Conservatism, mental inertia and the “memory of places”

Posted on April 7, 2026 by Yoram Gat

A few months ago, I wrote a post about the attitudes that underlie support for elections and lack of support for or outright rejection of sortition. My main point was that the arguments that are often provided for elections and against sortition should not be taken as being the causes of the positions they purport to justify but rather as rationalizations of those positions. The positions themselves are due to underlying pre-existing attitudes that are usually unacknowledged. Unlike the arguments, which are easily debunked, the attitudes are coherent and rational and provide real and reasonable causes for the observed behavior – a positive view of elections (as an ideal rather than in its actually existing manifestations) and an apathetic or negative view of sortition.

In the post I argued that the most common pro-elections and anti-sortition attitude is “conservatism or mental inertia”. I gave two justifications for this attitude. First, electoralism is the status quo and any radical change involves risk, which people wish to avoid. Second, “becoming a supporter of a fundamental political change involves the adoption of a new radical mindset which is never easy”.

Reading Emmanuel Todd’s 2017 book Où en sommes-nous ? [Where are we now?], I came across the notion of the “memory of places [mémoire des lieux]”. This is the notion that societies maintain certain ideas and habits which are quite persistent despite various changes which these societies undergo. This was reminiscent of “conservatism or mental inertia” and therefore sent me back to look at the post. I soon realized that the “attitude” of “conservatism or mental inertia” is actually rather transparently two separate attitudes, “conservatism” and “mental inertia”, which are quite distinct and quite clearly correspond to the two different justifications provided. Conservatism is clearly associated with the perceived risk which radical change involves, while mental inertia is clearly associated with the effort involved in “the adoption of a new radical mindset”.
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