My performance of suffering has at times produced the love, nurturing, and attention I needed. At times, this performance served me better than other things I tried to get love.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, this largely unconscious practice of performed suffering that started out as serving me became a prison that limited and isolated me. People tired of the play. <\/p>\n
What gets socially rewarded varies over time and place and how people behave varies with the situational incentives. When the demand and the reward for a particular performance increase, the supply and quality of that performance increases. Those who didn’t care about my suffering didn’t get much performance of suffering from me. Those who rewarded my performance of suffering got more of it. <\/p>\n
Prior to the 1960s, claiming victimhood, including for your group, was not prestigious in the West, but then it became prestigious for some groups. As a result, claims of victimhood increased according to demand. <\/p>\n
I want to be as objective and fair as I can in this essay so I can gain status in your eyes. On the other hand, if I can get more prestige by performing suffering, I can do that too!<\/p>\n
My father, Desmond Ford<\/a>, was an evangelical Christian theologian and evangelist. He was a finer man than me on many scores. I never saw him sin with regard to sex or money or power, which I couldn’t say about myself. If you love my dad, you might view his career as a magnificent example of the wounded healer. Over the decades, he developed a pained and saintly visage and his Christlike performance, which I have no doubt he experienced as a real and vivid relationship with Jesus Christ, served him and some of those around him while repelling others. This performance was internally produced and socially produced according to incentives, just like the performance of other people. <\/p>\n My dad loved preaching at funerals because that was when people listened to him most intently. Dad was uncomfortable in most social situations where he not the center of attention, and he had 1000x more followers than friends. After his exile from the Seventh-day Adventist ministry in 1980, he changed in some ways and he didn’t change in other ways.<\/p>\n From his teen years, my father’s charisma could light up a room and that didn’t change after 1980. He could still be the life of the party. He could have people rolling in laughter or crying over the depth of God’s love. I never doubted dad would do the right thing according to his understanding and ability to follow God’s law and I felt so inadequate in comparison to his morality and accomplishment that when he died in 2019, I primarily felt relief that he could no longer call me out on my self-serving stories. His judgments on me were often far more accurate and far more uncomfortable than my own. <\/p>\n When I overheard my father give advice to people in pain, I was consistently impressed by his empathy and good sense, even though a part of me wanted to cut him down so I could feel better than him in some way. I might say to myself at times, “Sure, I’ll never be as successful as dad, but at least I see through the bs.”<\/p>\n My father frequently sacrificed his own comfort to help others, and he did this far more than I have done. <\/p>\n Please clap for my humility.<\/p>\n Dad made almost everyone close to him feel inadequate in comparison to his performance of superiority (including in the superiority of his suffering ala how Michael Eisner boasted about the severity of his heart attack). <\/p>\n When I went to UCLA in 1988, my overall view of my father changed in a few months from seeing him as a hero to seeing him as a deluded and pathetic loser. Dennis Prager, by comparison, was much greater man in my eyes. <\/p>\n My father was a human being with flaws in addition to gifts. He became lonely after his 1980 exile and he obsessed over the redeeming power of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. My atheist brother called him Dr. Deathman because he often predicted, with mixed accuracy, when people around him would drop dead.<\/p>\n I’ve never been able to perform as effectively as my father. I didn’t give my teachers, employers and community what they wanted as effectively as he did. I never gained the following and prestige he did. I didn’t produce the scholarship he did. <\/p>\n I learned from my father, who had a PhD in Rhetoric, how to frame things so I came out ahead but I didn’t produce this framing as convincingly as he did. While my father impressed others, I came across as unbearably duplicitous and pompous. <\/p>\n Sociologist Jeffrey Alexander’s work on cultural trauma, particularly his 2004 essay “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma<\/a>,” argues that trauma is not simply something that happens to a group but something a group constructs through a specific cultural process that requires carrier groups, narrative entrepreneurs, and institutional amplification. The construction serves specific social functions and produces specific rewards. <\/p>\n In his 1999 book, The Holocaust in American Life<\/a>, historian Peter Novick<\/a> (1934-2012) gestures at this without quite stating it. His documentation of how Holocaust testimony became a cultural form with specific conventions, the trembling voice, the specific narrative arc, the resistance to analytical distance, suggests that survivors learned what society wanted from them and performed it. Those who could not or would not perform it, Primo Levi being the paradigmatic case. He received less of the attention and moral authority than others such as Elie Wiesel who produced stories of inferior depth.<\/p>\n Levi’s suicide in 1987 has been read by some as the delayed consequence of his Holocaust experience, which fits the sacred incomprehensibility framework. Others, including Diego Gambetta in a careful essay, argued the evidence for this reading is weak and that Levi’s depression had more proximate causes. The organized Holocaust memory apparatus needed his death to mean what it needed it to mean.<\/p>\n Alexander distinguishes between what he calls lay trauma theory, which treats trauma as a natural and automatic response to terrible events, and his own constructivist account, which argues that trauma is a socially mediated attribution requiring carrier groups, narrative work, and receptive audiences. The suffering is real. The translation of that suffering into a recognized collective trauma is a social process with identifiable stages and identifiable beneficiaries.<\/p>\n I learned that with certain people, the performance of pain brought attention, love, and status. Alexander’s framework says the same thing operates at the collective level. Carrier groups, his term for the organizational entrepreneurs who broadcast trauma claims, succeed or fail depending on whether the wider audience finds the claim compelling and identifies with the victims. When the audience is receptive, the rewards flow toward those who most effectively perform the trauma. When the audience is not receptive, as in the early postwar period Novick documents, the supply of performance dries up.