fantastic in Russia, why we love the 19th century is because they did not have free political discourse. Art, particularly literature, was the carrier of all the moral aspirations of the country, particularly of the classes that owned serfs but wanted to get rid of serfdom.
And a lot, of course, a lot of the writers were not actually owners of serfs. That would have been kind of a tall story. That was about it.
But everything about the art and literature was so morally inflected and so deep and really kind of existential. And that was just really appealing to me. So in contrast to, say, let's say, American art, which you and I can have a conversation about at some time.
And so I was very happy to return to that world because I was able to talk about, by focusing on the artists of that time, 20th century and 19th century, I was able to focus on those, on the subjective evidence of people. So rather than talking about historical events and things like that, I was able to, through these artists, give you, I sense, to kind of embody what it was the embodied knowledge of living in these cultures in which lies are. And so there's one woman in the 20th century, I highly recommend you dip into these volumes of memoirs that she wrote.
It's Nadezhda Mondorstam, who was the widow of the great Russian poet Osip Mondorstam. She lived to a very ripe old age and lived, she said she managed to live through that time and the purges and the death of so many people she knew, including her husband, so that she could remember and be a witness when the time came when she could write it all down and write her husband's poetry down, which she did. And in this book of memoirs, two volumes of memoirs, she gives the most profound, I think, account of both the effect of that kind of control, that slow collapse of any kind of truth and certainty in the world being replaced by sheer terror, which she felt herself.
And what's so profound about the book to me is that she spends a lot of time talking about what memory is, what its value is, why it's so intrinsic to humanity, how fragile it is, and how broken, how easily broken it is. And she said herself, don't trust me, my own memory is so traumatized. And so I thought it was a way of just, you know, I don't make direct connections with the traumatic memories that were being excavated in America now, but I don't think you need to make them.
I think that there's a very robust industry now of learning in America about a past which is very hard to reckon with, that we don't really want to look at, and yet we have to. And the example of Russia is one, contemporary Russia, Fred, is of when a country goes through all of that, has a chance to account, make amends in the 90s, for example, and simply turns its back on that. Instead, it's gone back into, let's be great again, and let's continue this great land of censorship of the past.
Fred Turner: This book set against the one right before it, and in the larger shift from material to digital preservation, has got me really fretting. A lot of the book was really exciting. It was great to see you just engage the writers, and the writers are fascinating, and the material that you've pulled in from the Mandelstam diaries are incredible, but it is kind of scary.
The question I have, I guess, if I can figure out how to put it, is if our infrastructures, our institutional infrastructures and our technical infrastructures are crumbling, or if in their new condition of digitalness, they're going to suffer a bit rot and be very sort of impossible to sustain, are we headed for the era when it's sort of all against all story-wise, where we're going to be telling kind of competing stories about what happened in the past? One of the things that really strikes me in the Russia that you're describing is that it's a story world. People are competing to tell stories, and they may or may not have evidence, they may struggle with the evidence, they may try to erase the evidence, but they're fighting over stories.
And so have we entered a time when we're fighting over stories likewise, and if so, what can we take from the Russian experience that might be valuable to us now?
Abby Smith Rumsey: Well, not only are we fighting about stories, we're trying to monopolize who gets to tell whose stories. And that's a political angle. And they're so rather touching, but I mean, it's quite hilarious. The Russians have quite a gallows sense of humor, I'd say. But I think most Americans said, this book is so depressing, Abby. It's actually quite funny.
Fred Turner: It’s not that depressing.
Abby Smith Rumsey: No, it isn't. I mean, the fact that they survived is just kind of amazing to me. But there's an incident where St. Maudre's Thomas staying in the home actually of the great Russian art or literary critic Victor Shklovsky, who has a teenage daughter named Varya.
And Varya comes home from school and talks about what she has to do today, which books she has to pull out and which faces she has to paste over, because they've fallen out of favor. And then she describes, well, of course, in some cases, people come home and they're told that they need to get rid of books on their shelves, and they burn them in their furnaces, but these new modern houses that have central heating, they actually have to go find scissors and cut the books up and flush them down the toilet, which explained a lot to me about Soviet plumbing. But, you know, what she's basically talking about is what's happening right now in China, rewriting history books, in Russia rewriting history books, in America rewriting history books, writing people in and writing people out.
And that actually, it's not to do with digital technology, the technologies of erasure and digital world are just scary as can be. But the deeper, the reason why it's a threat, I think, is because people are really trying to grab control of what, I keep thinking of my roommate, that woman could not imagine a world in which there would be butter sufficient for everybody. So I think when you tamper with people's sense of reality and their own past, you're basically telling them what is possible in the world and what is not possible in the world.
And I'm really afraid that there are people in this country who will grow up thinking that, for example, it's not possible actually that Congress ever passes a budget. It's not possible that in fact there is such a thing as a judiciary that we can trust. It's not possible, et cetera, et cetera, because people base, they look at the world as it is and they think that's how it's always been.
And so that's much more than digital technology right now. That used to keep me up, you know, last ten years and now it just moved on to bigger things.
