Narrative Tools,Truth,and Fast Thinking in National Memory:A Mnemonic Standoff between Russia and the West over Ukraine

In 2014, the U. S. and Europe found themselves in a surprisingly tense face -off with Russia over events in Ukraine. As these events unfolded, it became clear that what was involved went beyond the kind of realpolitik dispute over re-sources or ideology that had long vexed the rela-tionship between Russia and the West. Instead, much of what Putin said during the tense standoff with the West over Ukraine was a straightforward reflection of an underlying national narrative that has been part of Russian culture for centuries. In order to understand Putin’s stance—and why it is wildly popular with large segments of the Russian population, it is crucial to understand the “social language”(Wertsch,2002)that they share as mem-bers of a “mnemonic community” ( Zerubavel, 2003) . This is a social language built around a set of narrative tools that shape the speaking and thinking about the past and the present and that distinguish this mnemonic community from others. We need to examine the narrative tools that shape Putin’s thinking, and need to consider how his thinking reflects his membership in the Russian mnemonic community. In many respects the deep divide that separates Putin from Western leaders reflects a more general divide between mnemonic communities and the narrative tools they employ. The approach that I take to symbolic media-tion draws on the writings of Vygotsky ( 1934 , 1978,1982),but it important to contextualize Vy-gotsky in a broader discussion that was going on in Russia,Germany,and Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At several points in his writ-ings,Vygotsky was quite explicit about the centrali-ty of mediation( oposredstvovanie) in his thinking, and a focus on mediation,especially as it concerns“signs,” or “psychological tools,” can be found throughout his writings. Vygotsky’s ideas echo Cassirer’s in several important respects, and draw-ing on both yields some useful synergies. A crucial point where Cassirer’s line of reasoning goes be-yond Vygotsky’s comes from his claim that using symbolic forms introduces the“curse of mediacy,”meaning that this use comes at a cost—a cost that often goes unrecognized. Taken together, the ideas of Vygotsky and Cassirer suggest a world in which speaking and thinking are fundamentally shaped by the symbolic mediation,or cultural tools provided by historical, institutional,and cultural contexts. It is worth no-ting that in this approach cultural tools do not mechanistically determine human discourse and thinking. Instead, the very notion of a tool implies an active user and suggests an element of variabili-ty and freedom stemming from the unique contexts of performance. Returning to Putin’s stance on the 2014 events in Ukraine,the first point to recognize is that what he said was fundamentally shaped by the narrative tools of his mnemonic community, and as such, it makes sense to include the power of these tools into our analytic effort. One of the most important shared narratives that binds the Russian mnemonic community together concerns repeated invasions by foreign enemies. This national memory has encour-aged Russians to develop habits of emplotment, or“narrative templates”( Wertsch, 2002 ) , that lead them to interpret many events in similar way—namely,as threats. This underlying code has been used repeatedly by the Russian mnemonic commu-nity to make sense of events from the past,and it is also employed when interpreting current events. Tense interpretive standoffs such as the one in 2014 over the Ukraine and Crimea are typically grounded in assumptions about the truth of “what really happened.” These “mnemonic standoffs”(Wertsch,2009)about events in the near or distant past are different from other sorts of disputes. When thinking and speaking about Crimea, Putin was not simply listing a series of facts or observa-tions;he was organizing them in line with narrative tools of his mnemonic community,and this required the events to be grasped together into a familiar plot. He was able to grasp things together along the lines of what Frederic Bartlett ( 1932 ) might have called a specifically Russian“effort after meaning”based on the narrative template noted before. In analyses of national memory,narrative tem-plates are habits of speaking and thinking that have great power and operate in ways that often escape our notice. Research in cognitive science on “fast thinking”( Kahneman ) and “intuition”( Haidt ) have produced fundamental insights about con-scious and nonconscious thinking are quite compat-ible with ideas about how narrative tools are em-ployed by national communities, and they can be put to good use in analyzing them. The central role of fast thinking and the asso-ciated tendency to jump to conclusions about the truth of one’s account of the past mean that mne-monic standoffs such as that between Russians and the West over Ukraine may be expected to be the rule rather than the exception. The psychological processes involved are powerful and lead to over-confidence in our account in part because they op-erate below our level of conscious reflection. The combination of narrative tools and the nonconscious habits of thought associated with them is so power-ful that we can find ourselves taken by surprise when someone comes up with a completely different interpretation of“what really happened.” The dis-connect can be so great as to give rise to comments about how others are“operating in a different real-ity,” but such comments may also mean we do not understand the logic of another party’s perspective. A great deal of research in the psychology of memory suggests that the first exposure to informa-tion or the first discussion or rehearsal of an event after it happens can have a profound effect on what is remembered, so profound in fact that people sometimes report still having a memory of an event even though they have information that convinces them that this memory is inaccurate. Is something like this behind the fact that we appear to be so locked into stories about past events that we have an extraordinarily hard time seeing another’s per-spective? Such questions are highly speculative, but they appear to be a fruitful place for collabora-tive investigations that would bring together schol-ars from a wide range of disciplines to address one of the most mysterious and most dangerous