Talking Tuesday: History and Memory

A bit late today, but I wanted to share a great article about history and memory by Jonathan Sacks.  I think it works well with what I'm working on for the piece about Matthew B. Crawford's excellent book, The World Beyond Your Head.  In it, Crawford argues that from the so-called Enlightenment onward, we in the West moved from a pre-modern mindset that seeks objective truth outside oneself, in the world and beyond it, to find one's place in the larger history of the world and to submit one's will to the wisdom of those who've gone before, to a post-modern mindset that seeks nothing beyond the subjective reality of one's own mind and views any incursion of the outside world as a threat to one's self.  The self reduced to the sum total of its desires: the Platonic consumer.

I think this relates to Sacks' article because he argues first that we Westerners have been far to quick to discard our history and our memories, and that the distinction is important, as is the virtue that arises from knowing both.

In Standpoint, Sacks writes:

“I want tonight to look at one phenomenon that has shaped the West, leading it at first to greatness, but now to crisis. It can be summed up in one word: outsourcing. On the face of it, nothing could be more innocent or productive. It’s the basis of the modern economy. It’s Adam Smith’s division of labour and David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage that says, even if you are better than me at everything, still we both gain if you do what you’re best at and I do what I’m best at and we trade. The question is: are there limits? Are there things we can’t or shouldn’t outsource?

“The issue has arisen because of the new technologies and instantaneous global communication. So instead of outsourcing within an economy, we do it between economies. We’ve seen the outsourcing of production to low-wage countries. We’ve seen the outsourcing of services, so that you can be in one town in America, booking a hotel in another, unaware that your call is being taken in India. This seemed like a good idea at the time, as if the West was saying to the world: you do the producing and we’ll do the consuming. But is that sustainable in the long run?

“Then banks began to outsource risk, lending far beyond their capacities in the belief that either property prices would go on rising forever, or more significantly, if they crashed, it would be someone else’s problem, not mine.

“There is, though, one form of outsourcing that tends to be little noticed: the outsourcing of memory. Our computers and smartphones have developed larger and larger memories, from kilobytes to megabytes to gigabytes, while our memories, and those of our children have got smaller and smaller. In fact, why bother to remember anything these days if you can look it up in a microsecond on Google or Wikipedia?

“But here, I think, we made a mistake. We confused history and memory, which are not the same thing at all. History is an answer to the question, ‘What happened?’ Memory is an answer to the question, ‘Who am I?’ History is about facts, memory is about identity. History is his-story. It happened to someone else, not me. Memory is my story, the past that made me who I am, of whose legacy I am the guardian for the sake of generations yet to come. Without memory, there is no identity. And without identity, we are mere dust on the surface of infinity."

~Jonathan Sacks, "Rediscovering Our Moral Purpose", Standpoint Magazine online, July/August 2016 issue.

I read an excerpt of different article from Standpoint from the same issue that noted that our Western heritage is in danger of being forgotten as we engage in collective amnesia.  I think author Daniel Johnson overstates his case a tad, but he notes that 

"The diagnosis, surprisingly, is more complex than the cure. There are numerous viruses attacking the Western body politic, but only one medicine. To face the future unflinchingly, we must return to the past: listen to the patriarchs and prophets, the ancestral voices of our literature, break open the arsenal of our intellectual history, and mobilise the resources of righteous indignation against the dominions, principalities and powers of darkness that threaten to overwhelm us. The great books, from Homer to Shakespeare, from Plato to Pascal, from Dante to Bellow, must once again not only be assigned to every student, but learned where possible by heart. The music of the masters, from Gregorian chant to George Gershwin, from Sebastian Bach to James MacMillan, from Palestrina to Arvo Pärt, must not only float across the courts and quads of our colleges, but fill our airwaves and headsets."

~Daniel Johnson, "What Made the West Great Is What Will Save Us", Standpoint Magazine online, July/August 2016 issue.

I've noticed that the more I think about our post modern world, and how to reclaim a pre-modern mindset, particularly in trying to disengage the notion of myself as primarily a consumer, rather than a child of God, the less time I have for popular culture, particularly music.  I occasionally enjoy a tune or two, but I don't want it to be to the mainstay of my aural diet.  It feels like the aural equivalent of living on gummy bears.  I find myself craving substance in the music I listen to, and am drawn to the storytelling style of folk music, as it speaks of past events, of history and memory, bound up in melodies that stay with you, become part of you.  (There is also liturgical music, but I put that in a different category).  I also live with a lot more silence than I used to.  

I suppose having a sort of physical ascesis forced on me by circumstance has brought me to a place of somewhat more restraint in terms of what I want to live on in my soul.  I am drawn to books and programs and movies that explore the truth of the human condition out there, and particularly ones that acknowledge the extra dimensionality of the spiritual.  I know I keep banging on about episode seven of the BBC's War and Peace, but it really blew me away.  The book also has several other scenes of immense truth and spiritual beauty that I keep returning to in my mind.  In season two of Outlander, episode seven (what is it about seven??) was breathtakingly, heartbreakingly beautiful and spoke so much truth to me about loss in motherhood, about the challenges that face a marriage in the face of that loss, and what comes next.  The book is even more intensely beautiful.  

I continue to work through my thoughts on Crawford.  I wrote several more pages last week, and have a rough first draft, but after several days' thinking, it feels like a rubbish first draft, so I may scrap it and start again.  I can't really decide how to tackle what I want to say; I'll get there eventually.  I keep telling myself to be patient, let it marinate.  I keep talking with different friends about various aspects of the book and related reading I've been doing, and that helps me to refine my thoughts as well.