Fred Turner: Yeah. On bigger things, I got kind of an abstract question I've been wrestling with. There's a tension in the book between what we might call history and what we might call storytelling. And I'd love to hear you say a little bit about how you see each of those categories of knowing the past, each of those ways of knowing the past.
And I'll say that one of the things you call for toward the end of the book is a kind of openness and embrace of chance and embrace of contingency as a mode of historical explanation. And you argue that, you know, closed stories about the past, tightly written narratives, close off alternatives. And part of what authoritarians want to do is tell tightly written stories that, you know, shape the world that they want to see and make sure all that other stuff falls away.
Is all that other stuff what makes history? How do we do history without telling stories if stories close us off that way?
Abby Smith Rumsey: Yeah, well, I think that in order to make sense of evidence, we need to find a way to, I wouldn't say spin a tale, but let me just say that the danger of confusing your story or making a narrative or gratifying narrative out of something in the past is that it kind of shaves off the things that don't quite fit. So there's this wonderful literary critic, Frank Cremode, who explains that for narratives to be really satisfying, to hold our attention, they have to have a middle, sorry, a beginning, a middle and an end. And no matter what happens in the middle, the ending always has to harmonize with the beginning.
And the major argument, I think, in my book, if you want to be abstract about it, the great theories that I'm trying to grapple with, is teleology versus the acceptance of chance. That is, the story that things unfold towards a predetermined end, it's a kind of Aristotelian idea metaphysically, but it's definitely the Marxist idea and Hegelian idea, the history goes through these stages and will eventually get to this other stage. And sometimes people feel highly motivated by ideology, people like Lenin, to just advance those stages of history, because it's going to happen anyway, why don't we just accelerate it, which means, why don't we just get rid of everybody? I mean, it's usually through violence, that's fine. Marx sanctioned that. But I think the narrative in the United States is of always progressing towards something.
Now it's a kind of justice. There's a fellow here, several years ago, a sage CASBS winner as well, Jen Richardson, who wrote a wonderful piece in the Atlantic about why it was so perplexing for white people, she was never this crude, to recognize that it's found it hard to say that there really hadn't been as much racial progress as we all had assumed. That in fact, that everything is kind of progressing along.
Yeah, there are things that go wrong, but generally there's this trail of progress. And she says that Americans, unfortunately, want to cling to their own innocence, this idea that they're innocent. And when you have a kind of commitment to innocence, it means that you're never free.
So this is the point in my book, is that if you want to be free, it means that you actually have to be able to make choices and accept responsibility for them. And if you believe otherwise, then you're just a child in a fairy tale. So the Soviets were very good at basically saying, this is how history is going to be. And nobody actually can be guilty of pushing that history forward. No one's actually ever guilty of being on the side of history. You can kill whom you wish.
You can kill whom you wish. And I think that's the point that our enemy is always the people who are against progress. And I think that while there's a much more benign myth of progress in the United States, it's pretty dangerous for us to free ride on the idea that things are just going to get better. I mean, a lot of us just free ride on this system. And we don't even vote. A lot of us don't even vote.
Fred Turner: I was really struck in the book by the way that you brought together the Russian history of sort of millenarian visions and Marxism. And I was struck by how similar that pairing is to a kind of neo-Christian vision coupled with tech world right visions…
Abby Smith Rumsey: Absolutely
Fred Turner: … here in Silicon Valley. Can you tell us a little bit more about the millenarian Marxist collision and what happened in Russia when it happened?
Abby Smith Rumsey: Yeah, because I'd always... I want you to talk more about how it happened in America.
Fred Turner: Oh, great. Go for it. Please.
Abby Smith Rumsey: Because you're an expert on that. But the Russians have always been prone to millenarian sects, actually.
And some of the earliest communists, the early Bolsheviks, actually embraced some of these sects. They were actually communist sects. The religious sects were actually part of the Communist Party.
And I'm not the first, and I won't be the last person to say that, the way, not Marxism, but the way Marxist Leninism was constructed, it was essentially a kind of religion, a substitute religion. You'll notice that Lenin's body is embalmed and still found in Red Square. Well, there is a tradition in the Russian Orthodox Church that, which you can read about in Dostoevsky, incidentally, that a saintly person's body is incorruptible and they will be kept forever.
And that in fact in the day of resurrection, the saints and the saints alone will have totally uncorrupted bodies and they will be the first to be resurrected. It's very elaborate. But the early Bolsheviks were, in fact, many of them coming from this sect about millenarian destiny.
And they also pictured the end of history as being precisely the kind of end of history that we can see in Marxist Leninist theory. I mean, nature will be totally conquered. I mean, this is really interesting. There's technology now. Nature will be totally conquered. Everyone will be equal. Everyone will be free. And you know, you can't be free and equal unless you're basically all the same.
Fred Turner: Right, right, right, right. And I think the American version of that is a post-Puritan. We're going to leave our bodies behind and enter the condition of being saints together. And our wealth will be a measure of our achievement and a measure of our saintliness. And to see that old Christian myth collide with new technologies, new technocracies is terrifying. And I think your book offers a wonderful ground with which to sort of think our contemporary problem here in a different place.
