Substituting Memory for History in the (Mis)information Age

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
James Joyce, in ‘Nestor’, from Ulysses (1922)

If there is any substitute for love, it is memory. To memorize, then, is to restore intimacy.’
Joseph Brodsky, in ‘Nadezhda Mandelstam (1899-1980) An Obituary’, from Less Than One: Selected Essays (1986)

One of the more contentious trends in contemporary historiography, and philosophy of history, is the weird juxtaposing of memory and history, with the latter being privileged (perhaps unsurprisingly, by professional historians) as somehow superior, or more objective. This is evident, for example, in the work of Roy Foster (e.g. ‘Sorry is not enough’, London Independent, 17/07/1999), and of David Reiff (‘The cult of memory: when history does more harm than good’, The Guardian, 02/03/2016). This tendency may have partly originated in a reaction against the work of French historian Pierre Nora, who, in his efforts to define what constitutes a ‘true’ history, instigated this opposition between history and memory. Because outright political agitation and national imperatives dominate readings of history, he argued (see Realms of Memory (1996/1998), therefore there is no objective truth to be found there. However, he went further, adopting the nihilistic perspective that because memory, although preferable, is also selective, there is, effectively, no such thing as a recoverable past. In his somewhat opaque attempt to reconcile Marxist dialectics with an underpinning theology, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940), Walter Benjamin took a more measured, if equally audacious approach. In Thesis VI he wrote:

To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger.

But how exactly has memory come to be viewed as the poor relation of history? For what else is history, ultimately, but the product of memory? Or, at the very least, a consequence of the urge to memorialise? If only because Memory (Mnemosyne) is the mother of History (Clio), as she is of all the muses.

This shift in status is compounded by the current fearmongering panic and paranoia about the threat to humanity and the humanities by the dreaded Artificial Intelligence. While AI is NOT nothing to worry about, it should be remembered that narratives of conflict in contested spaces have always been distorted by misinformation: it is known as ‘the fog of war’ or, more commonly, ‘propaganda’. All that has improved (or disimproved, because of the uses to which it is put) is the technology. As the great Irish essayist Hubert Butler wrote in ‘The Sub-Prefect Should Have Held His Tongue’:

Speed of communication has increased, and we are expected to have strong feelings about an infinite series of remote events. But our powers of understanding and sympathy have not correspondingly increased. In an atmosphere of artificially heated emotionalism truth simply dissolves into expediency.

That was in 1956. It was ever thus. Whatever the contemporary concerns about manipulation by A.I., data harvesting, algorithms and bots, it seems to me that digitally native under-30s are more than capable of dealing with the vagaries of the media with which they have grown up and are therefore adept at handling because of easy familiarity. When it comes to being duped online, the kids are savvy enough. It is the supposed adults in the room you have to fear for and keep an eye on.

Perplexity as to the status of historiography as a somehow tainted literary representation or a scientific unbiased recounting is nothing new, with E. H. Carr’s What Is History? (1961) provoking fierce responses like that of Geoffrey Elton’s The Practice of History (1967), because of Carr’s relativism and his rejection of contingency as an important factor in historical analysis; that is, his almost proto-Baudrillardian notion of history as a partisan pursuit, a simulacrum written by the winners, or at least by those whose relative perspectives are skewed by vested interests or their own agendas. Elton, on the other hand, was a strong defender of traditional modi operandi and was appalled by postmodernism and multi-narrative histories, seeing the duty of historians as empirically gathering evidence and objectively analysing it.

