Visions of Order - 3

THE ATTACK UPON MEMORY

Between myth and status and memory there is a necessary connection. Clearly people cannot identify or appreciate status unless they can carry with them a memory of society's hierarchic structure and of the image in response to which it has framed itself. If men were to view one another as created anew each day, they would see themselves in original, not achieved or conferred relations. Every individual's desire is that he will be seen for what he is, and what he is depends upon some present knowledge of this past. The same principle holds for societies and nations. They are their history, and any detraction from the latter is a detraction from their status. It goes without saying that this history is not simply their spans of existence, but their careers in relation to the "mythic cover." Cultural life depends upon the remembrance of acknowledged values, and for this reason any sign of a prejudice against memory is a signal of danger.

Yet from one point of view it seems foolish to write anything directly about memory. No one appears to know in exact terms what memory is. Even the most searching of the psychologists today can(40) give us little more than behavioristic description and hypothetical constructs. Still we are faced with the fact that everyone believes there is such an entity as memory, and there are the reasons given above for insisting that memory plays a highly important role in cultural ordering. In another approach to the problem of what is happening to the synthesis of culture, I shall begin here by listing some things that indicate a decay of memory.

The slogan today is to forget and live in the future. Wherever we look in the "progressive" world we find encouragements not to remember. Increasingly the past is looked upon as a burden. "Forget it and turn to tomorrow" is the orientation of the times. People evince in their very manner a pride in letting go of what has happened and jumping at anything new. The individual conservators of the past exist no more or they are no longer listened to: the grandmother preserving the history and traditions of the family by the fireside, the veteran relating the story of his battles in the shaded courthouse square, even the public orator recalling the spirit of 1776 on commemorative days. There is no "time" to listen to them, and time is of the essence. Frederick Wilhelmsen has summed it up boldly and truly in saying, "history is no longer a category of the consciousness."

Amnesia as a goal is a social emergent of unique significance. I do not find any other period in which men have felt to an equal degree that the past either is uninteresting or is a reproach to them. When we realize the extent to which one's memory is oneself, we are made to wonder whether there is not some element of suicidal impulse in this mood, or at least an impulse of self-hatred. One of the obvious and easy ways to take leave of oneself is to forget, to cease to hold in consciousness what one has been. This is personal annihilation, for no man exists really except through that mysterious storehouse of his remembered acts and his formed personality. His very reality depends upon his carrying the past into the present through the power of memory. If he does not want identity, if he has actually come to hate himself, it is natural for him to try to get rid of memory's baggage. He will travel light. But it will be a deprived kind of traveling, cut down to immediate responses to immediate challenges. The element that makes his life a continuum will be missing and in the absence of this he cannot be a human being(41) capable of culture. To be human is to live extensively in two tenses, the past and the future, both of which require for their construction the mind and therefore the memory. We may not be able to say what memory is, but we can say something about its uses. It supplies material for the faculty of reason and it provides the necessary condition of conscience. This is equivalent to saying that it is essential to intelligence and to soul.

Let us state as accurately as we can conceive it the relationship between these atributes and memory.

Beginning with what has actually been observed, we find that no man has revealed high intelligence in any field of activity without a strong and usually an exceptional memory. I refer, of course, to the kind of intelligence we think of as distinctively human and not the quick and simple registration of the presence of an object of which animals are capable. Intelligence on the human level is an ability to perceive things for what they are and to grasp their relationships. Things in these relationships are often not physically co-present. This means that intelligence involves a considerable amount of causal reasoning, which is the linking of phenomena that occur as antecedents and consequents. William James has pointed out that if we are to think of one thing as occurring after another, we must think of them both together, and this requires that at least one of the items must be supplied by memory. If we think of striking a match, we must remember that matches are ignited by a process of friction. The mere seeing of a match does not apprise us of this unless we can recall such action or have it explained to us in words before we try the act of striking. Intelligence is this power to associate remembered potencies with things seen simply.