Abby Smith Rumsey: Yeah.
Fred Turner: Which is really, really, really neat. I want to begin to wrap up with a question that's also been on my mind a long time. So in your book, you talk in part about, or at least you point to, material infrastructures, institutions, libraries, books, physical things that resist in their limited way just as paper resists scissors, you know, the elimination of Stalin's enemies, and you know, paste and paper resist at least a little bit.
You also describe human beings, novelists and others, who resist in very complex ways, sometimes giving in where they have to, sometimes dancing around trues where they have to, sometimes forgetting whole stories just to be able to get on with their days and get the butter. I found myself thinking that both the people and the institutions were infrastructures of memory. They were both infrastructures for remembering and holding things to account.
I guess my question is, what's a good infrastructure and what kind of infrastructure should we be getting in place now given the kinds of threats that we're seeing? We're living through moments much like the ones you described in the 19th century in Russia. We can see in your book how different infrastructures succeeded and failed, their limits, their strengths, their weaknesses. What might be some things that we could do now to stem the tide a little bit?
Abby Smith Rumsey: One of the things that I learned from living in the Soviet Union with people who told the truth over the kitchen table is that sometimes the truth passes from an individual to an individual, and that's the only way it passes. I'm no expert in this, but I have been fascinated at the ways that historians are grappling with the history of African Americans in this country, how much of it is undocumented, in the way that an archives could keep, but how intact the memory is. It's really stunning.
And the historical profession, for so long, has resisted using any evidence except text. Now, we've come a long way since then. I don't think, speaking as a historian, I don't think we rely enough on, or we don't understand enough the way that memory is transmitted orally in certain cultures.
I'd say specifically African American cultures, but again, I'm no expert in this. I also think that historians, as a rule, and I'm talking about, we all have professional obligations, mine is as a historian, I don't think as a rule they really understand how human memory works, that is biologically. I can't understand why professions, I mean humanists wouldn't want to understand our biological infrastructure for things like why we create, where music comes from, how the brain retains and also loses information.
So all of these things are very important and there is a growing field of material evidence, a lot of historians now are working with what matter can yield, but I think there's a skills that we as scholars, and I speak to all of you in the room, scholars, whatever field you're in, we need to have a much better grip about the source space that we work from, how it comes to us, how it's preserved, who serves it to us. Are librarians really well compensated? Are there enough librarians? What is their training like? Why do we take them for granted? They're always there.
And so I think that there are ways that we can, each of us fill in the blanks, and there are lots of little holes. I also continue to be extremely optimistic about the fact that the tools of self-recording are available to most people, the digital technologies. Now someone once said to me, well, how can you trust people who want to tell their own story?
And I'm thinking to myself, you work in the archives, what do you think goes on there? I mean, we're trained to actually read into subjective evidence. So the more stories, the merrier, because as a historian you know, the more you have, the more context that you have to sort of just ping off that surrounding environment to understand the specific context of the lingo in this particular group of gals who are 13 talking about Barbie.
You know, at some point there will be evidence of something going on in American life.
Fred Turner: You solved the problem that I really sat down with, which is interesting. When I sat down and when I read the book, I was really scared about narrative as a species of symbolic closure. You know, we close stuff off with stories.
And when I saw your stories about Lenin and with other folks struggling over the memory of the past, wiping it out, Stalin wiping it out, wiping out the pictures, what I saw was people doing something a lot like what historians on their not-best days do, which is make coherent stories. You know, I talked to editors who say, well, this is great, but, you know, you really need a person or two to carry the story. And, you know, like, well, yeah, but maybe it's forces, maybe it's contingencies, maybe it's structures. And what I think I hear you saying is with enough stories in the room, we might actually be able to see the contingencies in the structures and not get closed down.
Abby Smith Rumsey: No, you're absolutely right. So, you know, my real bet in this book is teleology, the idea that, you know, everything is tidy up. But, you know, the truth is that we do live in a world of chance and contingency, and that brings its own responsibilities.
And one of the things that I hope you will find in the book, you know, if you read it, is that I focus on the artists who accept chance and contingency, see it as a measure of actual self-determination. And I recommend to you in particular Gerhard Richter, who just looks and looks and looks, and makes you see without turning away, looking at things you don't want to look at.
Fred Turner: Will you say more about Richter as a vehicle, as someone who moves from the Nazi era through the Communist era into our own? Because I think that's a kind of person who goes unnamed sociologically in the book, but who's really important, the person who carries the memory through and changes it as they do their work.
Abby Smith Rumsey: Oh yeah, well, we should all be so lucky to spend a book with Gerhard Richter. I mean, one of the great things is, you know, when you sit down and yes, you have to have people to carry the story, sometimes the people just volunteer. They just show up and Richter was one of them.
And you know, he was born in, right outside of Dresden in 1934. He's still with us, thank goodness, and still painting. We're making art.
