Andreas Kappes and M.J. Crockett, ‘The Benefits and Costs of a Rose-Coloured Hindsight’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20 (2016), 644-6.
I wrote about the benefits of nostalgia once (here). Now Kappes and Crockett are proposing reasons why our self-serving biases extend into the past as well as the future. We’re habitually optimistic, but we also have a kind of ‘unethical amnesia’: ‘memories of unethical behavior are less vivid than memories of good deeds’. This amnesia takes a while to set in, and once an unwanted memory has been suppressed once, it gets less likely that it will be remembered. This appears to be a matter of retrieval rather than encoding: the memories that reflect badly on us go in alright, but we don’t recover them again.
There are benefits and costs. It might protect us from psychopathology, and it might help our ‘social impression management’: we need to convince other people we’re good to be around, so it makes sense that we convince ourselves first. It may seem benign enough, this ability to keep thinking well of ourselves, but the authors are concerned that it also extends to other members of social groups. They link it to historical episodes in which ‘white-washed narratives replace the despicable episodes many would rather forget’.
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Aeschylus portrays something like this in Agamemnon. The King returns from the ten-year Trojan war in triumph. He and his army have come to terms with the sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia as they travelled to Troy. (Agamemnon was told that this was the only way of getting the Gods to bring some wind for the becalmed fleet.) She is not forgotten, but the whole episode is cocooned in necessity: it had to be done, there was no other option. At home in Argos, however, Clytemnestra has not moved on at all: for her the death of Iphigenia is crying out for vengeance as freshly as ever. However, she has a new lover and has enjoyed power over the city in her husband’s absence, so her motives are complex. Rose-tinted and blood-stained are all one here.