Işıl Öz's interview with Prof. Dr. Yankı Yazgan: Can remembering be an act of resistance?

In the past, I often caught myself saying, “Ah, those old holidays.” I guess my longing for my childhood was deeper in those days. Of course, from time to time, I still get nostalgic and cling to my childhood memories. Maybe I want to remember happiness. So what does it mean to remember happiness? Is it a motivation or an escape? We talked with Prof. Dr. Yankı Yazgan.

In the past, I often caught myself saying, “Ah, those old holidays.” I guess my longing for my childhood was deeper in those days. Of course, from time to time, I still get nostalgic and cling to my childhood memories. Maybe I want to remember happiness. So what does it mean to remember happiness? Is it a motivation or an escape?

We spoke with Prof. Dr. Yankı Yazgan . We talked about why we remember happy moments from the past more easily, even if we didn't feel that happy at the time...

Does “remembered happiness” or “remembering happiness” occur because of a functional bias in our minds?

Yankı Yazgan : It may not always be like that. The period of life we ​​are in, our era, how much it satisfies us, and the extent to which our capacity to dream about the future is working (or restricted) may cause us to look back to our past and seek and find the happy side of our memories. Especially in a situation where feelings of hopelessness and pessimism prevail, the past can play the role of a shelter.

I think there are many people looking for old holidays…

Yankı Yazgan : When we say where were those old holidays, it would not be honest to say that we miss the boring holiday visits or the moments when we pretended to be good with people we were not on good terms with. However, despite all these negativities, the sense of security it gave us, the spirit of people not harming each other for at least a few days and not being able to find this sense of trust right now makes us miss the old holidays. It is not because we loved those holidays or spent every second of the holiday happily, but when we compare the current situation with that time, our minds can more easily detect what is missing and what is broken. We think that the past was better and therefore we were happier to the extent that the period, era or whatever you call it, we are in is not encouraging.

However, when we climb four flights of stairs as a family, ring the doorbell a few times, and the door doesn't open, we leave and head home with our business card stuck between the door as proof of our visit, the relief and momentary happiness we feel as a child can erase the unpleasant or negative moments before or after.

Is there any harm in this situation?

Yankı Yazgan : Instead of ignoring the negative aspects of what we have experienced, what harm could there be in seeking and finding memories that will inspire or inspire our current lives? However, when our belief that those good old days, or rather the sense of security of those days, can be experienced again weakens, remembering the past or the happiness of the past (and that we have lost it in a way that will never come back) creates a feeling of melancholy. Especially the events that make us feel that we have lost control over our daily lives, injustice, the subversion of the basic values ​​that form our society, and impositions with oppression turn even the happiness of the past into a burden. The past ceases to be a shelter that allows us to endure difficult times, to remember what we have been able to do and achieved, and to create continuity for the future, and turns into a depressing, dull museum.

Can remembering be an act of resistance?

Yankı Yazgan : Active remembering can play a protective role in order not to be dragged into a melancholy that paralyzes our minds from nostalgia. We can push ourselves a little bit to determine what we will not forget, what we will keep alive and what memories we will pass on to the future, to the next generations. Even if it spoils the pleasure of our present moment, we can create a moment that we or those we are with will remember with happiness in the future. Don’t let defining remembering as an action or even a form of resistance seem like a search for consolation. On the contrary, by actively remembering (shall we call it effortful remembering?), we can carry an imagination that feeds and mobilizes hope, even if we cannot find solace, as a legacy from past dreamers to the present. What we remember can be like pieces from past civilizations that make us think that we can do something similar or even better, that truly “inspire”.

When we listen to or read those who remember and tell about the foundation and development periods of the Republic, think about the motivation created by the admiration we feel for “what they were able to do under those conditions.” The fact that the past is full of traumatic memories beyond being painful or unpleasant can change the direction of this process. We can have less control over what we remember, how we remember it, and when we remember it. Our grief, which is tangled up in trauma, can turn the fact that we cannot bring back what we have lost into a lifelong despair. Despair weighs down on us, makes us unable to plan for the future, and feeds the illusion that the current situation will continue no matter what we do.

You once said, “We shouldn’t rely too much on our memory when we are making a decision on a subject.” Although it is very rare, the mind can get stuck when we make things up, right? One day, we were talking about Ersen and Dadaşlar, and when I asked, “What happened to Ersen?” I said, “I think he died,” then “No, he became a real estate agent.” Thank goodness we have Google, I couldn’t insist on the subject. Since that day, when we can’t remember what someone did, we now say, “He became a real estate agent.” What could have happened that my mind made Ersen a real estate agent?

Yankı Yazgan : Let alone remembering a past situation correctly, it is not easy to see what is in front of our eyes as “complete, complete, and correct”; measuring, testing, trying are what we do to get closer to this truth. When we look back, with the advantage of looking at a situation that caused us strong emotions at that moment from a distance, what we see may be different from what we remember. We construct the truth with the effect of our emotional state at that moment, and with what was happening there at that moment.

Once you have built models with multi-piece legos, they will remain on the shelf as they are unless you disassemble them. However, when you start taking them apart, it becomes increasingly difficult to preserve the pieces completely, and when you try to rebuild them, you can make something very similar to the first model by transferring pieces from other sets to replace the lost pieces. When our memory fills in the gaps, it sometimes makes do with whatever is on hand. Of course, it also depends on the purpose of remembering. If you are remembering to answer an exam question, it is best to keep the lego pieces well.

So how do we distinguish between happiness and life satisfaction?

Yankı Yazgan : The easiest distinction to make is temporal: Happiness (like many emotions) exists for a limited and short period of time, while life satisfaction is based on a holistic view of life as a whole.

If we are in a period where basic concepts are turned upside down and rote learning is disrupted in a destructive way, it is not surprising that this will lead to deep unhappiness and then despair. However, beyond this momentary or periodic feeling, life satisfaction is proportional to what we have been able to present so far, what we have achieved or failed to achieve, and the satisfaction and contentment we receive from these. Life satisfaction takes its final form with what we pursue in our lives, beyond the scoreboard of what we have achieved. What we pursue, which ideals and basic ethical moral values ​​we remain loyal to cannot be subjected to inflation accounting. Even if the days and months we are unhappy have been lined up one after the other, what we see when we look back at our lives with remembrance prevents us from falling into despair and keeps the feeling alive that we can do better. Remembering is action because it enables the transition to action.

For example, do we remember the pandemic at all? Is our remembrance of the pandemic nostalgic or melancholic? What is there to remember about this pandemic period that caused the death of over a hundred thousand people in our country alone in a relatively short period of time? We forget the losses of the pandemic (and the intervention of science, especially vaccination, that stopped these losses) and talk about how dangerous vaccines “actually” can be, regardless of all the evidence to the contrary.

We have emerged from a period in which we distanced ourselves from even our closest ones out of fear that they could transmit the COVID-19 agent, and in which our minds coded everything coming from the outside as a potential enemy, as enemies of our savior, science, and the things we associate with science. The traumatic effect of the pandemic goes beyond unpleasant, unhappy, and bitter memories and becomes permanent with hostility towards science. The moments that remain happy in some of us make it easier for us to cope with the traumatic effect of the pandemic. Most of these happy moments are situations in which we are with others, get to know another person more closely, and are in solidarity with other people. When people who are approaching the end of their lives are asked what gives them the most life satisfaction when they look back on their lives, they say having established meaningful and positive relationships with others. The remaining, remembered happiness is born and continues to exist in moments lived with other people.