And he experienced the bombing of Dresden. And he went to art school, and then just before the wall was built, actually, and nobody knew the wall was going to be built, he moved to West Germany and started art all over again, starting with Joseph Beuys and others at Dusseldorf. And the thing that's important for me is that he grew up under two different regimes of censorship and memory erasure.
So as a East German, he was told that all the bad Nazis came from West Germany, and in fact, all the bad Nazis are still living in West Germany, and that the Soviets actually had rescued the Germans from the Nazis, which is a matter of fact, that's not a matter of opinion. You'll see a lot of interesting stories about people who thought of the Red Army as liberators and joined Communist Party. Many great people did that.
But when he went to the West, he said, I didn't go there, I didn't object to the materialism so much because Eastern Germany was very materialistic in another way. They just didn't have anything to be materialistic about. But what he found so disturbing, he wouldn't say this, but it was really remarkable, was that even when the country was unified, that there were people who had grown up in West Germany who thought that capitalism was the evil.
He did a whole series on the Red Army faction, the Badermeinhof Gang, and his conclusion really was, what he abides with is the idea that any culture, any society, any person who is in the grip of an ideology becomes a slave to that ideology, basically sacrifices their life. And so the poignancy of those paintings of the terrorists who committed suicide in their cell, the Red Army faction, is that these are people who have been so idealistic. I mean, they had the most incredible moral strivings had driven them to terrorism.
And that's a story that the Bolsheviks relive. And of course, when he showed the art, the audience itself, some people objected that he focused on the terrorists and not the victims. They thought it was morally abject of him.And others thought he was glorifying the terrorists. And it took a while before people just settled down and accepted that it was not a political statement, that you were meant to be scared looking at it and scared to see what effect ideology or any idea can render to a society.
Fred Turner: It seems like idealism is the handmaiden to teleology in your story. We lock into our ideals, we lock into a big story, we think it's like an airplane, we'll just get on it, and then suddenly we crash.
Abby Smith Rumsey: Seymour Viles said we'll keep walking straight and we'll rise into the air somehow. So I'm not a pessimist, I'm actually extremely optimistic, but I just want people to grab the reins of their own lives and not listen to all this other stuff about the dream that we can create if we just get rid of half of the country. It just doesn't work for me.
Fred Turner: I think this seems like a great place to open it up to questions. Thank you.
Abby Smith Rumsey: Thank you, Fred.
Fred Turner: That was great.
Thank you.
Narrator: There was a brief pause as we waited for folks together around the mic for Q&A. You're about to hear questions from current CASBS fellows, CASBS board members, a former director of the center, and new director of the center, Sarah Sewell.
Dave Hitz: My name is Dave, Dave Hitz. I'm on the board of CASBIS. Hi.
So something that's interesting to me is that for almost all of human history, I mean going back many tens of thousands of years, it was just stories competing with stories. And originally there was no written record, and certainly for most of the time there was no photographic record or tape recordings or movies or any of that stuff. And we had this like brief period of maybe 150 years where we thought we could capture the truth and now with Photoshop and generative AI, maybe that's going away.
And so I'm just, I'm wondering what you, like I've tried to figure out what that means. Like, oh my god, it's horrible. We're going back to the way that almost all of human history always was, that it was just stories competing with stories. Should we just get used to it? Or was that one brief period of true documentation? I'm just curious to hear you reflect on what that thing means. And if you think it's gone now, and is that bad or stories versus photos?
Abby Smith Rumsey: Right. Well, I do think that it's not entirely true that there was this period in which we all, you know, had really great evidence and truth. And I will say, Dave, it's very important for me to distinguish between evidence and truth. I mean, facts are facts, evidence is evidence, truth is in a moral realm.
So any given number of facts can be interpreted differently just like the Bible. What I care about is that the evidence facts is actually just there. What people do with them is a different thing.
But the painting, you know, tearing up books and flushing them down the toilet, that kind of thing, and teaching young students in any class that this is true, this is the way it's always been, this is the bad thing, that's always been bad. And in fact, everything has turned out exactly the way it was supposed to. I mean, things are the way they are because nothing could have turned out differently.
That's what I think is the real danger. There are some pretty heroic figures in my book and in my life. There was a time when there was a display shortly after the breakup of the Soviet Union. I was working at the Library of Congress, and we had a display of documents from the communist, Russian communist archives. It was supposed to start in Washington and then go to Moscow. By the time it got to Moscow, they shut it down.
But I got a chance to talk to some of the archivists of the Communist Party archive. They kept some really, not just Stalin's party card, but they kept this amazing documentation of the terrors, and even ordering the Holodomor, the starvation that was visited upon Ukrainians. The language that they used to describe human beings was not of human beings.
And I was asking her, you know, what was it like to live with these documents? And she was very loyal. I mean, archivists can be extraordinary people and very punctilious, but she just said kind of meekly, she wasn't quite sure what to say to me as an American, but she just said meekly that she hoped that, she said, you know, we all thought that this day might come.
