Unveiling Social Amnesia: Bridging Generational Gaps for a Vibrant Future
Summary:
This article explores social amnesia, a collective forgetting among generations, highlighting the communication gap between older and younger individuals. It emphasizes the significance of bridging this divide to preserve cultural legacies and avoid a dystopian future.
In this article, I focus on a fresh perspective I have cultivated over the past eight months about a phenomenon called social amnesia.
Social amnesia is a collective forgetting by a group of people. This concept has also been explained as “cultural amnesia,” “forceful repression of memories,” and “willful ignorance.” Russian-American psychoanalyst Immanuel Velikovsky defines cultural amnesia as “widespread ignorance of and indifference to what used to be important but has now fallen into forced displacement, resulting in a possible ‘dystopian future.’”
The inspiration for this article came from my dialogue with undergraduate students of design in Indore yesterday. I was invited to speak to a gathering of design professionals, teachers, and students at a symposium titled “The future of design education in the post-AI world.” About one-third of the audience were students sitting at the back of the auditorium, listening to lectures by design leaders from India and abroad. When my turn to speak came, I invited the students to join me on the stage. We sat in a semicircle on the floor for a chat. I began my conversation by playing a sound byte from Binacamala, a popular program that played Bollywood songs on the radio every Wednesday for several decades. The program was hosted by Ameen Sayani, known as the most magical voice of India, who had just passed away two days ago. I wanted to know how many people recognized his voice. While the students had no clue who he was, the rest of the auditorium called out his name in excitement. Next, I asked if anyone knew the famous Hindustani classical singer Late Kumar Gandharva, who hailed from Devas, a town just about 30 km from Indore. Again, the knowledge gap between the generations was visible in the response I received. I convinced myself that this was a generation gap. However, a conversation with a professor later in the day hit me hard. He said, “A few days ago, I showed some students the photo of Nobel Laureate, poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer, educationist, and painter Rabindranath Tagore and asked them who he was. Nobody knew who he was. One student guessed he was Jesus Christ.” I was stunned hearing this because my generation takes immense pride in Tagore as an icon of Indian patriotism, romanticism, and liberal ethos. His work is an inseparable part of India’s social imagination.
This incident led me to think deeply about what I am learning over the past eight months from my oral history project called “The legacy of India’s imagination.” My purpose behind this project is to help create a resource for the benefit of future generations and help them appreciate the diversity, vibrancy, and purposefulness of various individuals who have contributed to India’s purpose and progress in the post-independence period.
I began to ask myself,
- While I am creating an archive of The legacy of India’s imagination, is the younger generation even curious about it?
- While India’s freedom from British rule is an important mental marker for my generation, what, if any, is a historical marker for the current younger generation?
- Is the knowledge gap between my generation and the youngsters I am speaking to just a generation gap or is it a social/cultural amnesia caused by either “forceful repression of memories” or “willful ignorance”?
I went to bed restless with these questions hovering in my mind. The next morning, one of the student volunteers came to the hotel to escort me to the airport. She asked me a lot of questions about the future of design and her career options. She also said something that put my mind at rest. “Inviting us all to sit with you on the stage made a big difference to us — it removed the distance between us and got us thinking deeply about the questions you were asking.”
Something hit me hard. I realized it was not a generation gap that was creating a knowledge gap. It was a lack of communication that was subjecting the younger generation to social amnesia.
No matter how accessible the world’s information is on the internet, there is no substitute for oral traditions of the transfer of knowledge and wisdom. The mere presence of knowledge on the internet does not explain its importance. Left to digital devices, dialogue and discourse are undermined, and politicians and marketers get a free hand at “forceful repression of memories” and “manipulation of imagination and consciousness.”
The impact of social amnesia can be dire both for an individual and for an entire generation.
- Social amnesia robs them of the legacy of wisdom accumulated over centuries.
- It paints an incomplete picture of history in their memory
- It may lead to learning misdirected lessons from the past as they project their imagination of the future.
- Social amnesia may also deny them a sense of being connected to their roots: the ideas, idealism, and creativity from the past that are worth pursuing into the future.
I suddenly realized how important my project “The legacy of India’s imagination” is, not just as a celebration of the past or as an inspiration for the future. It is important from the perspective of removing social amnesia and avoiding a dystopian future.
