When you think about your nation, I’m sure lots of things come to mind – good, bad, banal. You might think about flags, stamps, singing the national anthem together, music, institutions, traditional holidays, particular foods, the national colours and emblems, the feel of the evening sunset, pride in triumphant wins in sports competitions – facts, events, times, and people all blended with a variety of emotions and a sense of belonging, even of collective identity. And perhaps all the sights, sounds, emotions melded into a vague sense of a national journey undertaken together into a not-yet-known, but better, future.
And many of the things coming to mind you probably share with others regarding your nation – what can be called ‘collective memories’.[1] These ‘collective memories’ help create the generally agreed national story: one reaching into the past, but which is also simultaneously projected forward into a possible future. The projected future is of course not yet known, and has not yet come to pass; this projected future demands a collective act of imagination regarding the nation’s possible destiny.
And looking backwards into the past, there are so many possible memories available from a nation’s history that can bind the citizens of that nation together: pick a country, and you will find national stories, known by all and sundry, animating cultural and political life – tales of overcoming, of struggle, of triumph against the odds. Nationalism and nation-building are therefore “cognitive” projects, requiring collective memories to construct a reasonably-stable, shared, narrative, sense of nationhood - the stories we tell ourselves of who we are, where we have come from, and of where we are going.
And, fundamentally, this is how we get from neurons to neighbourhoods to nations: our nations are shared, imagined entities[2], built upon brain mechanisms supporting memory, aligned together and exercised collectively.
Our memories are aligned with each other mostly through the noisy cacophony of conversations we have with each other - where we fine-tune what we remember by adjusting, subtly, our recall to cohere with that of the group we trust, are part of, and identify with. Our memories are not static or fixed. As Elizabeth Loftus, in a TED talk said, human memory “is constructed and reconstructed. It’s more like a Wikipedia page— you can go change it, but so can other people”. And, typically, you’re unaware of this subtle updating - your memory is tweaked by what everyone around is saying happened, and not just what you seem to remember happened.
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