That was it. The day when the documents would leave the archive and be visible to people, because they were closed archives, that they were never allowed, and they have gone back to Moscow and they are closed now for research, but for that brief period of time. So I think a lot of the evidence is there.
I will say that 150 years, in my opinion, didn't really exist in exactly the way you think of it, but I also have no, myself personally, don't think that we can do much better than telling stories. It's when we tell stories as weapons against other people that worries me. Stories are great things.
I'm going to go home tonight with my husband. We're going to tell stories about the day. I'm going to tell stories about the people I talk to, he's going to tell stories about the people he talked to, and it's going to be a grand old time. And no one's going to be hurt, you know? In fact, we'll probably come away much fonder of the people that we spent time with before.
Fred Turner: That was a little more intimate than I expected to get tonight, but that's okay, that's good. That's good, I was trying to draw the line there, but that was great, thank you, that was fabulous. You know, I want to note also that in your book, there is a different piece, and your question really prompts it.
You know, there are people who tell stories in which, sort of millenarian kinds of stories, in which facts get attached to the millenarian piece. So those folks in your archive, the folks whose horrible things or who wrote the horrible things, they probably think that they're doing just the right thing in relation to some kind of grand narrative. And it's only in the future, by holding on to those stories, that we see the grand narrative can, in fact, melt away, and that we have other options.
And one of the things that's so nice about your book is that you show us moments of grand narrative in the 19th and 20th century that have melted away, that look ridiculous, that are just terrifying, and that look enough like our own time, so they give us a little purchase on perhaps resisting what's happening right now. Other questions? Come on up front.
Peter Ferreto: Hi, I'm Peter, and I'm a fellow here. I wanted to ask a question related to Gerard Richter. Apologies, I haven't read the book, but I've studied Gerard Richter, and I'm very amazed by his work.
And my question sort of comes back a little bit because I witnessed something similar to what you're saying on a much smaller scale, growing up in Italy with a communist teacher, not being able to read, at the time it was called Topolino, which is Mickey Mouse. And my question was, Richter's paintings are fascinating because they're realistic, yet they're blurred. And the more he progresses in his career, he goes towards total abstraction.
And the two are kind of related. And I'm wondering how he was, and I think he was also influenced by American pop art, photorealism, and how on the one side you have the photorealistic that is completely realistic, he does the photorealistic and then he smudges it. Is he saying something about memory? Is he saying something that the mundane has to be blurred in order to be remembered in a different way? Thank you.
Abby Smith Rumsey: Well, I actually do talk about this issue of how he deals with memory. First, let me say that Gerhard Richter will very often take banal photographs, black and white photographs, and he'll recreate them in painting, not in the same photorealistic way that some Americans do. And then he has developed a technique of slightly blurring the painting. It's a very subtle technique, and it's very beautiful. And to my mind, what he's saying, he wants to, he says these photographs are by themselves quite banal. Nobody really notices them.
I blow them up, I put them on a big canvas, and suddenly it's art. People will notice it. And so it's a chance for me to present to people what is real, what I see, but he says the real reason he does it is because that he is trying to determine for himself what the world is, and this is the way he does it.
Why I think that the technique is so important is these are all, they're sort of like, you know, the home movies kinds of images. And the blurring is exactly, to my mind, what memory does. It, you know, the image itself can be quite vivid, particularly if it's visited many, many times in the brain, but it has a quality of seeing through a veil of time, and that's what I think the blurring achieves.
I also, you know, this is a subtle point, but I do think that, especially for those of us who spend so much time writing, that one of the things that I so admire about Richter is that his paintings can look, take a banal subject, but his craftsmanship and the sheer beauty of it attracts you. I mean, you just walk across the room and go to that painting, no matter what the subject is, and it just reminds me that if we want to communicate anything to an audience, particularly something of very high thinking, you know, we have to make it really attractive for people to read. We have to write in a way that is equivalent to the skill of an artist.
And I know that that's not the number one reward in the Academy, but I really think that, I say this to the fellows here in CASBS, I think it's just important if we achieve the goals that we're trying to achieve in CASBS, which is to change the world for the better as we see it, then we need to figure out how to reach the people with our ideas. And I just want to say beauty is a really good way to get people's attention.
Fred Turner: And voice is something that you touch on in the book quite a bit. You know, the writers in particular, they're not only beautiful, they don't only write beautifully, but they write in a way that is their own. And you can see that in Richter's painting as well.
When I saw the blurring, I saw Richter almost asserting his presence over and against the sort of found picture that came sort of from history. It's like, no, I'm here. I see. I remember. And all of the writers in your book do that, and you do that to some extent with your material as well. Any other folks?
Woody Powel: Abby, oh, first of all, for fellows, if you don't know Richter well, SF MoMA has a particularly wonderful collection of his paintings on the fourth floor, I think it is. It's stunning. It's really worth seeing.
All right, so you said this… I'm Woody Powell. I'm a Stanford faculty.
You said two things that I think are kind of interesting about erasure that have tension or contradiction, okay? And I'm not talking about the infrastructure side that both of you love, but more maybe it's the cognitive side. You said there are people who look at the world as it is and believe that it's always been that way.
