LIVING IN AN EMERGENCY, BETWEEN REMEMBRANCE AND OBLIVION

A state of emergency is a sudden condition which requires immediate response . It manifests itself as an event that is often difficult to predict with complete certainty, but that in many cases is foreseeable and can even be evaluated in terms of risk. Risk is defined and calculated as the relationship between the probability that an event may occur and the damage that it can cause. Despite this, when a catastrophe occurs everyone is always taken by surprise and unprepared. That is because surprise is sometimes due to ignorance regarding the actual risk being taken and sometimes due to forgetfulness. Memory actually plays a fundamentally important role in our perception of the past events which contribute to defining a risk. It protects us from those past events in one of two ways: through the memory of our experiences or through our forgetting of them. This is the other side of memory which, as opposed to remembering, removes the reality of these experiences from our minds so that we may move forward. This is how people can forget that they live in an area that experiences frequent seismic activity or believe that the force of water and the consequences of climate change can be disregarded. Forgetfulness can be so instrumental to our behaviour that some scholars have begun calling it unethical amnesia : when what we forget is how people have been treated by people, from war to exploiting our fellow human beings, or how we treat the environment, from pollution to deforestation. In these cases we forget so that we may continue to engage in these acts without our conscience being overly weighed down by them.