<\/p>\n My father’s pained and saintly performance was not cynical. He experienced his gravitas at funerals as authentic pastoral presence. That funerals were when people listened most intently shaped the performance without his needing to know it was shaping it. The social reward produced the behavior without necessarily passing through conscious calculation.<\/p>\n Primo Levi resisted the performance that the carrier groups needed from survivors. He analyzed rather than testified in the approved register. He refused the sacred incomprehensibility framework. The organized Holocaust memory apparatus gave him less of the attention and status it gave to writers whose work fit the required form. That Levi was the most honest and most analytically serious of all the major survivor writers, and that his reception was more complicated than Wiesel’s, is not coincidental. The market rewarded a specific kind of performance and Levi would not fully provide it.<\/p>\n In The Holocaust in American Life<\/a>, Novick noted that the supply of Holocaust testimony tracked demand with a precision that is difficult to explain if the testimony was simply the spontaneous overflow of survivor experience. Survivors who had been largely silent for twenty years began speaking in the late 1960s and 1970s as the cultural market for their testimony developed. The number of memoirs, the willingness to testify publicly, the elaboration of survivor identity as a social role, all expanded as the organizational and cultural infrastructure that rewarded testimony was built.<\/p>\n The survivors’ relationship to the public culture of Holocaust consciousness was complicated and often uncomfortable in ways that the public culture itself suppressed. Many survivors wanted to move forward rather than to live permanently in the shadow of their experience. Many found the public culture of Holocaust commemoration an inappropriate and sometimes exploitative use of their suffering. Many disagreed with the specific political conclusions that Jewish organizations were drawing from the Holocaust, including the unconditional support for Israeli policies that was presented as the obvious lesson of the Holocaust’s history. And many were uncomfortable with the sacralization of the Holocaust’s memory, which converted a historical event into something beyond ordinary human understanding and thereby made it less available for the kind of engagement that historical understanding requires.<\/p>\n The suppression of this discomfort is a custodianship operation<\/a>. The public culture of Holocaust memory required survivors to perform a specific role, the traumatized witness bearing testimony to the unspeakable, and survivors who stepped outside that role, who questioned the political uses being made of their experience, who suggested that the Holocaust might be understood through ordinary historical analysis rather than sacred incomprehensibility, were treated as threats to the memory rather than as its most authoritative custodians. Novick documents the reception of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem as the paradigmatic case. Arendt was a survivor who had lost family in the Holocaust and who brought to the Eichmann trial the full weight of her philosophical formation and her personal historical experience. Her insistence on analyzing the trial as a historical and philosophical event rather than as a sacred ceremony provoked the coalition enforcement response. She was designated as a threat to the community rather than honored as one of its most serious intellectual contributors, because her analysis challenged the specific framework of Holocaust consciousness that the organizational custodians had constructed and depended on.<\/p>\n The irony that Novick documents throughout the book is therefore this. The people with the most legitimate claim to be the custodians of Holocaust memory, the survivors who experienced the events being commemorated, were progressively marginalized in the construction of Holocaust consciousness by organizational custodians whose relationship to the Holocaust was mediated by institutional interests and political calculations rather than by personal experience. The tradition was transmitted not by those who had lived it but by those who had specific reasons to shape it in ways that served their organizational and political needs. And the specific form in which it was transmitted, the sacred incomprehensible monumental Holocaust that teaches the specific political lessons that American Jewish organizations needed it to teach, was significantly different from the complex, historically specific, morally ambiguous event that the survivors had experienced and that serious historical scholarship was documenting.<\/p>\n This is the custodianship question<\/a>. The tradition was real. The suffering it recorded was real. The obligation to remember was real. But the custodians who controlled the institutions of memory had specific interests in transmitting a version of the tradition that served those interests, and the result was a transmitted version that was both politically powerful and historically distorted in ways that Novick documents with characteristic precision and characteristic discomfort.<\/p>\n What The Holocaust in American Life<\/a> adds to the custodianship question<\/a> overall is therefore a demonstration that the question operates not only in the domain of literary and historical scholarship but in the domain of collective memory itself, and that in the domain of collective memory the stakes are higher, the distortions are more consequential, and the coalition enforcement tools are more powerful because they are backed not merely by professional sanctions but by the moral authority of genocide itself. The custodians of Holocaust memory were able to designate challenges to their framework as equivalent to Holocaust denial or as providing ammunition for antisemites because the moral authority of the Holocaust’s memory gave their coalition enforcement a power that the literary or historical custodians my analysis examined in earlier cases could not have accessed. This is the specific contribution The Holocaust in American Life<\/a> makes to the custodianship argument<\/a>, and it is a contribution that illuminates the broader argument by showing what happens when the stakes of custodianship<\/a> are raised from the domain of cultural inheritance to the domain of traumatic historical memory, and when the coalition enforcement powers available to the custodians include not merely professional marginalization but the moral authority of mass genocide.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My performance of suffering has at times produced the love, nurturing, and attention I needed. At times, this performance served me better than other things I tried to get love. Unfortunately, this largely unconscious practice of performed suffering that started … Continue reading