Interesting if less practical than advertised
The headline did not take me where I thought it would.
Linda Kinstler’s New York Times guest essay, “Jan. 6, America’s Rupture and the Strange, Forgotten Power of Oblivion,” (gift link) examines “an ‘act of oblivion,’ an ancient, imperfect legal and moral mechanism for bringing an end to episodes of political violence.” It is a pragmatic effort at “forgetting — a forgetting that instead of erasing unforgivable transgressions, paradoxically memorialized them in the minds of all who had survived their assault.”
Oblivion, a form of amnesty new to me and now fallen out of favor, served to put behind a society the rifts of past transgressions rather than see to it that every last transgressor receives punishment, especially where entire armies or classses are targets. That serves only to keep wounds open instead of heal them.
I’m not there yet.
Kinstler cites its roots in Greek history and writes, “As a legal mechanism, oblivion promised the return to a past that still had a future, in which the battles of old would not predetermine those still to come. It did not always achieve its lofty aspirations, nor was it appropriate for all conflicts. But the ideals it grasped for had an enduring appeal.” The practice has contemporary echoes in Clean Slate laws on the books in 12 states.
The unique power of oblivion is that it does not forgive the crimes committed on one side or the other, but rather consecrates and memorializes the profound gravity of the wrongs. It demands accountability and refuses absolution, yet it rejects the project of perpetual punishment. Where forgiveness is impossible, the only viable option is to look past the wrong, to bury it in oblivion, but to always remember where it lies and the harm that it caused. Historically, appeals to oblivion offered political communities the prospect of rethinking the present, presenting a rare opportunity to re-evaluate and confront societal divisions.
That paragraph may impress in a doctoral dissertation, but I’ll admit I cannot bring it into focus for its gauziness. Kinstler means to offer some way for the country to put behind it the divisions of Trumpism and Jan. 6 and move on. That presumes Donald Trump, a man whose very identity is getting even, wants to put the past behind him rather than under his boot heel.
When I read “the strange forgotten power of oblivion,” I thought Kinstler meant to explore the tango the MAGA movement and its Christian nationalist wing is performing with seductive nihilism, and its impulse to murder the republic if it can’t have its way with her.
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