I studied folklore and "oral literature" (ok, it's an oxymoron) in college. At the time, I was interested in closely parsing texts, in understanding the relationship between denotation and connotation in language, in how we might explore the subtext of these classical compositions to get greater insight into stories.
But I was a callow youth, so I didn't understand the larger issues. At a time when there was no written language, or when written language was technically impossible, especially for larger stories like the Iliad and the Odyssey, oral literature was a repository, the ONLY repository, for cultural memory, for history. Surely they weren't a factual history, but they were a place where a set of cultural values could be recorded and passed on from generation to generation. And so they were.
I have faith in a kind of cultural Darwinism: the stories that survived were the stories that mattered, whether because they were great stories or because they were useful vessels of cultural values. Anyone who listened to the Odyssey would have learned to be kind to guests and strangers and to value their home, their ancestors, their hosts.
I think a lot about cultural memory these days. There's a kind of recklessness in the wind that worries me, and I'm convinced the problem is that our generational memory is failing us. Paul Krugman's column today, Free To Die, examines the Lord of the Flies moment that broke out during the GOP Tea Party debate this week. "No insurance? Let him die!" David Underwood remembered a time when the US was proud not to have its citizens simply dying on the streets. There's something quaint about his reflection on the change in tone of public debate.
My how our society has changed in the past 60 years. I can not recall such mean spirited groups of people having any voice in polite society. Today we accept such behavior as being acceptable. Of course there have been various individuals who would advocate such behavior and they even had a few followers, but good people in general shunned them.
It's not just that the wacky right wants to roll back some of the policies and programs of the past six or seven decades, they are ready to reprise some of the ugliest times in our nation's history.
- Rick Perry suggested that Texas might secede. Does anyone remember the Civil War? 1.1 million casualties and 660,000 dead. Do we want to relive that national nightmare?
- Turn Medicare into a voucher program? Before 1965, 29% of all elderly Americans lived in poverty. Are we ready to throw them to the wolves again? Who believes that 80-year-olds should go get jobs as Walmart greeters?
- The current financial crisis is no surprise. The institutions set up to defend our financial systems were born of the last Great Depression. Glass-Steagall was torn down, the SEC was defunded, defanged, and handed over to Christopher Cox. And laissez-faire was (and still is!) the law of the land.
- It's not just the USA. Will the Germans and the French allow Greece, then Spain, Portugal, Italy, etc., to collapse? Will they risk the destruction of the Euro and the EU. The punitive fiscal policies being forced on southern european countries are replays of the Versailles Treaty that exacerbated economic conditions in Germany, leading directly to WWII. Where will today's nationalist tyrants rise next? Where the economic pain is greatest.
The people who lived through the disasters of the past are disappearing from the stage. The living memory of the Depression, of the second World War, of the shame of pre-Medicare America, they are all fading. Our current leaders grew up with me, through the 60s, 70s and 80s, and they think history started the day they were born.
There's a theory out there - maybe it's just the province of nut jobs, but there's a grain of truth. Great financial crises seem to hit about every 80 years, which seems to be just long enough for the living memory of the disaster to die out.
The institutions we built over the past 80 years have great value to humanity. The United Nations, Medicare and Medicaid, Social Security, the financial institutions (the Fed, FDIC, SEC) - they are all monuments to the imagination of those people who had suffered through the twin nightmares of depression and war, and swore, "Never again."
We need to restore memory. We swore never to forget 9-11, but we would be wise to remember some other dates. July 2-4, 1863. The 1930s. June 6, 1944.
The Mad Men episode, "The Wheel," talks about nostalgia, describing it as "the pain of an old wound." That's not quite right, at least not at its core. Nostalgia is the pain of the lost home. Odysseus strives to return home for 10 years after the end of the Trojan War. The epic is the story of this return, the "nostos", and the pain ("algia") that he endures along the road.
But nostalgia has become a delusion in this culture. "If only we could return to the good old days, before all of this government intrusion, when a man was a man and his home was his castle. When a man was free to live and die on his own terms." Sad to say, we are about to feel the pain of the return to this delusion.