In the world of affairs it has been noted many times that men of extraordinary success have had extraordinary memories. Milton, Napoleon, Mozart, to cite a few examples, had tremendous capacity to retain in memory the subjects of their intellectual passion. And what may be of special significance, men of this kind have a way of remembering details which their inferiors consider too trifling to bother with. Probably that is another proof of the relationships between memory and intelligence, for it is the mark of intelligence to see the ramifications that are possible to the smallest detail. It is certainly true that memory is selective, but the selection proceeds according to lines of penetration into significance. By bringing together the past and the present, an encompassing memory gives one(42) a scope of action. The effective men of the world are not cheerful forgetters but painful rememberers. In general all intellectuality rests upon our power to associate things not present or only suggested by what is present. Thus the intellectual value of anything depends upon our ability to retrieve from memory.

In the more formal definition which psychologists frame, "memory" is "remembering." The intellectual nature of the process becomes clear when we realize that remembering involves learning, recall, retention, and recognition and that discovery of meaning is a help both in learning and recalling. "The wider awake the learner," Robert S. Woodworth has written, "the quicker will be his learning and the slower his forgetting."

Thus the part that consciousness has in our relationship with phenomena is largely a matter of memory. The recollection of uniform lines of cause and effect in the world, the recollection of who we are and of what we are committed to, are equipment for dealing with experience.


It is therefore impossible to imagine a high grade or effective intelligence without things supplied by the remembering process. We cannot put two and two together without some work of retention and recall. In the absence of "memory traces," however these may be described, no kind of intellectual activity could be carried on by the individual. It seems beyond question then that any attack upon memory, insofar as this metaphor expresses real facts, is an attack upon mind.

For a comparable set of reasons, memory is essential to soul. Soul may be defined, for the purposes of this exposition, as an integrative power binding the individual into an intellectual, emotional, and spiritual unity which is his highest self. I realize that some modern readers will be put off by this term. If they wish to read in its place "psyche" or "personality," these will serve as approximations of what I am dealing with, and the assertions which can be made with regard to them will express the point. If we grant that there is in the human being some such integrative unity, it seems inescapable that memory is essential to it. We have already noted that without memory the individual cannot preserve his conscious identity. Without this he cannot recall his needs of the past, remote and near, which make it obligatory for him to do certain things today. Without memory he would be unable to imporve his ethical being because he(43) would have no recollection of those thoughts and acts which left him less than satisfied with himself. He could have no conscience because conscience means conscious self-judgment. If there is one thing that is inseparable from soul, it is an awareness that "this is I doing this." At the heart of soul, to speak figuratively, is responsibility involves widened associations. Moral nature cannot be ordered except with reference to one's identity, which has its formation through history, and this fact is recognized in very practical ways. When an offender is put on probation, he is expected to show, in the probationary period, that he has learned from his misdeeds and that he is consciously framing his life so as not to "forget them" but to be guided away from them. When a convicted man is released from prison, society watches for some time to see whether he will behave himself, and thus prove that he has learned from his errors. In areas that do not involve wrongdoing it takes time to "establish a character." There is point in the saying that youth has no character because it has not had time for the kind of self-direction by which character is formed.

To approach the matter from another side, a fastidious memory is among the first things that we observe in people who impress us as having a soul. They are conscious of their past selves in ways that leave them defined. We feel that there is nothing loose or detached about them; everything they do is notified to the whole being because that being is integrated. That is why we feel in these cases that we are dealing with a person. Memory seems a necessary condition for those lives which have a kind of consistent eloquence in that they are expressive of a point of view and a moral passion. A religious or moral man's first reminder to himself on any critical occasion is to remember who he is. Plato makes the point that even (44) those who have a natural talent for philosophy cannot progress in it unless they have a good memory.

Attitudes like that of the present day toward memory are always referable to general overriding ideas. In this instance we can trace a parallel between the altered view of the world which accompanied seventeenth-century scientific achievement and the altered evaluation of the recollecting process. The effect was to change the concept of memory from that of an active faculty of a special being to that of a passive capacity of a being more and more identified with the physical world. The first great step in this change was the mechanist psychology which began with the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. This philosopher attempted to dispose of the whole complex subject by declaring that memory is "decayed sense." At once this reduces memory to the status of sensation and makes it subject to a physiological wearing out. Hobbes was followed by John Locke, who saw something more than this in memory, but who nevertheless supported the physicalist conception of it. He admitted that "memory, in an intellectual creature, is necessary in next degree to perception," and that memory is often active, since the mind may turn "the eye of the soul upon some memory image." Nevertheless, his general conception of the mind generated a profoundly misleading idea which lasted until the intensive study given to psychology in our own day proved it fallacious. This was expressed in his famous statement that the mind is "white paper, devod of all characters." The sensations we get through expereince write upon this paper and are the source of the content of the mind. The ideas which make the deppest and most lasting impression are the ones accompanied by pleasure and pain. Other ideas "quickly fade and often vanish right out of the understanding, leaving no more footsteps or remaining characters of themselves than shadows do flying over a field of corn." Locke carried the doctrine further by asserting that the constitution of the body affects this process, since in some persons the brain "retains the characters drawn on it like marble, in others like freestone, and in others little better than sand."

