Wednesday, August 20, 2008
WHY WOMEN GET UPSET WHEN YOU FORGET THEIR BIRTHDAYS(based on and adapted from
the ethics of memory by Avishai Margalit)
Is there an ethics of memory? Are we obligated to remember people and events from the past? Are remembering and forgetting proper subjects of moral praise or blame? Who are "we" who may be obligated to remember: the collective "we" or some distributive sense of "we" that puts the obligation to remember on each and every member of the collective?
Which would you prefer: that a momentous work of yours will survive after your death, but only anonymously, or that your name will survive but none of your works will?
Miguel de Unamuno, the Spanish philosopher, believed that you, as he, would opt for the survival of your name rather than the survival of your work. Perhaps you don't share his preference, but that there is (and not entirely remote) a possibility that one would choose as he did underlines his point:
How strong the desire is for even such an insubstantial immortality as that of a name!
It is this strong desire for immortality that religion expresses so forcefully. The source of the wish for an immortal name is not mere vanity. Nor is it merely the desire to "make a name for yourself" in the sense of achieving glory. It is rather a horror of extinction and utter oblivion.
I once came across a report concerning the speedy and problematic career of a certain army colonel. He was interviewed about a publicly known incident about his past, when he was the commander of a small unit. One of the soldiers under his command had been killed by so-called friendly fire.
It turned out that the colonel did not remember the soldier's name. There then followed a flood of outrage directed at the officer who did not remember.
I was struck by the moral wrath heaped on this officer simply for not remembering something - is it really of special importance that the officer did not remember his dead soldier's name? Are there special obligations to remember people's names, or at least some names in certain situations?
The answer to this, I think, lies in the relation between memory and caring. Memory is partly constitutive of the notion of care. That is to say, if I care for someone or something, and then I forget that person or that thing, it means that I have stopped caring for him or it.
Not everything I remember I care about, in the sense that I may remember things that are unimportant to me. But things that are important to me, that I care about, I will tend to remember. Hence is the internal relation between memory and caring.
Now then, memory blends into morality through its internal relation with caring.
The snag is not that it is hard to like people we don't know: caring does not necessarily require liking. What we find hard is the
attention that is implied by caring. Women may be better at dividing their attention than men, and thus more able to care for others than man.
That's why women remember birthdays, anniversaries, you name it, and men forget it. That is also why there is such general outrage from the female sex to the male about the failure to recollect such details - women recognise and draw this relation between memory, and caring.
Failure to remember, in their minds, then equates to a failure to care. Now this conclusion is not universally applicable, and indeed, it may be that women are normally wrong to draw such a conclusion. But we have already established earlier the existence of a link between memory and caring. This link may not posit equality between the two concepts, but certainly requires more attention than has previously been awarded it.
Posted by nayrakroarual at 7:59 PM
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