Memory,Reason and History

In Walker Percy's "A Short Quiz" and Salman Rushdie's "The Broken Mirror" memory is examined as an individual phenomenon and a social phenomenon respectively.

Human memory has been a preoccupation for us since the beginning of the 20th century. The nature of time and space can distort the infallible memory of Man. In the scientific realm Einstein proved that time and space are related. In the philosophic world Henri Bergson postulated that since time and space are non-linear, then so must be memory. Marcel Proust wrote "Remembrance of Times Past" in Paris in 1914, occupying a cork-lined room to keep out the present. Not even the march of Von Moltke's armies bearing down on Paris could divert his memory from those muffins that so reminded him of his mother. The poets have always understood that emotions can distort memory.

Paradoxically the 20th century has been the great age of the present for men of practical affairs. Modern technology has allowed us to "save time" and "increase productivity". Thinking about the past is a waste of time. Thinking about the future is an exercise in futility.

One of the consequences of our preoccupation with the present is our disregard for the past and the future as exhibited by our ignorance of history and massive debt accumulations. Social amnesia is a consequence of mass amnesia. In Percy and Rushdie we see two reasons for this inability to remember the past: first, our nature as individual beings and second our nature as human beings. These intertwined natures and their implications for memory and reason have serious implications for my chosen profession of history.

In "A Short Quiz" we are confronted by the reality of our inability to examine ourselves. The Delphic exhortation, "Know thyself" has proven to be more aspiration than realization. Percy states, "Why is it that in our entire lifetime you will never be able to size yourself up?" The question Percy poses is one that only a human being can ask. However, the problem is not limited to humans. We often forget that human being constitutes two natures; that specific to humans and that specific to all beingness. The problem of knowing ourselves is related to the reality of our individual being. This confines itself not only to the realm of humanity, but to the animal world as well. The animal's eye, including the human animal's, is designed to see the physical world. One can see out but cannot see in. The eye is designed to examine the other, ultimately for self-protection. But no animal has a corresponding sense-organ so well designed to examine oneself. Humans have attempted to find such an organ, be it the head or the heart or a combination. But nothing has ever given us the definitive power to examine the inner mental world as the eye has given us the power to examine the physical world.

Aristotle knew that human being were animals, part of nature. However, he also knew that all animals have one particular characteristic that separates them from the others. For Aristotle, it was Man's ability to reason, to examine, to know that set him apart. To know thyself, for the Greeks, had a dual meaning. It meant to know yourself as an individual and to know yourself as a human being and the characteristics common to other human beings. For the Greeks it was reason, our mind, that was the golden chord by which to know the self. Since reason was the characteristic of humans, the knowing thyself, in both aspects, was the great enterprise of humanity. Our teleological purpose as human animals was to know ourselves through reason.

It is memory, our personal history if you will, that is at the core of this attempt to know. Without memory it is impossible to know ourselves as individuals. Without a collective memory, a history, we cannot know ourselves as a human society. Memory, reason and history are inextricably linked. The problem that both Percy and Rushdie demonstrate is that neither memory nor reason is infallible and one can distort the other. This poses a danger for history in that it rests upon both.

Percy shows how reason can distort memory. He demonstrates how that great perversion of reason, ideology, can prevent us from remembering our true self. By boxing ourselves into various identities be it Conservative, Liberal, Christian, Muslim, etc. we lose sight of the essential eclectic nature of each of our selves. Using our reason to create our identity distorts that identity and our memory of ourselves. Our identity is not a category that can be labeled. It is a category unto itself, our human identity. To categorize it is to distort and diminish it and block out all the memories we have that run counter to the categorical label we assign to ourselves.

So in Percy we see how our memory and therefore our history can be distorted in two related ways: our inability to examine ourselves as individual beings and our individual ability to use reason being so often misapplied into an ideology and perverting our individual memory.

In "The Broken Mirror" Rushdie shows how our collective nature as humans can distort our memory and how this distortion of collective memory can distort collective reasoning. Rushdie writes, "human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures...capable of only fractured perceptions." We are "partial beings." For Rushdie, there is some intrinsic human flaw that prevents us from accurately recovering the past. For Rushdie the definition of memory is the inaccurate, individual interpretation of the past. His view of Human Nature approximates the Christian view of original sin as the original flaw of Man. Our flaw does not cut us off from God so much as it cuts us off from our past. Memory is the imperfect tool used to try to recreate the past, as faith is the tool for the Christian to find God. It is not a tool of accuracy, but a blunt instrument that shatters the past into shards. It is these shards that constitute our memory. Memory is a particular characteristic of humans but it does not give us a vision of the past as a whole but only perspectives on the past. Memory is collective, common to all humans, but within each it is used in ways that define the self and separates us from our fellow man. For Rushdie, the notion of a collective memory is nearly impossible. There are so many individual memories that any collectivity that exists between them would be meaningless. Memory cannot be separated from the individual it belongs to because to do so is to strip memory of its meaning.

The impossibility of collective memory has serious, if not mortal, consequences for any notion of collective reasoning if we accept the notion, as argued above, that memory and reason are inextricably linked. If memory is simply an individual interpretation of the past and not an accurate view of it, then any reasoning about the past that tries to assimilate common human ideas is doomed to failure. Memory and history depend upon reason. Rushdie, it is assumed, would argue that because reason is flawed, stemming from our flawed nature, memory is by definition "flawed", that is to say not designed to accurately reconstruct the past. However, reason also depends upon memory and history. Can we ever come to any reasoned conclusions on anything if all our memories are simply individual interpretations of everything? Rushdie may be right. Perhaps the answer is no.

The realization of this terrifies me. At some point memory and history became perceived as purely individual and subjective and reason became perceived as purely collective. They have been hurtling away from each other ever since. The genius of the Greeks, and of the Western Liberal tradition, was to recognize that memory, reason and history contain individual and collective characteristics. It was possible to come to a collective reasoning through the use of individual memory and possible to achieve collective memory through the use of individual reasoning and vice versa. As a lover of history and future historian, the division of memory and reason has grave implications for the future of history as discipline. History depends upon both memory and reason in order to make any kind of analysis of the past. If they have no relation to one another then history is impossible. It might be, as Michel Foucault thought, simply an ideological construction designed to augment to dominant group's power. I hope this is not true, and still believe that it is not, but truths are often terrible and I am fallible.

We come back to Percy and Rushdie. In "A Short Quiz" memory is examined as an individual phenomenon. Self-knowledge is extremely difficult based upon the individual, separate nature of our being. We are designed, as are all animals, to examine the outside world, not our mental world. Percy shows how the perversion of reason, the constructed and ideological view of the self, can distort reason. In "The Broken Mirror" Rushdie examines memory as a collective phenomenon. The inherent flaw in mankind cancels out any ability to form a collective memory and it becomes individual interpretations of the past. From these it is impossible to come to reasonable conclusions which are by their nature collective, that is: common to all humans.

Perhaps then, we have stumbled upon the reason our current age is obsessed by the present. Memory and reason have been decoupled, the twin pillars upon which history rested. There is no common interpretation of the past. Therefore, any agreement about the efficacy of past actions and ideas that would lead to agreement about the efficacy of future actions and ideas is largely frustrated. Those who proclaim their interest in the present and future while professing dismissal and ignorance of the past have no interest or understanding in either. The present, like Freud's ego, is buffeted between the shoals of the super-ego of the past and the rocks of the id of the future. It is a precarious point upon which society stands on one leg, teetering from the push of a timeless past and the pull of an uncertain future. We hesitate, unsure of which force to succumb to, seeing dangers in both.

Happy weekend, John.