Post #2477829

2026-04-16 18:25 UTC

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.

Replies (1)

@celesteh@post.lurk.org 2026-04-16 18:35

One knowledge that gets transmitted generationally is racism and other bigotries. Could we just forget racism? Black people need to teach their children how to be safe, so the question here is better formed as "can white people just forget racism?" Once phrased like that, this seems like a re-wording of the proposal that white people become 'colourblind.' Alas, we know this doesn't work. (I won't be providing a citation here, but there is quite a lot of scholarship documenting that this idea fails in practice.) There are two major points of failure. The first of which is bias. Unconscious bias is a form of received knowledge, but, as the name suggests, it's not one that people know they know. IT is possible for motivated people to reduce the amount of bias they carry, but part of this process involves becoming conscious of the bias. It's not forgetting but enhancing one's memory that is required. Indeed, it's not enough to simply change one's attitudes to fight systemic bias. To illustrate this, we can discuss a solved bigotry, left-handedness.

Open ##2477830