We must realize that a false analogy can be extremely misleading and can produce long-lasting error. People are interested and pleased by the point of correspondence they can perceive; not many will go beyond these to see where the correspondence ceases to find how many are the points of difference which emerge in a complete comparison. Such has been the consequence of Locke's figure of the mind as a tabula rasa and of memory as the endurance of things written on it. So ill-founded is this analogy that a contemporary psychologist has felt it necessary to write: "There is no true analogy to memory to be found in the inorganic realm." Although some present-day psychologists are willing to speak of "memory traces," they admit they have no knowledge as to how these affect the structure of the mind. Something is left there by the process of memory, but how and where we cannot say, and the mind is certainly not a headstone with its inscriptions weathering away with the passage of time.


Indeed, it is now established that forgetting is not due merely to the lapse of time. If forgetting were simply a process of mechanical weathering, the experiences of our youth would be uniformly dimmer in recollection than those of last year or of last week. We know, on the contrary, that certain of an individual's pictures, though many decades old, are as clear in the mind as some from the recent past. It is a common observation, furthermore, that people in old age tend to recover the memories of their youth, so that they can relate with more detail something that occurred in their distant childhood than something that occurred but yesterday.


Nor is it true that these memories of long persistence are always produced by strong sensations at the moment. Some of the most vivid memories we have are of certain things to which the name "epiphany" applies. These are objects of mind that seem miraculously endowed with clarity - things caught in a moment of illumination so that they stand forth vivid in form and nature. The image of a companion, of children at play, of a street scene, of a seasonal landscape, will now and then register with a peculiar force and distinctness, as if posed for portraiture, even though we have little personal interest in the subject and are not much agitated in the personal interest in the subject and are not much agitated in the senses. The scene suddenly arranges itself in some kind of authenticity, and we remember it in a way that cannot be explained through mechanical impression or through our need to remember it.


This suggests that memory has a way of life of its own apart from anything that can be accounted for in physiological psychology. To a great extent memory is under the direction of personality, and this probably explains its high degree of selectivity. People remember what they are oriented toward out of a personal and mysterious complex of needs. There is the kind of man who can spend (46) an entire day with another person without being able to recall the type or even the color of the clothing the other person was wearing. There are persons who have gone to work in the same building for years, but who could give one hardly the vaguest description of the facade of that building. They have "looked" at these things, but they have not become conscious of them in the way that is essential to remembering. A story is told of a certain distinguished professor of philosophy who had to appear in court following a minor traffic accident. One of the questions asked him by the opposing attorney was, "What is the make of the car you drive?" To the infinite merriment of the courtroom he was unable to remember.


I cite these examples to show that memory is not simply the product of repeated association, but of inclination and focus. This points toward the conclusion that memory and the life of the mind are one active process, and that this process is constructive. Impressions endure not simply from the original engraving but from their contribution to the outlook which the individual is forming, this fact explaining the retention in mind of "epiphanies." So memory, intelligence, personality, and soul all seem related, although in a way that may defy further analysis. What we feel justified in saying by way of summary is that memory is active, is selective, and is probably creative. It furnishes the things which we need if "need" is defined in a very broad way, so as to include matters affecting the personality and the spirit of man. This is not to say that memory is a reconstructing of the past to suit our convenience, as some historians have argued that we should reconstruct history. It may, however, mean penetrating more deeply into the significance of past events and in this way altering their status and changing the perspective of the individual.


