What COVID-19 can tell us about memory
I’ve been thinking about the impact of COVID-19 on current understandings of social memory. It is yet too early to talk about the crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic (henceforth COVID-19) as a social memory. With a vaccine at least eighteen months away, COVID-19 is an ongoing crisis. Thus, it is not a memory. Not yet. Nevertheless, the vaccine will come. Most people on earth will survive the pandemic. And all of those who make it will have a memory of the crisis. Yet, I believe there are two ways in which thinking about COVID-19 in regards to memory can increase our understanding of the latter: it’s nature as a unique kind of cosmopolitan memory and the fact that it connects biological, psychological, and social forms of memory.
Cosmopolitan memory is a form of collective retelling of the past whereby lived experiences fade (because the generation that lived them dies) and thus the memory becomes primarily a re-telling of the past (Levy and Sznaider 2002, 2011). The proponents of cosmopolitan memory focused on the case of The Holocaust, the social memory of which was shaped over the course of a generation. The Holocaust gained global recognition gradually, through mass-mediated representations of the Holocaust such as film (e.g. Saving Private Ryan) or museum exhibitions in places such as the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum at the National Mall in Washington D.C. In the case of the Holocaust, it’s global stature derived partly from the recognition of the American Jewish community in the U.S. The global infrastructure of media, which included entertainment but also the press, gave enough recognition to the event so that the entire planet was able to learn about and care for the unfathomable mass murder of Europe’s Jews. In the case of COVID-19, the global stature of the crisis derived from the nature of the virus: humans had not experienced it before, thus we have no defenses or vaccines against it; it’s easily transmissible; and it’s appearing in a highly globalized world in which the circulation of bodies and goods is so pervasive that the virus has spread like wildfire. Yet, there is one more way in which COVID-19 is novel: it’s a crisis that it’s causing trauma for everyone in the planet at the same time. It’s cultural trauma of global proportions.
When I allude to cultural trauma, I’m talking about highly disruptive events that alter the normal functioning of a social system (Smelser 2004). Cultural trauma has often been discussed at the national level (Arthur 1998, Eyerman 2004, D’Orsi 2017, Fried-Amilivia 2011) because there had not been global experiences that were at once global in scope and socially disruptive. COVID-19 is both. The pandemic is highlighting the inequities of many societies, such as the U.S., where African Americans, Latinos and other minorities are dying at a disproportionately higher rate than whites. Likewise, the pandemic is serving as a catalyst of other conflicts. In places as dissimilar as Hungary and El Salvador, national governments are using the pandemic as an opportunity to suspend constitutional rights and fundamentally undermine their democratic systems (e.g. blatantly refusing to comply with court orders, or assuming de facto self-attributed special powers). Moreover, the loss of jobs world-wide is of a scale comparable to the Great Depression. In other cases, like Brazil or Mexico, presidents are opting to ignore the recommendations of health care professionals, which will exacerbate the eventual death toll and number of active cases. In sum, life as usual has, at least temporarily, changed.
Unlike The Holocaust, COVID-19 is an experience that people are not primarily living through the media. Instead, mass-mediated representations of the pandemic elsewhere are interacting with and expanding individuals’ experiences locally. For instance, most Mexicans do not live in Brazil, but the irresponsible decision of the left-leaning Mexican president to belatedly issue nation-wide stay-at-home recommendation informs Mexican’s perceptions of the Brazilian’s president decision to blatantly ignore all recommendations, and even fire the Health Minister of Brazil for insisting social distancing guidelines be followed. Similarly, while the experience of social distancing can be deeply stressful and disruptive to people everywhere, the experience is also different for individuals in the United States, where many stay-at-home orders designate exercising and walking outside as essential activities to life; to places like El Salvador, where such activities are deemed unessential. The result is that most Salvadorans are trapped in their homes in ways that most Americans are not. All traumas are disruptive and deserve attention, yet not all traumas were made equal. Even then, the collective experience of the pandemic, multiple as it is, remains a global one.
The other sense in which COVID-19 may expand our understanding of social memory is due to the link between psychological and cultural trauma. Mind you, the way in which I’m using those three terms here is tricky because these are different registers.1 You see, cultural trauma is more than the mere collection of individual/psychological traumas. In addition to that, cultural trauma represents also a crisis of social identity, a crisis whereby entire groups of people are no longer able to tell to which society/nation/ethnicity/group they belong to. They can’t because they have been casted away, forsaken and even brought to the brink of extermination. The mechanisms of psychological trauma fall within the scope of the individual. They may entail a crisis of personal identity, where the individual is unable to recognize herself, but there are other issues at play not present at the cultural level.
