The Importance of Remembering

This week I’ve been reading a fascinating book published in 2013. It’s called “The Spiritual Practice of Remembering,” written by Margaret Bendroth. Dr. Bendroth is the now-retired director of the Congregational Library in Boston and a historian of American religion. She writes from the perspective of an American Protestant about American Protestantism, but as I discuss below, I believe her profound insights transcend religion and apply as well to American cultural and political life today. So, with apologies to the author, I will try to set out some of her important themes and then extend them beyond her chosen context.

Dr. Bendroth’s short but rich book addresses America’s disengagement from its past, a tendency she says comes at a cost. She explains:

By definition modern time is inexorable, as ordered and controlled as the mechanical fun of an amusement park. This does not mean our sense of time is intrinsically evil: imagine city life if everyone ignored the clock and worked according to personal needs and preferences. Life is infinitely better when trains run on time. But if we step back from the practicalities, we can see what has been lost in the process. If time is always moving forward, the past is always becoming more distant and more irrelevant. In a sense, modern people are ‘“stranded in the present,” without a meaningful connection to anything that has gone before.

Dr. Bendroth seems to subscribe to the maxim of that great 20^th Century American novelist, William Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” She may even quote Faulkner, something I can confirm when I eventually re-read this gem of a book. Perhaps she also appreciates the final sentence of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” which reads: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”  That’s long been one of my favorites.

But I digress.

For all the data available to us in this information age, Americans as a people are not good at remembering. For example, we say “Remember the Alamo,” but how many of us can recount what happened at the Alamo, who did what to whom, and why any of it matters? Survey after survey designed to test Americans’ understanding of their own history too often reveal our widespread ignorance of many of the most important events and personalities that played a role in shaping our nation. Sometimes the misunderstandings are so striking that they become fodder for the roving, on-the-street microphones of late-night comedians.  (I have this vague memory of one such comedian asking young adults who America defeated in the American Revolution, or who won the Civil War, and getting wildly wrong answers.) In recent years, a new wave of political forces in several states has conspired to limit teachers’ ability to tell their students about such important matters as America’s historical treatment of enslaved and formerly enslaved people, and discrimination against members of the LGBTQ+ community. Key elements of our history, which are necessary to understanding how we became who we are and how we are becoming who we will one day be, are deliberately and methodically being erased by those who hope to mold future generations of students into their own image. For them, what is remembered must be selected and controlled, a well-known feature, experts tell us, of autocracies.

But how should history be taught? Dr. Bendroth says we too often think it’s just a matter of memorizing dates, and that such a narrow perspective is wholly inadequate to the task. What we need, instead, is to have a conversation with the past and the people in it. After all, we occupy the present moment only accidentally, and eventually all of us will be remembered only as people who lived ever-so-briefly in the past, if we are lucky enough to be remembered at all. She quotes a clever phrase by writer, philosopher, and Christian apologist G. K. Chesterton, another person whose life overlapped with Faulkner’s and Fitzgerald’s. He said that “true democrats [small “d”] ‘object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.’” The ideas and values of past sages, in other words, should not be discarded and replaced by purely modern ideas untethered to history and tradition. (I use the phrase “history and tradition” advisedly, as explained briefly below.)

Dr. Bendroth reminds American churchgoers of the phrase “the communion of the saints,” a way of saying that those who have gone before remain an important part of our heritage as relevant and, indeed, as present today as they were in their own times. To extend this observations to a broader context, any consideration of who we are as a people and what societal values we should promote begins with an understanding of our past, which in turn requires that we listen to the voices of those who came before us. It also requires the unfiltered study and passing down of history, even, and perhaps most importantly, the history we would prefer to forget.

Perhaps it’s because the very founding of the United States of America represented a break with the past that so many Americans have little interest in it. No doubt the fact that we are a nation of immigrants who arrived at our shores to find freedom and prosperity in a New World has contributed to our willingness to jettison the past. Whatever the causes, far too many Americans today have little or no appreciation of the past. Many have never studied history, have only the most rudimentary understanding of it, and vote for candidates who share their ignorance. They are persuaded by distortions of what was at stake in the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln’s role in it. They are served a whitewashed version of the historical Adolf Hitler, somehow thinking that they can identify some virtues in that thoroughly evil man responsible for the murder of six million Jews, not to mention the deaths of all who fought in the war he started. They know little or nothing about the McCarthy era in American politics, and how the lies of that singular person recklessly destroyed the lives of many others who were wholly innocent of the charges of espionage and treason falsely directed at them. And even today they are led to believe falsehoods about their political opponents.

I’m not blaming the deceived. I’m only blaming our collective failure to recognize that the preservation and study of the past needs to be given a priority that our politicians and citizens have largely neglected.

The rejection of history that so plagues us has now infected even our Supreme Court, an institution built on the importance of precedent in promoting the stability of law. In the last two years, the Court has chosen to end its decades-long support for affirmative action; has overturned a 50-year Constitutional precedent protecting a woman’s right to choose; and has overturned a 40-year precedent that empowered expert administrative agencies to engage in reasonable interpretations of their enabling statutes. While reasonable people might differ about how any of those cases should have been decided, the context in which these precedents have been discarded threatens the primacy of law in our democracy. It is as if the Court set out to prove not only that the law is whatever the Court says it is, but also that law is subject to change for no reason other than changes in the Court’s personnel. Where we once were proud to be ruled by laws and not by whoever happened to be in power at any given time, clever maneuvering and hypocrisy in the Supreme Court appointments process has flipped the script. In doing so, these political machinations have greatly diminished the importance of precedent and the public’s respect for the Court as an institution.

One can only wonder how long a Court that repeatedly undoes its own past decisions can reasonably expect to retain its power. The Justices who vote to erase prior rulings as part of a political agenda of the party that appointed them may remember the past, but they fail adequately to respect it.