Usually persons learn things when they set themselves to learn, and correspondingly they remember what they prepare themselves to remember, not when they merely throw themselves open to impressions. As for the opposite process of forgetting, Professor Woodworth believes that is due chiefly to two things: atrophy through disuse and interference. If our memories are not somehow ministrative to what we need to do and to the way in which we need to represent ourselves, or to our desire to integrate our view of existence, they may fade out. They very fact that the process of remembering may strengthen memory points again to the active and constructive employment by the mind of these "traces." In the second case (47) memory may be diminished if there is too much scattering of attention through interference or the competition of other things which break up one's concentration. It should not go unnoticed that recollection means "re-collection" or the gathering of things together. Sometimes we say that a person has or has not "recollected himself" in reference to the act of bringing his identity to consciousness. It is just this act of pulling together things which have an attractive nucleus of significance that produces units of identity and meaning. If the individual is too distracted to manage this, we often say that he is "beside himself" or that he is not in possession of his faculties. This is the acute stage of disorganization, but the mild state seems to occur whenever people are less able to concentrate their memories than their highest rational welfare requires.


Despite these actualities, we find today a large and growing cult of presentism, cherished both as an individual credo and as a social philosophy. Presentism, generally defined, is the belief that only existence in the present can give significance to a thing. The passage of time not only retires things from temporal existence but also deprives them of value and meaning. In this belief there is a small portion of truth, which is that the enactment of history renders simple conversion of what is past into the present impossible. But when the concept is applied to ideas, significances, and values, it is manifestly untrue, unless one regards these as simply relative to their times, which no intellectual and moral being can persist in doing. The ideas of past epochs are in some cases more limited than ours; in others they are less so; in any case this is a judgment for the imagination to make and not for the simple sense of historic time. Plato and Aristotle were not, of course, without limitations, but they have told us more about man and society than any two since their time who could be named; Shakespeare wrote before the Enlightenment, but his understanding of tragedy surpasses anything that has appeared since.


The identification of truth and contemporaneity rests upon a false assumption; the present actually has nothing to add to the verity of an idea. The more rigorously this thought is examined, the more justifiable it will seem. For when we come to analyze the real nature of time we are forced to see that the present does not really exist, or that, at the utmost concession, it has an infinitesimal existence. The man who pretends to exist in this alone would cut himself off from almost everything. There is a past and there is a future, but the (48) present is being translated into the past so rapidly that no one can actually say what is the present. If we say that everything should be for the present, we must quickly divorce ourselves from each past moment and at the same time not attend to those subjective feelings, born of past experience, which are our picture of the future. There can be no fulfillment through the mere present. In fulfillment we live in memory with its satisfaction over achievement and in pictures of the future. The richness of any moment or period comes through the interweaving of what has been with what may be. If every moment past is to be sloughed off like dead skin and a curtain is to be drawn upon future probabilities, which are also furnished by the mind, the possibilities of living and of enjoyment are reduced to virtually nothing. So without memory and the extrapolation which it makes possible man becomes a kind of waif, without a home to say he is from or to feel he is going to. Look as they will, the advocates of seeking everything in the present are without a theory. The best they can do is to juggle terms so as to make it appear that what a man wants he can have without assuming responsibility for the past.


In a way sermonizing against "presentism" appears pointless because, as should now be plain, no one actually lives in the present alone. Those who imagine that they do so are but the victims of a faulty analysis. It is possible, nonetheless, to underestimate the harm which can be done by a delusion. "Presentism" may be only a cult founded upon error, but the error can have long life and exert much influence. We should inquire next about what disposes people today to embrace the present with such relief.


A specific resentment arises from the fact that conscience and memory play the role of disciplinary officer. As was brought out previously, these remind us of what we are, what our commitments have been, what expectations we have aroused in others, and so on. It is memory that directs one along the path of obligation. License is checked, or at least made self-conscious by this monitory awareness. Therefore if we wish to be free in the unphilosophical sense of freedom, we must get rid of mind. Memories inhibit us and even spoil our pleasures. They keep in sight the significance of our lives, which influences and inhibits action. Under the impossible idea of unrestricted freedom, the cry is to bury the past and let the senses take care of the present. It is forgotten that "presence of mind" means "presence of memory." As Jung pointed out, denial of the past is (49) by no means the same thing as consciousness of the present. But making oneself discontinuous with the past sounds bold and enterprising and makes it appear that one is trusting all to momentary experience. The present is empirical, not conceptual, time.