And then later you said people also cling to innocence. And those two seem a little bit in opposition to me. When I think of cling to innocence, I think Irish folk songs, Norse sagas, children's books, a variety of things that look to a past that's very different than the present.
So help me understand the way you think about erasure.
Abby Smith Rumsey: Yeah. So to the first effect, I think that most of us, when we're growing up in the world, don't understand, and I'm talking about when we're kids, don't understand that there was the world before us. They can't understand that our parents were actually children. I mean, I think there's something basic like that. And I do mean as we grow up in the United States, particularly because of the failure of civic education, there are many Americans who will think that, well, America has always been like this. It's always been rich.
It's always been, you know, the number one power in the world. It's always been all the various things. So I think it's just a default of all living creatures that they come into the world, they learn it, and they keep that model of the world intact.
And then it changes only when they encounter changes and as they are growing. The idea about innocence, I should say, Woody, I think that the statement about the way things always were, it's just because I'm a historian, I always approach things from a very specific temporal depth perception, and I think of that fact that people think, oh, this is the way things always were, as a flat temporal depth perception. You don't have to be a historian to see that actually the world, you know, came from somewhere before us.
And that's something you learn as you're, if you're lucky enough to grow really old. But the question of innocence is a matter of moral innocence. And not, it's not about kids and Mickey Mouse and Barbie and wearing pink and things like that.
It's the fact that we shy away from taking responsibility for the things that we have done in our past. It's our inability to really, not everybody, but a significant number of people who really believe that this country is about progress, that things can't go wrong, and the worst thing of all is that we think that we have the best system of government on the planet. And when we come in and conquer a country, they'll be grateful because they'll be able to have that system as well.
I mean, isn't that rather innocent? I mean, I don't think it's a sinister kind of imperialism in some sense. It's just this astounding lack of self-awareness and lack of interest in the rest of the world that I think has reached the point where it's extremely destructive.
And I think that people who have that kind of delusion about the world, they can be dangerous to themselves, but when they go abroad and use that model of the world to tame the world essentially, to bring it into line with what they think the world should be, then they're dangerous. And I think that, you know, I think we have a lot of accounting to do, not just about our own domestic past, but about where we are in the world. And I think that we're being confronted by that now. And it's confusing to people.
Fred Turner: One of the things that's visible in your book is that innocence doesn't live in individuals per se. It lives in the stories that absolve their bad behavior.
Abby Smith Rumsey: That’s very true, yeah.
Fred Turner: It's really, really interesting. Great.
Santi Furnari: Yeah, thank you. This has been fascinating. I look forward to reading it.
So, well, you may be very curious, and I'm interested in your take, about the relationship between memory and editing memory, the emotions that that can trigger, and the sense of agency of people. And so based on also your experience and your studies in Russia and coming from a Catholic country like Italy, where sense of guilt is everywhere, your take on American history and memory, and how that triggers in many ways a sense of pride and a sense of guilt, re-editing the memory, the established memory. So we know that guilt can also affect agency and action in negative ways.
So in many ways what we see now in terms of rage can be explained by that. Is there a more positive way of editing the memory that can trigger more positive reactions, perhaps across the bridge, and enable action across factions? I'm just interested in your take, not expecting definitive answers, but maybe based on your studies of art and history in Russia.
Abby Smith Rumsey: So as I think I understand your question, how can we sort of actively shape memory in such a way that it serves our good purposes rather than sort of subverts us? Yeah. Well, fortunately you have, before you, someone brought up in the Catholic Church and someone is an expert in the Puritan, so we got guilt covered here.
Fred Turner: We’re a fun pair!
Abby Smith Rumsey: Yeah, right. And you know, those two cultures carry guilt very differently, as we know. Well, Catholics can be absolved of their sins, and they can always try again. But one of the things that, you know, I have a little discursion into the biology of memory to show that memory is designed not to be sort of photographic so that we have a perfect record of everything so that we can survive and procreate.
And so there's a lot of information which we just get rid of or a lot of information that any creature forgets over the course of time because it becomes unimportant. So, you know, forgetting is not a bug. It's a feature of memory.
And if you can't forget things, then you can't really remember things very well either. So just to be clear, I think it is a good thing for memory constantly to be amended, to keep in line with where we are in the present, and to seek, to use evidence to seek truth, maybe not find truth, but to seek truth in good faith. There is, you know, there are just millions of professionals working on how to turn negative memories into positive memories.
Certainly in the United States, there is a lot of work on post-traumatic stress syndrome. There is a lot of work on how we can use pharmaceutical interventions, including psychedelics, to help people deal with memories and re-experience them in a positive environment so that that connection between the fact of the memory, the content of the memory, and the emotion of the memory becomes detached and becomes reattached to something positive. So Freudian analysis is often thought of as nothing more than rewriting your autobiography in a way that absolves you of the sins that you're carrying, which, according to Freud, were actually inflicted on you by somebody else.
