Have you ever thought about how little we remember for ourselves anymore? Scholars talk about how cultures move from being oral cultures, in which the stories are passed down by word of mouth and held in the collective memory of the tribe, to written cultures, in which they are preserved in books, and now to what they’re calling “secondary orality,” as we move away from the written word; but it isn’t a move back toward a primary reliance on human memory. Instead, we’re simply replacing written media with visual/aural ones—the reliance on technology continues, as we outsource our memories to books, pictures, video, computers, PDAs, and the like. Indeed, a PDA is basically a handheld prosthetic memory; if you have one, and you remember to use it and keep it with you, you don’t have to remember what you need to do, where and when you need to do it, who you’re going to do it with, or what their phone number is—just press the right button, or buttons, and the box remembers it all for you and tells you what you need to remember when you need to remember it.
The advantage to storing so much of our memory outside ourselves, I think, is that less of our brain is needed for that task, which means there’s more of it that we can use for other purposes, like inventing new things. I don’t know if anyone’s ever looked into this, but that might explain the accelerating pace of technological progress. After all, each new invention that frees up a little more of our brainpower from the work of memory gives us that much more brainpower to come up with new ideas and new ways of doing things—and gives us ways to record and store those increasingly more complex ideas, allowing us to interact with them more easily and quickly; and as these inventions enable us, more quickly, efficiently, and completely, to share those with others, that multiplies the effect. So in that sense, maybe the fact that we don’t remember as much ourselves, that we rely on other means to do it for us, is one cause of all the material benefits science and technology have given us.
There are downsides, too, though. Not only can all those things break, or get lost, or simply not be where we need them when we need them, there’s also the fact that our memories tend to be less vivid and immediate, more distant from us—less real, we might even say. Rather than being part of our present reality, they come to us as shadows of another time. To be sure, this would be the fate of most of our memories regardless, and there will always be things we would rather let slide into oblivion—but what about the key moments in our lives, the ones that make us who we are? Consider that to a large part, memory is identity. The more distant our memories become from us—a problem worsened by the speed and busyness of life in the Western world, which leaves us little time to stop and reflect, and remember—the more distant we become from ourselves, and thus from others, and from God.
(Update: I first wrote this, for other purposes, back in the summer of 2006, so I may actually have gotten to this idea first, as I [probably naively] thought I had; but in the interim, David Brooks has gotten here too, from a quite different angle—neither fact of which is surprising.)
That, and we don’t have to make backups of our brain.
I head a DJ on the radio say he never memorizes phone numbers anymore. The only one he knows is his home number. Everything else is programmed into his phone. I wonder what happens when his phone dies or he loses it?
I agree there are many things we maybe don’t need to use our memory for; there are lots of useless factoids and things taking up space in my head. But memory also often fails us, hence the ongoing desire to record important data and information somewhere more tangible. At least we can make backups of media, when my brain fails me, there is no plan B.
” Consider that to a large part, memory is identity. The more distant our memories become from us…..the more distant we become from ourselves, and thus from others, and from God.”
Very interesting thoughts! You are right Rob – but I think it’s not so much the memories but how we react to them that form our identity.
I have found that my greatest source of inner healing has been to allow the Lord to revisit memories with me and reframe them in truth.
In order to do this we must retreat from business and look inside ourselves. We must pay attention to the symptoms in our behavior that point to something deeper inside.
The book “Sacred Romance” by John Eldridge and its study guide were very useful tools to me in this journey. They helped me see who God has created me to be and reclaim my true identity.
Thanks to both of you for your comments. Ruth–true statement; clearly, we are in no respect passive with regard to our memories, and letting ourselves think we are is a very unhealthy thing. Memory no less than anything else should be submitted to God, in the understanding that he remembers us perfectly where we remember ourselves imperfectly, and that our identity ultimately is found in him alone.
Erin–part of the problem, I think, is that in the shift from oral to written culture, our brains have shifted; less of our mind is devoted to memory, and more to other things, and our memories are less trained. All in all, then, our memory is a lot more likely to fail than that of someone not accustomed to relying on other means.
Also, it should be noted that oral cultures have backups, too–in a sense, everything is backed up in the memories of other people. Stories are told to one’s peers, passed down to one’s children, and so on. In such cultures, shared memory is part of the familial and societal bonds.