The 2021 Erasmus Lecture

The 2021 Erasmus Lecture The Claims Of Memory The Claims of Memory

Delivered by 34TH ANNUAL ERASMUS LECTURE WILFRED M. MCCLAY

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.

The following is an excerpt from Wilfred McClay’s Erasmus Lecture.

Aworking 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

in the conviction that the past has nothing to teach the present, and that wherever the past is inharmonious with the desiderata of the present moment, it must undergo an erasure and reconstruction.

This ethos is epitomized in the burgeoning academic study of “memory.” It is not hard to see that the systematic problematizing of memory is likely to produce impassable obstacles to the effective commemoration of the past. Historians have always engaged in the debunking of popular misrenderings of the past, and such debunking is often warranted. But “memory studies” tends to carry the matter much further, treating collective memory as a construction of reality rather than a more or less accurate reflection of it. Memory, wrote historian John Gillis, has “no existence beyond our politics, our social relations, and our histories.” He added: “We have no alternative but to construct new memories as well as new identities better suited to the complexities of a post-national era.” This agenda is nothing less than the Jacobin one: to take control of the public memory and serve as judge of its moral acceptability. And yet it is hard to regard the self-conscious creation of such “new memories” as very plausible. The programmatic skepticism that is unleashed is hard to keep contained, and it tends to infect even one’s preferred normative myths. We can say without hesitation that this outlook makes the creation of new monuments and commemorations much more difficult than it ever has been before. When the past is a prisoner of the present, the present is a prisoner to itself.

The phenomenon we call “wokeness” is a monomaniacal preoccupation with the detection and punishment of moral fault, past and present, which does not permit forgiving or forgetting. It wishes to forbid the simple human act of remembrance—remembrance not in order to moralize, judge, or dissect, but remembrance in joy, sadness, amusement, anger, or disappointment. And yet we are rendering ourselves unable to enjoy such things, unless some moral criterion is first met. The rest of us should recognize this tyranny for what it is.

The power of memorization lies in the fact that the poem, or prayer, or speech that is committed to memory becomes one’s own, alive in mind and spirit. When shared by heart by many, they begin to form the soul of a people. This is why we need to pay more attention to what we are putting into our memories, and those of our children. Rather than disparaging memory, let us conclude with Augustine, who described

coming into the field and spacious palaces of my memory . . . Even when I dwell in darkness and silence, I bring forth colors in my memory . . . These acts I perform within myself in the vast court of my memory. Within it are present to me sky, earth, and sea, together with all things that I could perceive in them . . . There, too, I encounter myself and recall myself.

And so might we.