We don't know if that's true or not. But, you know, so I think it's a very, in America, it's a very active activity. And, you know, even talking about history, going into the unpleasant history, for example, of the massacre in Tulsa in 1920, it's just, we need to know what actually happened.
And we need to get past that stage where we say, okay, who's to blame? What do we do now? This is why I think that we need this more, the sense of why teleology is terrible and why we need to accept chance and contingency and understand that the people who were wrapped up in that horrible time know more about what was going to happen after the fact than we do.
So I want to emphasize that we don't know what's going to happen. We feel in peril now, there's a crisis, and we really don't know what's going to happen, and it drives us crazy, and it makes us do bad things sometimes. Well, people living in the past had exactly the same feeling.
They didn't know how things were going to turn out. And so just to read back into the past that, in fact, sometimes it isn't just that the actors are consciously guilty of things, it's that they are moved by forces they do not understand, and we have a chance to open up discussion about what those forces were. We can see them in retrospect, and if we can see them in retrospect, then we hope, I hope, in answer to your question, we can bring some of that perspective back to the present and think, okay, a lot of the things we're feeling now, we don't know what's going to happen, but we know that if we go to the first, we cling to certainty, the first certainty that comes along, it's probably a mistake.
I would say that, at least speaking for our country, a lot of the rush to judgment and a lot of the embracing of the wackiest explanations of reality are because that's certain. That explains what's going on. It's really true that there is this, I mean, I won't even go into some of the QAnon theories, but that the forces that confuse us are actually held in the hands of just a few people that really understand and control.
And that's an abuse of memory. And so the point about memory and emotion is so powerful, I'm glad you brought that up. It is what, the falsification of memories is that emotional hook that people use to tear us apart, but it can also be the emotional hook that brings us together.
Stephan: So I'm Stephan and so I'm here too. Just wanted to follow up on that idea of, you know, stories, again, stories and, you know, the emotion of stories. You started by talking about the division, you know, how you were triggered by the division in the US you know, in terms of...
And my question overall, and I will elaborate a bit, is how much unity do we need in our current democracies? You've mentioned, talked about Russia, you know, the propaganda, the ideology. And, you know, I wouldn't say that, you know, the Western world has its own share of that, but, you know, there was this idea of a great narrative, national narrative, and actually that's the history that, you know, we learn in school, usually speaking.
And there is a lot of parallel between the US and other countries, you know. I come from France and, you know, there was this French history called by Michelet, a historian that was very much liked, you know, and that, and he's a great historian, actually true. But, you know, the kind of history of France certainly wasn't so interesting to some of the people, you know, there was other narratives that came out.
And then another recent historian, Pierre Noir, wanted to, you know, try to highlight some symbolic moments and re-evaluate those, you know, and to try to do the same thing, which is basically give everyone a common values and common, I would say, moments of pride, et cetera, which is actually something that is difficult to do, as we could see in that particular case. So to what extent do you think that it's necessary in a society, in a democratic society, to have this kind of, you know, variety of narrative in some ways, but also have these common places where everyone feels, you know, it's not a question of whether it happened or not, but whether this is what should be valued and how we, and what is, how can we, if yes, you know, how do we achieve that, in your opinion?
Abby Smith Rumsey: Hmm it’s a really difficult question. Oh, but a very good question. So I do think that, I can't speak for other countries, but in this case in America, we don't actually need to have a shared past, to have a shared future. I would settle for a shared sense of reality myself, but that's another story. That's my next book, seriously.
But I do think that, in contrast to countries that have one trajectory, one teleology, where there can be just one future, one present and one past, it's really dangerous to live in a country in which there is only one past, because it has to be a kind of fake past. It can't be a rich past. And right now, I'd say, and again, this is small consolation, but the fact that, unlike Russia, people are openly arguing about what our past is, that to my mind is doing democracy. That's what it is. And what's bad is if we come to blows and if we think that the Second Amendment gives us rights to force our will over other citizens and people we don't like and get our way.
So I think that there is a point in which it's good to debate the past, it makes it much richer, it makes it more open, it opens the eyes of others who grew up in one world and had no idea that the other part of the country lived like this. Wow, that's cool. On the other hand, I think there are definitely limits if we need to keep it civil, shall we say.
Fred Turner: I want to tease out a piece of your book at this point. You note that civil debate is the essence of preventing ourselves from getting trapped in these stories, but you also note that it's a little bit like five guys go into a bar and the nature of the bar determines the nature of the conversation. And so hiding in there is also a story about, forgive me, Woody, infrastructure.
I just kind of wanted to touch that again and say that the quality of open-minded debate and openness toward multiple stories depends also on having venues in which multiple stories can be told.
Abby Smith Rumsey: Yeah, right. So didn't think to bring up the story about the bar in the book. Sorry, I'll use that in my next book. But it is true that we tend to, we like to spend time with people that are like us. And that's part of being human. It's a sense of connection. We don't want to be bound by it, however. And I think in particular, as I think, as I look at this new building now, which is so beautiful, which we're going to inaugurate pretty soon, that's a place where people, I hope the fellows and people who visit here, can sit around the table and talk about things that they really disagree with. But do it in such a way that they come away thinking, well, I don't know, maybe that guy has a point or, you know, so there are places, and this is intentionally a place, where people can feel comfortable, I'm not going to say safe, but comfortable coming together, a neutral space where people can have those conversations.
