Neil Smelser Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Let's talk a little about cultural trauma. In preparation for this interview, I read at your suggestion an essay on cultural trauma which was written at about the time of 9/11. Help us understand the event of 9/11 as a cultural trauma, drawing on insights that might come from your sociology background, but then on the other hand, from your background in psychoanalysis.
The idea of social trauma, of cultural trauma, has come into the literature in the past ten or fifteen years via history, psychology, anthropology, sociology, not so much political science and economics, but political science to some degree. The idea is that certain historical events are so profound in their cultural and personal impact that they develop the features that resemble psychological trauma, namely that they're permanently unsettling, that you can't forget about them, even if you try to forget about them, there's a kind of compulsive need to relive and re-experience. Cultural traumas are mainly negative but not exclusively so.
I'd been working with a number of scholars at the Center in the three years before 9/11, and our project was the nature of cultural trauma. We focused comparatively and theoretically on events such as the Holocaust, the transformation of life in Eastern Europe -- pre-communist, communist, post-communist -- American slavery, things of this sort. When 9/11 came along, in a way I was quite poised to identify these very elements which 9/11 manifested. I wrote the essay four months after 9/11 and it seemed to me to have all the earmarks of what we had identified as cultural trauma, and the essay is to explore the strengths and limitations of that concept to describe 9/11.
One element of the formulation you come up with is that every effort to establish a cultural trauma is a contested process. When one thinks about 9/11, sometimes hidden from view was the fight as to how we will define it and what we will do in response to it. That's a very interesting point of view.
Part of the collective memory is who owns it, and of course, you see the parties -- the Republicans are claiming they own it [9/11] and are responsible for responding to it, and it's their property. It's their political property, and it should be remembered in certain ways and not other ways, just like Pearl Harbor should be remembered as a sneak attack on the United States and to forget about the fact that it was partially provoked. These are the kinds of contests, and of course, collective memory of traumatic events becomes a commodity over which people fight and over which they generate their own positions.
The memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is such an example. That's a kind of trauma, and if you look at American politics you see different groups jockeying over how that should be remembered -- veterans' groups, peace groups, the Enola Gay controversy [at the Smithsonian] -- that's what I mean by contestation. We see it in relatively smaller areas. I wouldn't call the replacement of the World Trade Towers small, but nonetheless that's been totally a contest as to exactly how we should remember this event. That's pretty much how we understand the aftermath of all traumas, the French Revolution, the Holocaust, just name it. You find it becomes a point of contest in contemporary politics over the meaning of history and over the meaning of memory.
This collection that you've done for UC Press, and I will show it again, The
Social Edges of Psychoanalysis -- a number of the essays were written
early in your career and it was remarkable, the extent to which they resonate
with the issues we're going through right now. 
One
essay in particular was called "The Problem of Evil." I think
the article was written in response to the My Lai massacres at that time.
Talk a little about that, because one of the rewarding things of the work
that you do is that because of your analysis of the macro-structural level,
you're laying out the elements of the puzzle in such a way that when we
turn back to that puzzle and act as if it wasn't addressed, in fact it
was.
Absolutely. The ingredients repeat themselves and I suppose there's a certain perverse joy that a social scientist gets in seeing the world repeat itself, even though it is not always pretty, what you see repeating. In this essay -- this is not bragging, it's just a fact -- in this essay on cultural trauma there are two paragraphs in there in which I predict what happened with respect to American unilateralism.
When you talk about the Lone Ranger.
Yes. And also, exactly how frail the balance of unilateralism is, given the world situation and given our own cultural predispositions to initiating aggression. And it has unfolded. I don't take any particular pride in being a predictor or seer in this regard, but you just bring together what's known about past conflicts and what the ingredients up here are, it becomes evident that these things are not entirely novel.
This essay is remarkable in objectifying, which is what you chose as your career code, in laying out the problem of evil. Let's say that evil is on the other side. You pose these questions: how is evil legitimated? how is it authorized? how are people mobilized to do evil? and, how is evil rationalized? In those four questions you give us a vehicle for looking at the adversary we now confront, if we, for purposes of analysis, accept that there is evil on the other side.
That could have been a pre-script for our dealing with terrorism. As you now read those questions, it is. This has come somewhat out of my past work in ideologies of social movements, all of which have some version of those questions. Even very mild social movements always point the finger at somebody -- it's not always an absolute evil that they are responsible for. So I teased out these ingredients from a lot of comparative study of ideologies.
Incidentally, if you talk about objectification, I did not want to use the word "evil" as much as I wanted to use the words "destructive behavior," because that was an ideologized term as well, and once again, I was trying to get a little bit of distance from it. The whole conference on this was a heavily emotional condemnation of American policies in Vietnam, which I shared, but that doesn't help us much in exactly understanding what's going on.
You actually refer to -- I should have given this definition -- "situations when force, violence, and other forms of coercion exceed institutional or moral limits." The beauty of that definition, of course, is it helps us understand the ways in which our side is violating some of the institutional norms that we have established over time in terms of dealing with adversaries.
One of the blessings of democracy is that we have enough people in our own society who see those things and call attention to them, and become a part of the partisan process rather than something that is completely doctrinaire or fully accepted, or indeed, totalitarian.
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