A part of the temptation, then, is the current impulse in favor of general emancipation, which often consists of striking at restraints without considering what they preserve. In the absence of the identifications which are supplied by memory, the individual becomes Walt Whitman's "simple, separate person."" Whitman is notorious for wishing to cast away the baggage of the past; the divine moment in which he was sunning himself on the grass or riding happily in a crowded omnibus was sufficient to itself. His romantic expansiveness wished to be free of old lessons and present obligations. Although there is in this an attractive waywardness, it will hardly stand examination as social philosophy.



To arrive at this naturalistic state of society, we would have to discard those things designated by the term "mind." For this self-isolation and self-reduction of the individual involves a pulling away not only from such of the past as is denominated history, but also from that pattern of rules and restraints by which society is presently represented in our memory. We know through our power of recollection that certain attitudes exist; if we run counter to them, we meet forces which oppose us; if we avail ourselves of them, we accomplish more than we could by an isolated effort. Hence in the actual world those who have the widest consciousness of this complex of forces are best equipped for successful endeavor, and those who have little meet with checks and failures.



The "simple, separate person," however he may be celebrated in romantic lyrics, is not prepared for the world of action and liability. Both his simplicity and his separation are flauntings of mindlessness which do not permit human beings to live together on the basis of cultural contacts.



A second factor behind the cult of presentism is that it serves that curious fetish "adjustment." The term itself signifies adaptation to the physical world and reconcilement to the idea that man is only part of this. "Mind" has always carried connotations of the transcendental, not to say the supernatural; at least it has always been thought that through mind man cognizes the things that are beyond time and nature. As long as the existence of such an entity was granted, man could not be completely identified with matter. The (50) rhetoric of material progress tells us to put faith in material things, and mind cannot be reduced to matter. So memory, as the content of the mind, falls under disparagement. Every reader of current thinking knows that "merely mental" and "merely subjective" are in general use as derogatory phrases. Therefore what has to be supplied by the mind does not have the same substsantive standing as what is presented by the sense. The balance has been tilted so far in this direction that a hidden premise becomes established, and those creations which are products of mind are now treated as ephemeral. When they stand in the way of certain physical adjustments, they are likely to be regarded even as evidences of psychopathology. The trend of this thinking is to say that only those persons who are alert in the way that animals are can be considered adapted to living, and we have already seen the respects in which this narrows down the content of living.


I have mentioned the doubts that ought to occur to anyone who attempts to say, much less to do, something about an entity as hard to define as memory. One has the feeling of coping with a subject which may not even exist in the forms in which he has had to conceive it. Still, if the account which has been offered is reasonably true, we are faced with a social fact of great significance, which calls for some kind of countermeasure. If the present general attitude toward memory is harmful, if it does encourage the cultivation of mindlessness, the social critic should propose some countermeasure. Perhaps the best we can imagine, in a situation as difficult as this one, is a rhetoric of counterattack. If there is an assault upon memory, we can direct our effort against those forces which are attacking or undermining in the hope of changing the prevailing attitude toward those things which are inimical to the habit of recollection.


The most effective countermeasure would be to define more exactly the province of science. There would follow from this a change of the outlook which turns in a spirit of helplessness toward science as the arbiter of human life. Not only is physical science by its proper definition and its mode of operation irrelevant to the world of value and feeling, but it also by its very process emphasizes discontinuity. Science as a whole is constantly superannuating itself. But the superannuation of scientific fact is quite a different thing from the accumulation of wisdom. Science can largely forget its past and profit thereby; the individual, to repeat this point, must (51) remember his past in order to preserve his identity and give direction to his life. It is misleading to analogize life with scientific progress. Modern man lives in a world in which the fantastic is ever just around the corner owing to the accelerating technological revolution. He is less inclined to base his thinking on expectations that "miracles" that come with new physical discoveries. This leaves him less in command of his destiny than before because he becomes less well read in human nature, which is the ultimate determiner of what will be done with the findings of science. in brief he is growing inclined to look in the wrong direction for the knowledge of why things happen. Science in the area of human affairs speaks with a false rhetoric, and this step toward redefining the place of science limits the subjects about which it can convincingly argue.


