August 25, 2009
Historical Memory
This observation made by Charles Taylor in a recent interview, to my mind, speaks to the heart of thinking itself:
Bloor: In you work you’ve often been trying to correct a kind of failure of self-understanding of our culture. For example, you called Sources of The Self ‘an essay in retrieval’. In some sense we’re missing what it is to have arrived at this point in our history, so your work is an attempt to explain Western culture in the early 21st century to itself.
Taylor: I think that’s right. I try to do that by delving back into history. If you’ve lived through a transformation you understand something of how you got to where you now are. But further generations may lose sight of history, and they take the mental landscape they’re in as being totally natural. They therefore miss something about the nature of that landscape, about the nature of their reference points of identity. They take them not as adopted possible reference points, but as the obvious ones you can’t avoid. So they’re living their identity, but in a way which hides very important dimensions and features of it. So it is a matter of retrieval – retrieving the trajectory that brought you to where you are. I think that should be a very important part of philosophical work.
I have always suspected that if the United States had a better historical memory, then a great deal of public policy and its attending discussion–and this is a bipartisan truth–would be less asinine. (via Redeeming My Time)
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Funny. I was thinking about this very thing while pondering the health-care debate/debacle. Thinking that a little “how did we get here?” might be in order.
Exactly, Sheila. I don’t pretend to have the answer to that question, but it is an answer few people are talking about.
The lack of historical memory here, as compared with ‘older’ cultures, is astonishing, as is the inability to be self-critical. It comes up repeatedly when you try to warn about the dangers of supporting a government which suspends, for example, habeas corpus. You talk about how tyrannies use the law against the people, and the response is “Oh, that can’t happen here. Americans wouldn’t do something like that. Only bad people will get arrested.” There is still almost constant hysterical ranting about how awful “America” has become, coupled with the insistence that “we haven’t done anything wrong and wouldn’t even consider it.”
The thing is, we live in a very very large country — loads of people spread all over the place — and the way people began paying (or not) not only for dreadful and unanticipated illnesses and injuries but for more ordinary treatments has its own specific roots, just as in other countries. What we have now is a mess, and I do believe that a bit of historical understanding and maybe even some philosophy might come in handy.
I’m not holding my breath. Not till I turn blue and have to go to the emergency room.
In fact, part of the history of how the U.S. system of paying for medical care evolved the way it did has to do with the man for whom Cooper’s and my high school was named — Justin F. Kimball.
I hate it when I post comments like this one. Kinda feel as though now I’m obligated to follow up.
Cindy knows, I’m sure. And she has loads of idle time, I know, so she can take it from here.
[...] this snippet, if you would forgive me my vanity, since it reminds me of something I observed about historical memory in culture: Do you believe you have complete control of the ”ideological” net that governs your [...]