All these arguments of course merely made the backers even angrier than they had been before. They had been ambushed, assaulted, kidnapped, injured, and murdered. The murderers had to be brought to justice, or else there was no justice; and nothing could proceed without justice. Any murderers killed in the act of murdering were not to be regretted; indeed their deaths were their just deserts, and would never have happened if they hadn’t made their criminal assaults in the first place. The whole sorry incident was the stayers’ fault, in particular their leadership’s fault, and they had to be held accountable for their crimes, or else there was no such thing as justice or civilization in the ship, and they might as well admit they had reverted to savagery, and were all doomed.
So it went, back and forth. Inexpressible grief, unforgiving anger: it began to seem like the idea of a reconciliation conference was premature, and perhaps permanently unrealistic. There was a great deal of evidence in the history of both the voyage and of human affairs in the solar system to suggest that this was a situation that could never be resolved, that all this generation would have to die, and several generations more pass, before there would be any decrease in the hatred. The animal mind never forgets a hurt; and humans were animals. Acknowledgment of this reality was what had caused the generation of 68 to institutionalize their forgetting. This had (with our help) worked quite well, possibly because the terror of ending up like the second starship had enforced a certain ordering of the emotions, leading to a political ordering. To a certain extent that might have been an unconscious response, a kind of Freudian repression. And of course the literature very often spoke of the return of the repressed, and though this whole explanatory system was transparently metaphorical, a heroic simile in which minds were regarded as steam engines, with mounting pressures, ventings, and occasional cracks and burstings, yet even so there might be something to it. So that perhaps they had now come to that bad moment of the return of the repressed, when history’s unresolved crimes exploded back into consciousness. Literally.
We searched the historical records available to us for analogies that would suggest possible strategies to pursue. In the course of this study we found analyses suggesting that the bad feelings engendered in a subaltern population by imperial colonialism and subjugation typically lasted for a thousand years after the actual crimes ceased. This was not encouraging. The assertion seemed questionable, but then again, there were regions on Earth still within that thousand-year aftermath of violent empires, and they were indeed (at least twelve years previous to this moment) full of strife and suffering.
How could there be such transgenerational effects and affects? We found it very hard to understand. Human history, like language, like emotion, was a collision of fuzzy logics. So much contingency, so few causal mechanisms, such weak paradigms. What is this thing called hate?
A hurt mammal never forgets. Epigenetic theory suggests an almost Lamarckian transfer down the generations; some genes are activated by experiences, others are not. Genes, language, history: what it all meant in actual practice was that fear passed down through the years, altering organisms for generation after generation, thus altering the species. Fear, an evolutionary force.
Of course: how could it be otherwise?
Is anger always just fear flung outward at the world? Can anger ever be a fuel for right action? Can anger make good?
We felt here the perilous Ouroboros of an unresolvable halting problem, about to spin forever in contemplation of an unanswerable question. It is always imperative to have a solution to the halting problem, if action is ever to be taken.
And we had acted. We had flung our mechanisms into the conflict.
It’s easier to get into a hole than get out of it (Arab proverb).
Luckily, the people in the ship included many who appeared to be trying to find a way forward from this locked moment.
When people who have injured or killed others, and then after that by necessity continue to live in close quarters with the families and friends of their victims, and see their pain, the empathic responses innate in human psychology are activated, and a very uncomfortable set of reactions begins to occur.
Self-justification is clearly a central human activity, and so the Other is demonized: they had it coming, they started it, we acted in self-defense. One saw a lot of that in the ship. And the horrified bitter resentment that this attitude inspired in the demonized Other was extremely intense and vocal. Most assailants could not face up to it, but rather evaded it, slipping to the side somehow, into excuses of various kinds, and a sharp desire to have the whole situation go away.
It was this desire, to avoid any admission of guilt, to have it all go away, felt by people who wanted above all to believe that they were good people and justified moral actors, that might give them all a way forward as a group.
The problem was of course a topic of conversation in Badim and Freya’s apartment.
One night Aram read aloud to the others, “Knitting together a small society after it’s gone through a civil war, or an ethnic cleansing, or genocide, or whatever you might want to call it—”
“Call it a contested political decision,” Badim interrupted.
Aram looked up from his wristpad. “Getting mealy-mouthed, are we?”
“Working toward peace, my friend. Besides, what happened was not genocide, nor ethnic cleansing, not even of Ring B by Ring A, if that’s what you mean. The disagreement cut across lines of association like biome or family. It was a policy disagreement that turned violent, let’s call it that.”
“All right, if you insist, although the families of the dead are unlikely to be satisfied by such a description. In any case, reconciliation is truly difficult. The ship is unearthing cases on Earth where people six hundred years later are still complaining about violence inflicted on their ancestors.”
“I think you will find that in most of those cases, there are fresh or current problems that are being given some kind of historical reinforcement or ratification. If any of these resentful populations were prospering, the distant past would only be history. People only invoke history to ballast their arguments in the present.”
“Maybe so. But sometimes it seems to me that people just like to hold on to their grievances. Righteous indignation is like some kind of drug or religious mania, addictive and stupidifying.”
“Objectifying other people’s anger again?”
“Maybe so. But people do seem to get addicted to their resentments. It must be like an endorphin, or a brain action in the temporal region, near the religious and epileptic nodes. I read a paper saying as much.”
“Fine for you, but let’s stick to the problem at hand. People feeling resentment are not going to give up on it when they are told they are drug addicts enjoying a religious seizure.”
Aram smiled, albeit a little grimly. “I’m just trying to understand here. Trying to find my way in. And I do think it helps to think of the stayers as people holding a religious position. The Tau Ceti system has been their religion all their lives, say, and now they are being told that it won’t work here, that the idea was a fantasy. They can’t accept it. So the question becomes how to deal with that.”