A Reader on Reading

Perhaps because of this, because of the difficulty of uttering a collective self-reproach to purge our troubled souls, most religions have ritualized the act of contrition. The Catholic mea culpa repeated three times during mass, the Jewish Day of Atonement in which forgiveness is asked from your friends and neighbors, the request for God’s pardon uttered in the five daily Muslim prayers are all attempts to recognize human frailty in our societies, and the terrible acts of which we are capable. These rituals pay homage to the victims, of course, but above all they offer the victimizers, if not oblivion for their sins, never oblivion, at least the chance to redeem themselves by acknowledging that they have done wrong. Words can be misused, can be forced to tell lies, to whitewash the guilty, to invent a nonexistent past in which we are told we must believe. But words can also have a curative, creative power. By allowing the misdeed to take shape first in the mouth of the victimizer and then in the ear of the victim, by transporting it from what happened to what is acknowledged to have happened, words effectively allow history to be, as Don Quixote proposed, the mother of truth.

So as not to permit unspeakable events to remain unspoken, so-called democratic societies, as secular organizations, sometimes raise monuments to commemorate their victims and to bear witness to past atrocities. However, the danger with monuments is that unless they are somehow transformed into a living, shared experience, they become the mute carriers of those memories, enabling the society to discharge itself of the burden of remembrance and allow the unspeakable events to become silent once more. What has been called “the duty of memory” in a society must be an active duty, one of forceful remembering, so that the terrible acts will not be repeated, or, if they are, so that they cannot be repeated claiming ignorance of their import and of how future society will judge them. In 2009, in the New York Times, the Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman maintained that unless Barack Obama orders an inquest into what happened during the Bush administration (and we expect that he won’t), those who hold power will believe that they are above the law “because they don’t face any consequences if they abuse their power.” As Don Quixote would argue, most acts of injustice are committed because those responsible know that they will not be made to face the consequences. Under such circumstances (and here we return to Socrates), it is every citizen’s duty “conscientiously” to try to prevent “a great many wrongs and illegalities from taking place in the state to which he belongs.” And that duty includes the active duty of memory, a secular ritual of atonement in which the guilty acts of the past are put into words for all to hear.

But memory can betray us. Sometime in the 1960s, psychologists identified a phenomenon in our psyche which they called the “perseverance of memory.” Often when we learn of a fact that later proves to be untrue, the force with which that information was first received can be so great that it overrides the knowledge that the “fact” is untruth, and we continue to remember the “fact” as true in spite of being told otherwise. That is to say, the memory of a known falsehood assimilated as true perseveres in our mind and prevents the corrected information from replacing it. If this is so, if we can “remember” as true what we positively know to be false, then it should not surprise us that, on a collective level, the duty of memory can become distorted and a revisionist version of the past can supplant that which historians have factually proven. In the Athenian court, Socrates can be shown to have done what he demonstrably has not done and be condemned to death for it, and the Bush administration may, in future years, be remembered “for bringing peace to the Middle East” (as Condoleezza Rice has pronounced). History may be the mother of truth, but it can also give birth to illegitimate children.

However, if governments can sometimes rely on this social perseverance of memory to misinform and misconstruct, they must also take into account another equally powerful perseverance: what I would call the “perseverance of truth.” There is an old English saying, “Truth will out.” Beyond our fantasies and our logic, beyond our invention of social realms and fairy tales about the universe, lies the implacable reality of what is and of what has happened, and it will always eventually appear from under the innumerable layers of deceit. We can, with practice, as the White Queen says to Alice, believe “six impossible things before breakfast,” but this feat of irrationality will ultimately change nothing in the relentless course of the world.