朗读版：记着的，忘了的，一块一块拼起了2020 | CGTN周末随笔
Sidelines | And Now Let's Begin to Remember 2020
Sidelines is a column by CGTN's Social Media Desk
How long will Donald Trump be remembered as the president of the United States before slipping from the global collective memory?
If cross-generational research could be any reference, its empirical analysis is unlikely to please either the incumbent's keenest critics who want to cleanse the Oval Office for January 20 or his most ardent supporters hoping to carve out his bust on Mount Rushmore.
Conducted at Washington University at St. Louis (WashU) respectively in 1974, 1991, 2009 and 2014, the series of surveys gave participating students the same task of writing down the names of as many U.S. presidents as they could in chronological order.
The findings, if viewed within each generational group, probably run in parallel to common sense. Few participants had trouble remembering the country's founding fathers who did the top job. Hardly anyone should miss the most recent leaders. It was those in between that failed to leave a lasting trail, barring a few of tremendous success such as Abraham Lincoln.
What may disconcert Trump, should he have ever pondered immortalizing his name, and his devotees comes when results were put alongside each other. For example, while 97 percent of college students in the 1974 experiment could recall Lyndon Johnson as president, the rate declined to 71 percent in 1991 and by 2009 only 42 percent of the surveyed remembered him – the bar for staying in collective memory forever seems to be quite high.
Collective memory is trickier than the people simply copy-pasting historical events such as war and pandemic onto their brains. Being informed by many factors, it is how a group of people remember their past that in turn molds their perception of the present and future.
A 2013 study in the U.S. found that although both younger and older Americans treated the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as critical World War II events, they parted ways on the attitudes towards the nuclear warfare. The seniors, having lived through the period, viewed the bombings in a relatively approving light as ending the war and saving American lives which could have been lost were it to drag on. The younger interviewees focused more on the civilian casualties and the destructive power of the weaponry. Three years after the research, Barack Obama, then U.S. commander in chief, upon visiting Hiroshima thus opened his speech:
"Seventy-one years ago, on a bright cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world was changed. A flash of light and a wall of fire destroyed a city and demonstrated that mankind possessed the means to destroy itself."
We don't have to remember a war by actually fighting one. Media can make up for what people lack in real-life experience. For those who didn't live in the U.S. when John F. Kennedy (whose name was found to remain solidly in American collective memory by the WashU research and projected to continue doing so), the 35th U.S. president, was assassinated in 1963, the burgeoning live broadcasting had started pulling together what had hitherto been the enclosures of collective memories originally isolated culturally as a result of geographical separation.
What the media offers is ingredients, however, sifted through multiple layers of social and cultural codes programmed in our brains, before being stored for future remembrance. This procedure can be quick, quiet but factually problematic. Not only because the existing collective memories we use as tools to process the new information are subjective. The neuro system of remembering and forgetting itself is not perfect.
How we remember things, for example, doesn't always chime with how we experienced them. A wonderful holiday on a beach could be ruined in our memory by, say, a 24-hour delay of the flight back home, even if we peacefully savored every second of the seaside view – a psychological effect termed "peak-end rule," i.e. we are prone to judge our experience of an event based on how we felt in its most intense point and at the end, neglecting the duration (in a way quite like trying to recall the presidents). The effect may play a role in how differently the coronavirus pandemic will be remembered once it's all over by people who come out on the other side of the health crisis largely unscathed and by those who have suffered dearly.
Along with remembering comes the mixed blessing of forgetting. Neuroscientists have discovered that we store things in our heads as actively as we delete them, because we need to learn how to apply the skeleton of knowledge to as many situations and as quickly as possible. Too many details would overload the brain (imagine you were bitten by a dog in a park owned by a man wearing a white shirt, you don't have to remember all these details apart from "animal of this kind bites" to alarm yourself against such danger next time). On this power to forget some may lament that histories repeat themselves – a likely theme in talking about 2020.
Probably for these design flaws we still need the special occasion of serious media year-end review – an occasion of collective memories of different communities overlapping and clashing with each other, and you may have guessed what the overarching narrative will be in those special offerings – to remind us what has been remembered and what has been forgotten, and more importantly by whom and why, if not just for saving us the trouble of going through every single Trump tweet to establish if he will go down in history being remembered as the greatest U.S. president of all time, or the worst.