On the wonderful Inward Empire podcast, Sam Davis describes beautifully a process of ideological succession in which perceptions and conceptions of the American Civil War changed in the collective imagination of the nation over time. This is a pattern you can see emerge in the collective imagination surrounding many great wars (and other great events in general), and you can certainly make it out in the wake of the World Wars, to name one prominent example, with the excellent history podcaster Dan Carlin (of Hardcore History fame, which is a must-listen IMHO) commenting just recently on this very issue.
To go back to Davis' description, the gist of that succession is this: for various structural and historical reasons, a given war could very easily expand in scope and duration, outstripping anyone's anticipation or expectation or endurance, and grind on torturously, consuming entire societies caught up in them. And as one of those given wars winds down, there is at first an outpouring of expressions and accounts of the raw horror and trauma, fresh in the memories of the surviving soldiers that experienced the war firsthand.
Over time though, there is a redirection of that immense amount of martial energy and talent into domestic reconstruction and production, which results in an oftentimes manic outpouring of economic growth and progress. After the Civil War for example, there was a vast diversion of labor from the military into heavy industry like the railroad companies and manufacturing, revolutionizing the rate, organization, and intensity of construction and production, injecting particular military qualities of regimentation and work ethic for instance.
This in turn produces a great wave of prosperity, albeit with its share of overproduction and crashes as well. And over time the ascent of that prosperity amidst the ensuing profound social and cultural transformations encourages a broad cultural forgetting of the wartime era, with a growing romanticism and sentimentality in many of the surviving soldiers, safely ensconced in that rising wave of prosperity. And this is a romanticism and sentimentality that is quickly seized by a mass culture eager for consumption of exciting and flattering war sentiments amidst a rising tide of complacency and boredom on the other side of that prosperity coin, amplified in favor of moving forward and papering over the terrible wounds of that bygone era. Meanwhile the lone voices like those of Ambrose Bierce (profiled in the podcast episode), though treasured for their profundity and quality, are drowned out in terms of collective purpose and feeling contemporary to that particular time.
To be sure this partially has a protective effect, in which a mass culture interested in healing and forward movement forgets its wounds as the scar tissue bridges what were once dissonant and dysfunctional chasms. There is a deep emotional imprint of that collective trauma and abuse, which bequeaths a cultural legacy that is taken up by the collective culture and upheld with a kind of dignity. But at the same time this forgetting could be conceptualized in the same way that an immune system forgets a pathogen: that collective deliberation forgets the horrors and total ruin of a great war, clearing the ideological and deliberative board for the next one.
There are a multitude of additional implications and considerations of this phenomenon. This places the myth of our collective deliberation in a new light, which I've done in various ways here already. Instead of traversing deliberately from point A to point B in the name of progress say - which can certainly happen at times - it often more resembles the limited angling of a desperate swimmer, attempting to stay afloat in a raging river while constantly carried downstream, making for an additional complicating layer and challenge when moving through history collectively over longer periods of time, complicating and making more difficult the task of learning from and reckoning with that history.
