Remember...

    Ask a college freshman about the American founding and you may get a fluent answer in under a minute. The trouble is, he may never have made any of it his own. He has not read it, copied it into a notebook, or argued it at a dinner table. He has retrieved it. And what is retrieved on demand is rarely kept. And trust me, we’re gonna get back to the whole students and A.I. thing. But I digress…

    Recently, the Hall-of-Fame historian Allen Guelzo (who is another favorite of this website), argued that a republic which forgets its past becomes easy prey for tyrants and conspiracy theorists. As usual, Guelzo is right, and the evidence is grim: history squeezed out of the schools, proficiency scores in free fall, students who can no longer read cursive, let alone entire books, at all, etc., etc. His prescription is a return to teaching history. Preach, Professor!! I believe he is more than correct (although I admit to a certain bias), and I would like to carry his argument one step further, where teaching alone runs out.

    History and memory are not the same thing, though we use the words as if they were. History is a discipline. It is what scholars do in archives, the careful and contested reconstruction of what happened. Memory is a practice. It is what a polity does to remain itself across generations. A nation can possess more historical expertise than ever before and less living memory than it had a century ago. I believe that is roughly the situation we find ourselves today.

    The clearest model we have for memory is religion. For many believers, The Bible, or The Passover Haggadah, or even The Koran are not textbooks. The crucifixion and resurrection are not necessarily lectures. They are assignments, as it were, handed to every generation: Tell the story again, in the first person, as though you yourself came out of Egypt. When Christians, Jews, and Muslims sit at the table with their children, they are not reciting information. They are handing them something of themselves, and the obligation falls to them because no one can discharge it on their behalf. Every durable tradition understands this. A story does not survive by being shelved in a library; it survives by being reenacted by living people. The same logic runs through the catechism, the oath, the pledge, the family story told until the children can finish the sentences, and the civic rituals that remind a nation who it is. 

    My good friend, Alexis de Tocqueville, saw that American self-government was sustained less by Washington, D.C. than by smaller associations throughout the land, the congregations and townships and lodges where citizens practiced being citizens. Memory works the same way. It requires institutions, rituals, and habits that carry the story forward, and all of them require participants.

    Americans once practiced memory in forms that demanded participation. Schoolchildren recited the Gettysburg Address from memory. Families visited battlefields and cemeteries where the nation’s story could still be touched. Memorial Day observances read aloud the names of the local dead. Civic clubs sponsored Constitution Day programs and essay contests that treated citizenship as something to be practiced, not merely studied. Some of it hardened into rote. Yet they worked, because Americans rehearsed the founding often enough that it became part of who they were. This is stewardship; a story inherited, carried for a time, and handed on. A republic like ours depends upon such stewardship. Citizens who inherit nothing and carry nothing have little reason to preserve anything.

    This is where artificial intelligence changes the problem in a way that an essay about schools cannot reach. The usual worry about these tools is that they get things wrong. Increasingly, however, they get things right. The deeper difficulty is that they remember for us, and remembering done on our behalf does not help anyone. The effort was never an inconvenience to optimize away. The effort was the substance. A student who asks a model to summarize the Federalist Papers has the summary. He does not have the Federalist Papers, or the slow hours spent wrestling with Madison and Hamilton that might have made some part of their argument his own.

    Now, please don’t misunderstand me. None of this is a complaint about the technological tools, which are remarkable and not going anywhere. It is a question about who does the remembering. We still teach children to add, though every phone can do it, because the goal was never the answer. It was the mind that could produce it.

    One of the best lessons I learned from the great literary critic, Harold Bloom, is the idea of memorizing a poem. Bloom told us that silent, intensive rereading of a shorter poem that truly finds you should be followed by recitations to yourself until you discover that you are in possession of the poem. “Committed to memory, the poem will possess you, and you will be able to read it more closely, which great poetry demands and rewards.” While not exactly the same thing, I believe memorizing quotes and certain passages from novels do the same thing. I have memorized quotes and paragraphs from numerous novels. They speak to me long after I have read the novel. I possess them, just as I possess many of Wallace Stevens’ shorter poems.

    I think that if young people would memorize bits and pieces of our founding documents, the preamble to the U.S. Constitution or maybe the Gettysburg Address, and the opening paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence, they would be less inclined to want to drag the country down a path the Founding Fathers never intended. Maybe they would understand, and make those words their own, where the Founding Fathers were coming from, intellectually, and take a deep breath before voting and/or marching for politicians and leaders, idols and icons, and charlatans who do not wish to be associated with those formative documents that are the textual and spiritual bedrock of who we are.  

    We celebrate our 250th birthday as a country on Saturday, and the temptation will be to celebrate with better content: documentaries, searchable archives, virtual tours, an app for every battlefield. And some of that will be more than worthwhile. But the questions that matter most are much simpler. Will parents tell the stories? Will teachers ask students to commit anything to memory? Will communities gather to mark what deserves remembrance? Will older people take the time to pass on to the next generation the wisdom of the Founding Fathers. Free societies survive because each generation accepts responsibility for carrying forward what it did not create. What we can look up may make us knowledgeable. Only what we read deeply and then commit to memory can make us a “People.”  

    Happy Fourth of July, everyone!! And remember...

Write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com