Post #2477828

2026-04-09 10:42 UTC

The transmission of intergenerational trauma is also disrupted by forgetting, but the transmission of memory is also often a moral mandate. My mother suffered terribly for her belief in Hell and was careful to try to replicate that in my brother and I. Hell has specific aspects that function to keep it within memory. Failure to communicate the idea of Hell is punished by Hell itself. What's more, failure to learn of Hell also damns the ignorant. To avoid the 'reality' of Hell, one must be aware of the idea of Hell and pledge to communicate it further. Rothko's Basilisk is just a special case of Christian Hell, less pernicious because it has a mechanism for forgiving the innocent. Fed Clark has more on hell: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2026/04/07/the-pedagogy-of-moral-accommodation/

Replies (2)

@celesteh@post.lurk.org 2026-04-16 18:25

Reviving this thread for two reasons: 1. I forgot to include citations! 2. I think it's maybe my unfair gloss to suggest that Jack Halberstam might endorse forgetting as a way of disrupting intergenerational trauma. Indeed, in Wellerstein's post, he identifies two kinds of knowledge: book learning and tacit knowledge. Book learning are the plans for how to make a rocket. Tacit knowledge is having the skills to do the precision welding on the fuel lines. You need both of these to run the nuclear programme. This is the required _technical_ knowledge. But, I will argue, it's not the only kind of knowledges and not the only kind needed to run a nuclear programme. In order to run a nuclear programme, especially one with the ability to literally kill everyone, you need to _want_ to run such a programme. It's not a binary decision to be able to end the world, but thousands or millions of smaller decisions about how and _why_ to build such a massive, sprawling system. The 'why' is another form of transmitted knowledge. Why on earth did people in the 1950s decide that they wanted to run the world as a suicide pact? This cultural mindset, which persisted until at least the 1980s was engendered in people, an invisible form of knowledge transfer.

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@prinlu@0x.trans.fail 2026-04-09 17:56

@celesteh@post.lurk.org very interesting thread, thank you 💜

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