phe-nomena we see at work in international relations to-day.In 2014, the U. S. and Europe found themselves in a surprisingly tense face -off with Russia over events in Ukraine. As these events unfolded, it became clear that what was involved went beyond the kind of realpolitik dispute over re-sources or ideology that had long vexed the rela-tionship between Russia and the West. Instead, much of what Putin said during the tense standoff with the West over Ukraine was a straightforward reflection of an underlying national narrative that has been part of Russian culture for centuries. In order to understand Putin’s stance—and why it is wildly popular with large segments of the Russian population, it is crucial to understand the “social language”(Wertsch,2002)that they share as mem-bers of a “mnemonic community” ( Zerubavel, 2003) . This is a social language built around a set of narrative tools that shape the speaking and thinking about the past and the present and that distinguish this mnemonic community from others. We need to examine the narrative tools that shape Putin’s thinking, and need to consider how his thinking reflects his membership in the Russian mnemonic community. In many respects the deep divide that separates Putin from Western leaders reflects a more general divide between mnemonic communities and the narrative tools they employ. The approach that I take to symbolic media-tion draws on the writings of Vygotsky ( 1934 , 1978,1982),but it important to contextualize Vy-gotsky in a broader discussion that was going on in Russia,Germany,and Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At several points in his writ-ings,Vygotsky was quite explicit about the centrali-ty of mediation( oposredstvovanie) in his thinking, and a focus on mediation,especially as it concerns“signs,” or “psychological tools,” can be found throughout his writings. Vygotsky’s ideas echo Cassirer’s in several important respects, and draw-ing on both yields some useful synergies. A crucial point where Cassirer’s line of reasoning goes be-yond Vygotsky’s comes from his claim that using symbolic forms introduces the“curse of mediacy,”meaning that this use comes at a cost—a cost that often goes unrecognized. Taken together, the ideas of Vygotsky and Cassirer suggest a world in which speaking and thinking are fundamentally shaped by the symbolic mediation,or cultural tools provided by historical, institutional,and cultural contexts. It is worth no-ting that in this approach cultural tools do not mechanistically determine human discourse and thinking. Instead, the very notion of a tool implies an active user and suggests an element of variabili-ty and freedom stemming from the unique contexts of performance. Returning to Putin’s stance on the 2014 events in Ukraine,the first point to recognize is that what he said was fundamentally shaped by the narrative tools of his mnemonic community, and as such, it makes sense to include the power of these tools into our analytic effort. One of the most important shared narratives that binds the Russian mnemonic community together concerns repeated invasions by foreign enemies. This national memory has encour-aged Russians to develop habits of emplotment, or“narrative templates”( Wertsch, 2002 ) , that lead them to interpret many events in similar way—namely,as threats. This underlying code has been used repeatedly by the Russian mnemonic commu-nity to make sense of events from the past,and it is also employed when interpreting current events. Tense interpretive standoffs such as the one in 2014 over the Ukraine and Crimea are typically grounded in assumptions about the truth of “what really happened.” These “mnemonic standoffs”(Wertsch,2009)about events in the near or distant past are different from other sorts of disputes. When thinking and speaking about Crimea, Putin was not simply listing a series of facts or observa-tions;he was organizing them in line with narrative tools of his mnemonic community,and this required the events to be grasped together into a familiar plot. He was able to grasp things together along the lines of what Frederic Bartlett ( 1932 ) might have called a specifically Russian“effort after meaning”based on the narrative template noted before. In analyses of national memory,narrative tem-plates are habits of speaking and thinking that have great power and operate in ways that often escape our notice. Research in cognitive science on “fast thinking”( Kahneman ) and “intuition”( Haidt ) have produced fundamental insights about con-scious and nonconscious thinking are quite compat-ible with ideas about how narrative tools are em-ployed by national communities, and they can be put to good use in analyzing them. The central role of fast thinking and the asso-ciated tendency to jump to conclusions about the truth of one’s account of the past mean that mne-monic standoffs such as that between Russians and the West over Ukraine may be expected to be the rule rather than the exception. The psychological processes involved are powerful and lead to over-confidence in our account in part because they op-erate below our level of conscious reflection. The combination of narrative tools and the nonconscious habits of thought associated with them is so power-ful that we can find ourselves taken by surprise when someone comes up with a completely different interpretation of“what really happened.” The dis-connect can be so great as to give rise to comments about how others are“operating in a different real-ity,” but such comments may also mean we do not understand the logic of another party’s perspective. A great deal of research in the psychology of memory suggests that the first exposure to informa-tion or the first discussion or rehearsal of an event after it happens can have a profound effect on what is remembered, so profound in fact that people sometimes report still having a memory of an event even though they have information that convinces them that this memory is inaccurate. Is something like this behind the fact that we appear to be so locked into stories about past events that we have an extraordinarily hard time seeing another’s per-spective? Such questions are highly speculative, but they appear to be a fruitful place for collabora-tive investigations that would bring together schol-ars from a wide range of disciplines to address one of the most mysterious and most dangerous phe-nomena we see at work in international relations to-day.596-9