The Power of Memory (In Politics)

Much of my work in the scholarly world lately has focused on the theme of memory, especially on tradition as a kind of “remembering.” The analogy is this: tradition is not the same as history, but it draws upon it, which is like how my memory is based in my history, but is not the same as it. That is to say, my memory is in fact a complex portrait of who I understand myself to be, and it is not just a catalogue of events. It is as mobile and flexible as my understanding of myself is. In other words, I am not the same as every single thing that has happened to me; I am, in myself,  a dialogue between what has happened to me and who I am. Traditions, likewise, mediate between history and identity. Like memory.

You’d think it doesn’t relate to anything political, ever, but tradition has a way of haunting – and enriching – the decisions we make everywhere. Just like memory.

I cannot help but look at this recent election and note the intense power memory had for both sides of the basic divide. It is deceptively simple with Trump: “Make America great again.” The force of his presidential bid rested on the power of a memory, a yearning for an America that had been lost or ruined. Clinton’s campaign also evoked the power of memory: in her case, it was about remembering how human beings progress through history, improving themselves at every turn.

The problem with both memories is that neither is, in fact, historical. The greatness that Trump referred to was, on the one hand, so ambiguous that anyone could imagine anything about it, and on the other, dishonest about a past that is both resplendent and awful. More difficult to diagnose, perhaps, is the insidious lack of history in the myth of progress. It is not true that human beings improve themselves over time, and it is not true – in history! – that history takes sides and the morally superior position wins. The historical fact is that human beings are able to make progress and to decline, and that our efforts have often been a blend of both. We have records of defeat as much as victory.

Both memories were based in something real: a real sense of loss, or a real sense of moving forward in time. The white working class, so maligned for choosing Trump, has suffered deep losses that are perfectly real. They are not figments of anyone’s imagination. It is also a real sign of progress to potentially have a woman as a president, placing real responsibilities on her shoulders as an equal.

This is one of the things that is so hard about memories, and so about traditions: when they go wrong, they don’t simply stop saying real things.

But without that rootedness in real history, both “sides” made impossible demands of human beings. It is not true that justice will be ours if we simply let history happen, and it is not true that the “next” step in our human development is obvious. Human beings simply are not good like this. We are too fallen. To ignore this is an immense and terrible lie, one deeply embedded in the narrative of the liberal elite. Nor is it fair or good to ask human beings to support many injustices for the sake of some justices, as when the Trump campaign horrendously split apart the dignity of women and the dignity of the unborn. (Which the Democratic Party was complicit in, which makes all of this worse. These are not two separate traditions so much as conjoined twins.)

Traditions unhinged from human history become inhuman.

Politically, we have succumbed to nostalgia rather than holding onto memory. Nostalgia, here, would be a kind of false memory, a remembering of what is wished for rather than of what was. It can both emerge from and create apathy, or an inward blindness and inertia, a deep impermeability to anything different than itself. Nostalgia will have no dialogues. Will tolerate no activity.

Real tradition and real memory require immense activity. They must be renewed again and again, and they are never entirely stable realities. Or rather, their stability is in a kind of movement or “aliveness.” I am thinking particularly of God’s “memory” in the Old Testament. When the Lord remembers His covenant, it is never just in its pastness. The covenant is always alive, and so is God’s memory, and in recalling the covenant, God also renews it.

Without an active memory, one like the divine memory, traditions become harmful rather than useful, which means that the past suddenly saps us of our future. It is a perfect and terrible vengeance: history, lost to itself, insists on taking the future with it. We throw ourselves into unreal hopes, ones that make cruel demands of us, because they are hopes that never quite touch our humanity. Our broken and incredible humanity, remarkable in its resilience and flexibility.