At this point a new formulation of the difference between science and history would be helpful. Science is the study of what is presently true because uniformly true, of what is abstractly true because generally true. History on the other hand is the memory of all the past with all its uniquenesses, as they were expressed in the concrete matter which is creation. Science makes use of memory because we have seen the role of memory in intelligence, but scientific judgments are rational whereas historical judgments are intuitive. That is to say, to the extent that history offers lessons, these lessons appear intermixed with a great deal that is concrete and particular, and the latter have an influence upon the inferences that can be drawn. The insight of a Winston Churchill into the consequences of an historical development when compared with those of a person educated only in scientific rationalism is that of a sage compared with that of a simpleton. Science teaches through validity; history teaches through eloquence behind which lies the persuasiveness of unique historical fact. If science provides experiments, history provides instances, and this is why even folk memories are more prophetic of what will happen than the prognostications of those who have brought the scientific method into the study of social phenomena. The world depicted by science is a world we do not possess and do not even understand except through a difficult effort of conceptualization, but the world of history we possess in a specially intimate way.


This is our reason for saying that although science has its place, history contains science, and it is from the whole that we derive our truest ideas of what is humanly possible. It therefore needs impressing (52) upon the age that as science encroaches and memory is allowed to retreat, man's predictive power regarding the real forces in history becomes fluctuating and uncertain.


Some opposing center against the great modern force of journalism needs to be found. There is in the nature of great organs of publicity, or in the circumstances which they tend to bring about, something which causes them to cater increasingly to the sensate. The trend can be pointed out in a number of ways: first headlines become larger, then the language employed becomes jauntier and less responsible, next pictures begin to take the place of language, and finally substance itself is changed to appeal to appetites for the lurid, the prurient, and the sadistic. Thus the history of journalism has been a rather steady progress toward sensationalism. At best it seems that about one or two newspapers in a nation are able to resist the trend; the others may give in unwillingly, but they say that surrender is the price of survival. Even magazines once supported by a cultural elite have not escaped this fate. Whatever may be the complex of causes behind this fact of deterioration, it can hardly be denied that the new type of publicity is an encouragement to vivid perception and a discouragement to philosophical association of ideas. The typical modern newspaper is an example of ephemera in a sense in which even the old politically inspired journal was not. These considerations bring one, of course, in sight of the ancient problem of controlling at the source what can be published, a problem on which no one should pronounce without giving the most careful consideration to alternative consequences. It must serve the purpose here to say that modern publicity is a powerful incentive to short memories, which ought to be counteracted in some way. It is as if the reader of journalism were to say, "Let the page retain the perception for me, and give me a fresh perception tomorrow."


Again the need appears to speak up against the uncritical adulation of youth. It is anomalous that a civilization of long history and great complexity should defer to youth rather than to age. The virtues of youth are the virtues of freshness and vitality, but these are not the virtues that fit one to be the custodian of the culture that society has produced. Deferring to youth is another way of weakening continuity. Mark almost any young person, and you notice that he does not see very much, in the sense of understanding what is present to his vision. He perceives, but he does not interpret, and this is (53) because he is too lacking in those memory traces which lead to ideas and concepts. The memoryless part of mankind cannot be the teachers of culture; they are, however, ready learners of it if the real teachers show faith in the value of what they have.


On the positive side, we must re-create in some vivid way the value of historical consciousness. People must be brought to realize that the past has not dropped into nothingness. It is absolutely impossible that the past, because of the fact that it has happened, should be nothing. If it existed only in the form of physiological memory traces, these at least would be something. But far more likely is it that the past exists like the enacted scenes of a great drama, permanently recorded in some great memory and pointing up the significance of all that occurs in the "present."


To sum up, there is more truth in saying that the past is the only thing that exists than in saying that the past has no existence. Such theory as we learn from experience is the contribution of the past, and while this is not the only guide to conduct, it would be disbelief in life and creation to dismiss it as nothing. That is why memory is needed to keep us whole and consistent in opposition to that contrary force which is dissolution. Merely a new attitude toward the past as this functional picture should persuade people, even under the dispersive impulses of modernism, not to neglect the highly human faculty of conceptual memory.


-Richard Weaver