Without memory, and the stories within which memories are held suspended, one cannot say who or what one is; one cannot learn, use language, pass on knowledge, raise children, establish rules of conduct, or even dwell in society, let alone engage in science. Nor can one have a sense of the future as a moment in time that we know will come, because we remember that other tomorrows have come too. The philosopher George Santayana had this in mind when he wrote what were perhaps his most famous words, in his Reason in Common Sense:
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted, it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness
and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience.
A culture without memory will necessarily be barbarous, no matter how technologically advanced and sophisticated, because the daily drumbeat of artificial sensations and amplified events will drown out all other sounds, including the strains of an older music. Speaking of history as memory may seem to clash with our common notions of history as the creation of a definitive “record” or chronicle, a copious account of bygone events which is placed on a prominent shelf and consulted as needed, as if it were a small-scale secular equivalent of the Book of Life. We should be thankful for the existence of such accounts chronicles of organizations, communities, churches, families—often produced in a remarkably selfless spirit, which form the backbone of the historical enterprise. But of what use is even the most copious historical record if it is never
incorporated into human consciousness, never made into an integral part of the world as we see it, never permitted to carry the past’s living presence into the present, where it can enliven the inertness of the world as it is given to us? In this sense, antiquarianism sometimes does not serve history well.
It is a good thing to keep records, but a very bad thing to do nothing but lock them away in the archives to gather dust. Written history that is never incorporated into human awareness is like written music that is never performed, and thus never heard. The growing professionalization of historical writing in the past hundred years has only accelerated this very problem, very much contrary to the hopes of the early advocates for professionalization, who had hoped to make history a useful science. For most of today’s professional historians, the suggestion that their work might be so written as to address itself to a general public is unthinkable. Instead, the process of professionalization has carved the study of history up into smaller and narrower pieces, more and more manageable but less and less susceptible of meaningful integration or synthesis.
There is not a sinister conspiracy behind this. Our professional historians do not, by and large, go out of their way to be obscure or inaccessible. They are hardworking, conscientious, and intelligent people. But their graduate training, their socialization into the profession of historical writing, and the structure of professional rewards and incentives within which they work, have so completely focused them upon the needs and folkways of their guild that they find it exceedingly hard to imagine looking beyond them. Their sins are more like those of sheep than those of wolves.
Add to this, however, the fact that, for a small but increasing number of our academic historians, the principal
point of studying the past is to demonstrate that all our inherited institutions, beliefs, conventions, and normative values are arbitrary—“social constructions” in the service of power—and therefore without legitimacy or authority. For them, history is useful not because it tells us about the things that made us who we are, but because it releases us from the power of those very things, and thereby confers the promise of boundless possibility. All that has been constructed can presumably be dismantled and reconstructed, and all contemporary customs and usages, being merely historical, can be cancelled. In this view, it would be absurd to imagine that the past should have anything to teach us, or the study of the past any purpose beyond the needs of the present. History’s principal value, in this view, is not as a glue but as a solvent.
We can grant some admixture of truth in these assertions. In the first place, scrupulous history cannot be written to please the crowd. And yes, history ought to be an avenue whereby the present escapes from the tutelary influence of the past. But the study and teaching of history ought to be directed not only at the accumulation of historical knowledge and the overturning of myths and legends, but also at the cultivation of a historical consciousness. This means that history is also an avenue whereby the present can escape, not only from the past, but from the present. Historical study ought to enlarge us, deepen us, and draw us out of ourselves, by bringing us into a serious encounter with the strangeness and the strange familiarity—of a past that is already a part of us. In drawing us out, it “cultures” us, in all the senses of that word. As such, it is not merely an academic subject or a body of knowledge, but a formative discipline of the soul.
Historians should not forget that they fulfill an important public purpose simply by doing what they do. They do not need to justify themselves by their contributions to the formulation of public policy. They do their part when they preserve and advance a certain kind of consciousness and memory, traits of character that a culture of relentless change and instant erasure has all but declared war upon. To do that alone is to do a great deal.
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