Psychological trauma is the result of an adverse event where the psyche was overwhelmed and the event was thus unprocessed (Kolk 2014). This drives the mind into a loop cycle, where the individual’s memory may keep revisiting, unprompted, the experience in the form of flashbacks (as with PTSD) or at least become overwhelmed when, due to some stimuli, the individual remembers the experience. In other cases, the opposite occurs and the psyche ‘hides’ the memory of the traumatic event, again until some stimuli evokes it. Regardless of the specific form the trauma takes (flashbacks, conscious reminiscing or forgetting), the traumatic memory, as long as it remains unprocessed, causes the individual to be physically and mentally depleted every time it’s invoked. The body and the mind are so deeply intertwined that traumatic memories can cause multiple physiological problems. Conversely, it is also known that physiological health conditions can cause psychological issues. People with some chronic health conditions are more at risk of becoming depressed. In addition, people who suddenly see their mobility reduced due to accidents, may also become traumatized, not necessarily by the accident, but by the implications of the accident in their lives. All these are known facts. What is knew is the notion that a physiological condition, such as catching the COVID-19 virus, and the high mortality rate of the virus, can be subject to such dramatic social disruption, and that such disruption can lead to trauma, not only at the individual, but also at the cultural level. In this regard, COVID-19 offers one opportunity to explore a link between bodies and social memories at a scale that has not been seen before.
I see also one more link between COVID-19 and social memory: the connection between the biological memory and cultural trauma. For instance, Sana Saboowala, a PhD student at Urbana-Champagin, is studying how cultural trauma affects bodies. Focused on the case of the partition of India and Pakistan, she is exploring how geopolitical events, like partition, can affect the expression of a gene over the course of a life time. It is already known that gene expression is affected by environmental stimuli and that stressful environments alter the gene in ways that are detrimental to a person’s health. However, to my knowledge, Saboowala is the first person to consider the specific effects of cultural trauma as an environmental stressor, and therefore, to investigate its impacts on public health. Work like her is direly needed in times of COVID-19. For example, a longitudinal study of gene expression in COVID-19 across multiple sites would be a means to understand how traumatic experiences at a global scale impact our health not just years down the line, but how that level of impact evolves over a person’s lifetime. This information would be necessary not only for psychologists, but also for social workers, public health experts, and policy makers. Research like Saboowala’s go to the heart of an issue about which we barely know of: if the body keeps the score, as Kolk (2014) has so pointedly taught us, what are the interactions between the memory of the social and the individual bodies? If Saboowala is understanding the direction of influence from the social body (through geopolitical events like India’s partition) into the individual’s body, what about the opposite? How does the “biological memory” of the body, as manifested through the phenotype shapes social memory?2
Notes
- My area of specialization is information science. I’m not a psychologist.
- As you can infer from my limited understanding of epigenetics, I’m no biologist either.
References
- D’Orsi, Lorenzo. 2017. “Trauma and the Politics of Memory of the Uruguayan Dictatorship.” In Memory, Truth, and Justice in Contemporary Latin America, edited by Roberta Villalón, 117–32. Latin American Perspectives in the Classroom. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. https://mirlyn.lib.umich.edu/Record/015508420 CN - F1414.3 .M45 2017.
- Eyerman, Ron. 2004. “Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity.” In Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, edited by Jeffrey C Alexander, 60–111. Berkeley: University of California Press. http://libproxy.umflint.edu:2048/login?url=http://site.ebrary.com/lib/umich/Doc?id=10676173.
- Kolk, Bessel A. van der. 2014. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York, NY, USA: Penguin Books.
- Levy, Daniel, and Natan Sznaider. 2002. “Memory Unbound: The Holocaust and the Formation of Cosmopolitan Memory.” European Journal of Social Theory 5 (1): 87–106. http://ejournals.ebsco.com/direct.asp?ArticleID=94T7WLF11Y17CK9R9HG1.
- Levy, Daniel, and Natan Sznaider. 2011. “Cosmopolitan Memory and Human Rights.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Cosmopolitanism, edited by Maria Rovisco and Magdalena Nowicka, 195–209. Burlington, VT : Ashgate.
- Neal, Arthur G. 1998. National Trauma and Collective Memory: Major Events in the American Century. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.
- Fried-Amilivia, Gabriela. 2011. “Private Transmission of Traumatic Memories of the Disappeared in the Context of Transitional Politics of Oblivion in Uruguay (1973-2001): ‘Pedagogies of Horror’ among Uruguayan Families.” In The Memory of State Terrorism in the Southern Cone: Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, edited by Francesca Lessa and Vincent Druliolle, translated by Maxine Lowy, 157–77. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. https://mirlyn.lib.umich.edu/Record/010329696 CN - HV6322.3.S63 M46 2011.