In past years, in fact, it's actually been a very active pub as well or bar, because, you know, there have been people who have loved, you know, they had whiskey clubs and, you know, burgundy clubs. And so there's a lot of drinking going on and a lot of exchange of conversation, but nonetheless, I do think that the venue where we meet does basically set the parameters of the kind of conversation, the kinds of emotions that can be exchanged and revealed to each other. Yes, there's one more question.
John Diamond: Great, thanks. I really enjoyed the conversation. I'm John Diamond. I'm a CASBS fellow this year. So I wanted to try to be brief. This is a fascinating discussion.
I'm interested in the relationship between absolution and the acknowledgement of history. I'm thinking of land acknowledgments, right, where people sort of make a statement, we're standing on this ground, and then they go on with their day. I'm thinking of the protests over George Floyd's murder and the fact that corporations all of a sudden had statements, “systemic racism, bad”, all these things that they were saying.
I'm wondering about the relationship between that kind of acknowledgement of a complicated history and what it does for people who make the acknowledgement and what it does for actually doing something about it. I'm just wondering about all of that and the mix of things that you talked about.
Abby Smith Rumsey: Yeah, well, it's interesting. This is another point that at least I took away from what Jen Richardson wrote in that wonderful article. You know, good intentions really don't count for very much in a democracy.
I mean, you want people with good intentions and not bad intentions. But what really matters is not whether we line up on the right side of this or the right side of that, but the actual, what do we do the next day and the day after that and the day after that? So this probably happened in private conversations, but in public discourse, there was very little satisfying answer to, okay, so now that we, because of cell phones, actually can see what goes on in neighborhoods that the people who live in the neighborhoods have been saying has been going on for years, and we're actually seeing it and we're confronting with the evidence, saying, okay, I see the evidence, I see how bad it is, that's terrible.
That's just another way of maintaining our innocence. That's not really doing anything, and it's not accepting responsibility for the world being like this. That would be my answer to you.
So I don't have much... I tend to get a little worried that the fact that people make these statements and signal their virtue, for example, keeps them from actually doing anything. If they say what they think and act according to that, fine. But otherwise, I think it's another sort of free riding on democracy. Sarah.
Sarah Soule: Thank you. And I think, Abby, you've probably sprinkled this through a lot of the last few responses. But when I read the book, I saw a wonderful diagnosis and a wonderful prognosis.
And I also saw in the final chapter a call to arms, a call to action, very concrete. Here is what we need to do. And I heard you sprinkle, here's what we should be doing, to Santi and some of the other questions. But I'm hoping maybe, and perhaps this will be the final question, you might tell us, as you do so beautifully in the final chapter, where's the hope? What can we do?
Fred Turner: No pressure.
Abby Smith Rumsey: Actually, but it is pretty simple, and I think you know that, that it really is, you know, we're so lucky to live in a country, if we stand up and do something, we can actually do something. This is the contrast with Russia. If we stand up, we get our heads chopped off.
That's exaggerating. But, you know, we, I mean, people can get by very well with, you know, their fellow Russians and hired hands to go invade Ukraine, and it doesn't have to affect them as long as they keep their heads down. But it doesn't, but if we actually, I mean, the hope is us, actually, and the hope is this place.
I mean, you know, these are not easy, these are not easy questions to raise. We have to make sure that we phrase them properly, or we will actually already be giving people the answer we want without really asking an appropriate question. So what we can do here, I think, is, of course, the civil debate piece.
Listening to other people, asking intelligent questions against the grain of other people. And I hope that all the fellows come away from this time with a sense that the time they spent here, in which they felt that their ideas had power, had real power and people really listened, and then their ideas shifted because other people pushed against them and they had to modify them. You know, I hope they take that back to wherever they are.
And not everyone goes back to campus, thank goodness. You know, the fellowship has broadened a lot beyond campus. But I do think that people who teach have a particular responsibility to carry these forward into the classroom and set a model for their students.
I know it's very scary nowadays for some people to walk into a classroom full of people who have much greater moral certainty as kids than we do as adults and want to tell us what's right and wrong. But you have a unique position to model what it's like to live with uncertainty and to take responsibility. And I don't have that.
I don't teach. I sort of can give it to people, young people in my life, but I do think scholars, especially here, have a unique opportunity to really bring up the next generation, I hope, embracing uncertainty and feeling like, whoa, that's the key to my freedom. I get to choose, and that's what it means to be free.
Narrator: That was Abby Smith Rumsey in Conversation with Fred Turner. As always, you can follow us online or in your podcast app of choice. And if you're interested in learning more about the Center's people, projects and rich history, you can visit our website at casbs.stanford.edu.
Until next time, from everyone at CASBS and the Human Centered team, thanks for listening.