What We Don’t Remember May Return to Haunt Us

     In conjunction with a trip to see our son in Minneapolis a number of years ago, I elected to spend some time exploring the exhibits and archives of the Minnesota Historical Society.  As is often the case with such institutions, a gift shop occupied a small space near the entrance, so I popped in for a moment. On a high shelf, an otherwise drab looking piece of headwear caught my eye. The message inscribed over the bill of the cap is what inspired me to make the purchase: “History Matters,” it pronounced.

    Well put, I thought; a statement calculated to refute a dismissive comment made by Henry Ford as World War 1 consumed Europe. “History is more or less bunk,” the auto magnate declared. 

    Now, there have been abundant post-mortem analyses of the recent election, with plenty of explanations for the Democratic party’s unexpected collapse. Biden waited too long to throw in the towel and his dilly-dallying hurt Harris’s chances; inflation, though moderating, remained a major source of working-class anxiety; an overly cautious approach to the immigration “problem” became an albatross around the Democrats’ neck; progressives were unable to counteract the messaging of right wing media outlets, and so forth.  All of these points are worth considering. However, one issue that hasn’t received much attention is memory, or the lack of it.

     Another aphorism: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Contained in The Life of Reason by the American philosopher George Santayana, it appeared ten years before Henry Ford’s quotable phrase.  Although it, too, has devolved into something of a cliché, the admonition deserves to be taken seriously.

    Unfortunately, a broad swath of the American public seems to have given up on the notion that history matters. Surveys repeatedly indicate that students despise their history classes (it doesn’t help, as James Loewen points out in Lies My Teacher Told Me, that standard history textbooks don’t exactly pique the reader’s interest), and the mass media’s concentration on current events stripped of context has, in most people’s estimation, rendered the past largely irrelevant.  

     Bill Moyers was already alert to this development in the last century.  “Today’s media,” the famed PBS journalist wrote, “helps make ours an anxious age of agitated amnesiacs…. We American seem to know everything about the last 24 hours but very little of the last sixty centuries or the last sixty years.”

   That was then. In today’s click-bait-happy, internet-saturated world it is unlikely that the average citizen remembers what happened in the world even six weeks ago. This, as Time Magazine’s Richard Reeves once remarked, allows for “a politics that disdains the stale stuff and allows candidates and public officials regularly to get away with murder of the truth…with the press too rarely looking back.”

    We naïve history buffs might well have thought that when a virtual consensus of presidential historians ranked #45 as hands down the worst chief executive in American history, voters would sit up and take notice. And, when over four-hundred worried historians came together to urge Americans to reject Mr. Trump’s quest for a second term, one might suppose more than a few would have second thoughts about this deeply compromised candidate. But no, it’s pretty clear that a majority has placed their bets on Henry Ford rather than George Santayana.

     Of course, it’s also possible these good people really liked what they saw and heard between 2016-2020: the family separations, the transparent grifting, the near-daily White House chaos, the foolish responses to the Covid crisis, the impeachable offenses, the business neglected while the President indulged his passion for golf. There were so many offenses against civility, civic responsibility and just plain decency. 

    So…either we really are “agitated amnesiacs,” or the moral center of the nation has shifted decidedly in the direction of narcissism and casual indifference to our democratic heritage.  

    In Ray Bradbury’s1951 dystopian novel “Fahrenheit 451” which imagines a society in which the possession of books has become illegal (reading encourages people to think), a local official defends the authoritarian regime’s policy: “People want to be happy, right?…that’s all we live for, isn’t it? For pleasure, for titillation.”

    Are people really fine with all this? Hopefully not. But as Mark Twain once put it: “a clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory.”