[Exploring Life] How many misleading or false beliefs and assumptions do we preserve in our memories? And how many of these false beliefs and assumptions have been assimilated as a result of cultural conditioning? It would be immensely difficult to conduct a statistical inventory of our memories in order to quantify the exact number of beliefs and assumptions we hold on to that are confining and perhaps even virulent. We cannot describe or locate the precise nature of a memory. Memory is an elusive phenomenon that remains hidden and mysterious to us. The contents of memory, the specific thoughts and beliefs that give rise to remembrance cannot be itemized and put on display. Our awareness of the memories that animate our actions is incomplete; we are not always aware of what we remember and how those remembrances influence the choices and behaviours.
In Against the Memory Industry, Christopher Szabia asks, “Is the cult of remembrance holding us back?” The idea of a cult of remembrance is compelling and immediately places us on a trajectory to explore the shadowy confluence of psychological assimilation, personal identity, and lifestyle. The idea of a cult often retrieves the negative imagery associated with abhorrent forms of devotion to a set of beliefs that are all too often unfounded if not deranged. The task of any cult is to infiltrate, capture, and confine memory within a prison of imposed belief. A cult infects memory with subservience, making us pliable, feeble and numb. Our memory is hijacked, and the deception is often so complete that we view those that hijack us as our benefactors who are caring for our best interests.
A Cult of Memory: The contents of our memories are not merely play by play recollections of past experiences. Memory is fluid; we never remember the past in quite the same way. That is to say, our relationship and interpretation of past experience changes over time. This perspective on memory is quite different from memory as rote learning (the term “rote learning” though widely used, is nonsensical). In the cult of education we are seduced into accepting the belief that the act of “knowing” something is nearly synonymous with remembering or recalling it. In this sense, memory is ineptly viewed as a container to be filled with items called data, facts, and information. Evaluation techniques then proceed to examine how well an individual can recall data, facts, and information, and perhaps manipulate that content using basic analytical skills. In the mechanized world of education, memory is reduced to machine.
The purpose of a cult is to control an individual’s beliefs and manipulate them into prescribed behavioural patterns. The person is brainwashed into following an ideology, often without knowing they are victims of deception. The art of manipulation within a cult is invisibility, that is, the ideal form of manipulation is one in which the victims are completely unaware of it. In this sense, the pervasive and virulent manipulation and deception that is the foundation of any cult is built on stealth, suppression, and concealment. A cult is ultimately a closed self-serving system designed with the single intention of assimilating people in order to control their thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, and actions.
A cult of memory, then, is a form of manipulation that is designed to create a specific orientation of memory or way of interpreting our own past experience, as well as history in general. If the manipulation is effective, our memory is seduced into by imposed pattern of remembrance while we remain largely unaware of the manipulation itself. Any organization or individual that seeks to control what a person remembers and how they interpret their memories is engaging in an act of psychological warfare. Power can be attained by manipulating the collective memory of a group of people. By influencing the recollection of the past in a particular manner, political or religious figures can attain both power and influence over large numbers of people. In a sense, political and religious systems are socially acceptable cults.
Learning to Forget: Chris Szabia points out: “In an era of Google archives and tragedy tourism, we need to relearn how to forget.” Memory is one of the most unfortunate victims of our strange desire to give machines human-like qualities. The human memory is vastly superior to a computer memory. All a computer does is store data in electronic bits and bytes and makes it readily available. A computer can neither remember nor forget; it is bound to adding and deleting. All human memory is fundamentally a creative act; all computer memory is completely void of anything that can be meaningfully referred to as creativity. By hijacking words, technophiles have done a great disservice to language. Google “remembers” absolutely nothing. However, Google stores data about seemingly everything that can be turned into data, making the suicidal trajectory of humankind constantly on symbolic display.
Tragedy tourism is a symptom of a society too focused on the negative aspects. This is hardly surprising, since the media and various news services seem horrifically inept and incapable of presenting anything other than tragedy. We feel the touch of tragedy everyday day in some manner, and the persistent presence of doom and misfortune begin to affect our minds. Tragedy is a cult, an industry, and a form of entertainment. We hardly have to travel to be a tragedy tourist.
But the impulse to forget is also a recurring feature of Western history. “Remembering is only a new form of suffering, Baudelaire lamented… historian Timothy Snyder argued that too much “bearing witness” to the past meant draining focus from contemporary concerns… different memories could cannibalize one another in their quest for attention.
- Christopher Szabia
In literal terms, we cannot “learn how to forget.” Once an experience has occurred, it finds permanence within the intricate web of neural connections in our brain. However, our attention cannot hold every memory in our immediate awareness. The less we focus on a particular memory the weaker it becomes; the more attention we give to other memories, the stronger they become. Thus, instead of learning how to forget, we are really learning to manage the content of our mind and memory more effectively. This can be immensely difficult to do when the external surround of our lives is mired in a cult-like celebration and admiration of tragic display.
The inability to weaken the memory an experience can result in intense and needlessly prolonged psychological suffering. Ironically, the pathway to weakening a particular memory is not to direct any effort to it, and instead focus attention and awareness on thoughts and memories that are more creative. We also need to explore our memories to try and cull their origin and effect on our lives. Negative memories, those memories that do not help us to live creatively and vibrantly, should be weakened. In other words, we are not helpless victims of our memories; we are the architects and designers of remembrance.
Memories Thrive in the Now: It is difficult to look at the history and development of human civilization on this planet without being discouraged and saddened at the tragedy and atrocity that have taken place. Suffering, sacrifice, and war seem to animate the content of our collective memory and degrade our quality of life. Humankind seems mired in obsessive quests for power, control, and authority over each other and the planet itself.
Yet memory’s most fatal attractions lie at a much deeper level. Writer Ian Buruma, who spoke at the NYU symposium, has claimed communities now form through a “quasi-religious identification with shared suffering.” Subconsciously, the cult of memory demands more of what would be honoured and memorialized: more suffering, more sacrifice, more war.
- Christopher Szabia
While honouring the sacrifices made by individual in the past has an important place in society, to honour the more tragic experiences of the past in an obsessive and cult-like manner is at the very least quite strange. Memory does not operate in the past, it creates the past in the present moment. Each time we remember something we re-create it and give it more presence in our thoughts and feelings. In this way, our memories inform and animate what we do and how we think and feel each and every day of our lives. Memory easily travels across the confluence of body, mind and spirit.
I would, however, take a more optimistic view of our ability to manage our memories:
The ever-present past, available online, renders these processes unremitting. Neverending memory makes it impossible to forgive, both between individuals and across borders.
- Christopher Szabia
The ever-present past is not something that is exclusive to the online experience, and memories themselves cannot be stored in a database. Memories are a phenomenon of the mind; databases are an extension of the machine. Although a database may contain data that breeds contempt, forgiveness is purely and exclusively a human trait. Forgiveness is entirely possible even though the online data may inspire continuing hatred or contempt. If our memories, and our ability to forgive, are reduced to the trash heap of data that Google inspires then we have reduced ourselves to mere automatons.
Most importantly, each of us must be the author of our own memories. That is to say, what we remember, how we choose to remember it, and how we bring those memories into our lives on a daily basis is a critical function of learning. It is all too easy to fall prey to cults and cult-like entities who attempt to seduce us into assimilating their thoughts, beliefs, assumptions, behaviours – and their memories. This means understanding the nature of our memories, how they are formed, and how they have been influenced. Memory is sanctuary.
