On Remembering the Past One of the staples of received opinion is Santayana’s assertion that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. The chief value of that adage is that it demonstrates once again that old George was full of it.
by Jason Capodimonte,
modern living editor, NEW IMPROVED HEAD
If those who could not remember the past were always repeating it, then people who knew nothing about the musical past would still be churning out baroque keyboard sonatas, wouldn’t they? People who knew nothing about the religious past would be burning witches. People who knew nothing about the Canadian past would be acting as if Canada were a sovereign nation (people used to – really)
In fact – as should be painfully bloody obvious – it is people who are well aware of the past who are most likely to repeat it. It wasn’t people who had forgotten television’s past who came up with the idea of remaking The Flintstones. It isn’t people who have forgotten the sporting past who continually come up with the idea that the Leafs can win the Cup this year. It wasn’t people who had forgotten the Vietnam War who decided to start the Iraq one.
I know George W. Bush pretends he can’t remember what exactly he was doing back in the National Guard while the Vietnam War was on, but since he and his Iraq-attacking cronies spent much of the Vietnam War evading it, I’m sure that period of history is etched on their memories. Nevertheless, when the opportunity arose once again to send too few troops to invade another nation and alienate its people from the United States for generations, these connoisseurs of the past jumped on it as quickly as a fly jumps on dung.
Just in case you believe, as is thoroughly reasonable, that Mr. Bush and his associates had motives for invading Iraq other than their stated ones, I will note that millions of other people who had no other motives but who had pretty good memories of the Vietnam War also jumped on the dung.
Conversely, who came up with the novel idea that Michael Ignatieff is an intellectual? Was it people who remember the intellectual past? I think not. Is it not people who remember the Canadian past who perennially come up with idea that just one more amendment to the Canadian constitution will drive the stake through separatism’s heart? I think so. When the Canadian people periodically get fed up with some slimy lying weasel they’ve voted into office, do they refuse to elect another slimy lying weasel? I rest my case.
People repeat history because they think that’s a good idea. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t, but whether it is or not they still have to know history to think repeating it is a good idea.
A popular form of interpreting the past is known as the gambler’s fallacy. People who interpret the past this way believe that if something has happened frequently in the recent past it is less likely to happen on the next occasion it has a chance of occurring. So if red has been turning up more often than not on the last dozen spins of the roulette wheel, they’ll bet black, reasoning that red is now less likely to turn up.
But it isn’t any less likely to turn up. Even if the wheel was rigged, the people rigging it would be smart enough not to go out of their way to let things like that happen. So if you bet black because red has turned up a few more times recently than red has, you have not improved your chances over simply picking the colour to bet by flipping a coin. But you have remembered your past.
Then there was the fellow at the trots who told me that he picked horses by betting the horse whose driver had driven the morning-line favourite in the preceding race. The preceding race is the past, and this fellow was remembering it. And he was so excited about cashing a measly $6 ticket that I reasonably concluded that he was having about the success you’d expect with his system.
What is the past, anyway? As someone who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s I am continually surprised by the persistence of the myths that the 1950s were a quiet period of conformity to middle-class values, and that the 1960s were a period of free love and hippies. The 1950s and 1960s that I lived through were in fact periods of enormous social upheaval and of intense intellectual and artistic endeavour. But it seems that for most people the past includes a somnolent 1950s and a 1960s peopled by people who wore flowers in their hair and held love-ins.
”One’s memories of the past,” Peter Dickinson has written, “are only a special kind of dreaming, in which one makes mental pictures and tries to organize them into a coherent sequence.” We dream every night. Are we worse off for forgetting what we have dreamt?
On Remembering the Past © John FitzGerald, 2007
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