A lesson from Grenfell Tower: mourn in public, but grieve in private | Simon Jenkins

Are you grief or rage? Three days ago I watched a news crew at work outside Grenfell Tower. They were interviewing an elderly Muslim woman and needed a composite shot of the blackened tower, her face and a picture she was holding. They clearly wanted her to cry. I sensed her dignity in being unable to oblige. Amid the overwhelming sadness of the place, I felt fury at such an intrusion on private agony.

We surely risk exhaustion from the demands of collective grief. From Westminster through Manchester to London Bridge and on to Kensington and Finsbury Park, we have been subjected to a running drama of public mourning, as of a nation at war. It has brought out the best in us – but sometimes the worst.

For the victims, these tragedies are chances of an appalling fate. For them, the word grief is properly for those who knew and loved them. The pain of bereavement and heartbreak is so personal it cannot be “shared”. It can be respected, and others can show care and consideration. But human loss is an intense and solitary emotion.

When people die singly we tend to treat it as an accident of life. When they die in numbers, or are celebrities, their death somehow becomes collective. The hatred that motivates Islamist killers seems so widely targeted that we feel we must generalise the grief. We suspend normal business. We observe (numerous) minutes of silence. Likewise, almost hysterical emotion surrounded the death of Diana in 1997, as it did the deaths of David Bowie, Prince and Amy Winehouse.

The role of churches and mosques after the Grenfell and Finsbury Park tragedies was intimate and consoling. In ethnically mixed communities, faith is important in bringing friends and families together. These are people who know one another and can assert fellow-feeling across faith boundaries. Manchester’s local response to its bombing and Finsbury Park’s reaction to the killing outside its mosque have been intensely reassuring. They have shown how events intended to tear communities apart can yet bind them together.

For those who are not involved, I am not sure what collective grief is supposed to do. To parrot the politician’s “I feel your pain” is to lie. I can feel an intense sadness at the loss of others, but not grief. I can see that disasters on a certain scale merit a ritual of public mourning. But to invade, let alone exploit, the private sorrow of families and neighbourhoods, turning it into “grief pornography”, seems wretched.

I am sure it would have helped Theresa May politically to have hugged someone in Kensington last week, and preferably cried. The word empathy has joined authenticity as essential ingredient of the new politics. If public figures are now expected by the public to perform in certain ways, perhaps they should learn to act. But this is not in May’s character, and I cannot hold against her the lack of a celebrity hug.

The psychologist’s “five stages of private grief” are said to be denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. A chapel dedicated to them in St Albans Cathedral adds a sixth, peace. In collective grieving, I recognise different stages. They are initially of shock and a rush of charity, then a confusion of anger and mourning, then a cacophony of blaming, political carpet-bagging, and a fumbling search for “it not to happen again”.

Emotion cannot be the best guide to action. In the case of Grenfell Tower, some lawyers are dismayed at the kneejerk summoning of a “judge-led public inquiry”, rather than a swifter investigation – not least since the cause of the fire already seems clear. The occupants of Grenfell were entitled to express rage, given their explicit warnings about their block. That such rage and any consequent action needed tragedy as its fuel is the more shocking.

That does not require their grief to be “nationalised” and their predicament made partisan. There was something terribly wrong with this tower that must be identified. Enveloping it in a collectivised, politicised misery risks making it easier for those in power to shuffle the disaster off into an interminable public inquiry, as happened with Bloody Sunday and Iraq. That merely prolonged private grief.

Likewise, in the case of terrorism private grief dominates the news agenda for days. Britain, indeed much of Europe, seems doomed to a spate of terrorist incidents. They are unlikely to go away soon. Most are religiously motivated, and they are hard to prevent. They are fuelled by group psychology, rooted in past memories, beliefs and enmities.

Reaction surely has to avoid reinforcing those enmities, which the terrorists are so eager to promote. From all these tragedies we are told to “learn lessons”. But wrapping them in emotive responses risks learning the wrong ones. It risks leading us towards more repressive measures against minority communities. It risks generating an equal and opposing hostility from the right, as Finsbury Park shows.

Britain faces a long task – like America a century ago – in assimilating migrants with divergent narratives of their past. Those narratives cannot be suppressed, but there must be a virtue in trying to put them behind us. The silliest of sayings is the philosopher George Santayana’s: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Half the conflicts in history are the result of some statesman remembering the past and repeating it. I recall shuddering at school Remembrance Day ceremonies, when we incanted: “We shall remember them.” Yes, I thought, and then what?

The sanest corrective to this is David Rieff’s book In Praise of Forgetting. In it he warns against obsessive retrospection as “a formula for unending vendetta”. He catalogues long conflicts based on the distorted histories of groups and nations. To him, more wars are the result of remembering than of forgetting.

Terrorism, like war, is an abuse of memory. Of course groups will not forget their past, but we might plead with the champions of group identity to try a little forgetting. Life must be lived forwards. As Yeats said: “Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart.”