The Claims of The 2021 Erasmus Lecture
Memory The Claims Of Memory 34TH ANNUAL ERASMUS Delivered LECTUREby WILFRED M. MCCLAY
The following is an excerpt from Wilfred McClay’s Erasmus Lecture.
For more than thirty years, the Erasmus Lecture has brought world-renowned speakers to New York City to address an audience of FIRST THINGS friends and subscribers. The 34th annual Erasmus Lecture was delivered by Wilfred M. McClay, the Victor Davis Hanson Chair in Classical History and Western Civilization at Hillsdale College.
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working memory is indispensable in the flourishing of the human person and of human culture. It is also maddeningly imperfect. Memory can be a reservoir of joy, a treasury in times of woe, and also a source of woe, of remorse and regret that will not go away. Memory maintains a shifty relationship to the truth, yet we cannot do without it. Alzheimer’s may be the most dreaded affliction of our time. By robbing its victims of their memories, it robs them of their sense of who and what they are. Can we discuss larger collectives in similar terms? What memory is for individuals, history is for civilizations; and without the reference points provided by a broadly shared historical consciousness, we soon forget
who we are, and we perish. Yet there are crucial differences. No one can be blamed for contracting Alzheimer’s, but the American people can be blamed for abandoning the requirement to know our own past. Though we “know” more about this past, thanks to the labors of professional historians, we know less, because we fail to grasp the overarching meaning of our history, a meaning that would impart coherence to the way we live together. So how to begin repairing the damage done by the neglect of our history? First, we must face up to the depth of the problem, which goes far beyond bad schooling and an unhealthy popular culture. The agenda of late modernity has turned into a steady assault on the claims of memory, grounded