Herodotus vis-à-vis Thucydides

The Carr/Elton debate can be seen as a more recent reenactment of a controversy which has reoccurred throughout (as it were) history, for example in relation to perceptions surrounding the virtues and drawbacks of Herodotus vis-à-vis Thucydides as historians of Ancient Greece, or of Suetonius in contrast to Tacitus of Ancient Rome, the methodology espoused by each echoing the practice of their predecessors. Thucydides and Tacitus may be more analytical and less anecdotal than Herodotus and Suetonius, but their histories are still based on interviews with participants and eye witnesses, and then drawing their own conclusions. How do we know if these interviewees were telling the truth, or if their memories were accurate or faulty? They could be deliberately lying, or accidentally misremembering. Plus, these informants are rarely named. Then there is the question of how much bias effects the reliability of Herodotus’ Histories and Tacitus’ Annals of Imperial Rome, given their respective Athenian and Roman sympathies, which they freely admit. Herodotus may have been accorded the accolade the ‘Father of History’ by Cicero, but at least as early as Plutarch’s pamphlet On The Malignity of Herodotus, he has also been known as the ‘Father of Lies’. When introducing his English translation of the Annals, Michael Grant even refers to Tacitus’ ‘mask of austere impartiality’. Meanwhile, much of Plutarch is pure entertaining hearsay. Furthermore, it is worth remembering that the Greek word Ιστορία (historia), from which our own specialised meaning is derived, meant ‘research’ or ‘inquiry’, rather than the definitive account, and is how Herodotus’ titled his work.

So, while from an early twenty-first century perspective, Herodotus may seem more like a chronicler rather than an analyser, it is important to remember history’s origins in storytelling, and the influence of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey – the stories from both of which were recited orally long before they were ever written down – on Herodotus’ mindset and methodology. Indeed, in an echo of those tales told around a campfire, which rhymed to facilitate ease of memorisation, it is believed that Herodotus would have given public readings from his Histories in Athens. For this reason, we may find it more understandable that he is nebulous about the differences between tradition and history, and that he did not always realise that eye witness accounts of the same event can vary. If literature is what is written, and Herodotus was writing history, we should not forget the debt both literature and history owe to the oral tradition.

Of course, professional historians will argue that historiography has come a long way since antiquity, especially through the use of documentary evidence – inscriptions, manuscripts, treaties, newspaper and (latterly) television and radio reports, court records, archival material and archaeological discoveries, etc. But all of these (un)reliable sources are, finally, human products and personal artifacts, and thus subject to the fallibility of the species – certainly in their interpretation if not equally so in their inception. Just because something is written down does not make it true, or even representative. What pressures were being exerted on those doing the writing and signing, and what did they stand to lose or gain by their acts of scrivening – their Oaths of Allegiance and their Declarations of War? How far can we even rely on those who observed them, or who claim to have done so? Indeed, overreliance on these constituent parts privileges literacy over the oral tradition, one which Herodotus (influenced as he was by the Homeric epics) came out of and which historians have always relied upon – however unreliable it, in turn, may be, based as it is on folk memory. To favour the written over the spoken word does a great disservice to so-called ‘ordinary’ people, and smacks of a ‘made by great men’ approach to historiography. In this prejudice originates the elevation of History over Memory.

Worthwhile Academic Pursuit

None of the foregoing is intended to denigrate the study of History as a worthwhile academic pursuit. But one has only to trace the history of nationalist, revisionist and counter-revisionist narratives of past events on our own island over the preceding century or so to glean an inkling of the fluctuations of fashion in how history is done and disseminated, and to be aware that all readings of history, whatever the original sources or new evidence which come to light, are necessarily provisional. Plays by Brian Friel like Translations and Making History engage with how this history has been made, and remade. The presentation of the past, whether in memory or history (or historical memory), and the relation of both forms of presentation to the ideal of an unmediated past – that is, to an account of the past not distorted by the medium in which it is presented – is illusory. In this regard, every form of (re)presenting the past is a construction and an attempt to pass on something that is already forever lost.

The concept of historiography as representation, which can easily shade into fiction, while being presented as factual truth, has correlatives in our own time. Herodotus’ treatment of the Persian invasions under Darius and Xerxes implies an underlying conflict between the absolutism of the East and the allegedly free institutions of the West, between Persian monarchy and Athenian democracy. The fact that we have no Persian record of the Persian Wars is down to the fact that Persia was an oral culture, and their version has been lost in the mists of time. In this case, written words would have proven useful. Herodotus’ contention that democracy was the cornerstone of Athenian superiority, and his praise of it as responsible for Athens’ pre-eminent position, might make us mindful of the justifications invoked for the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States and Britain. While bringing the benefits of democracy and freedom to a former dictatorship was the general goal of the invasion, the proximate goad was the supposed presence of weapons of mass destruction within the jurisdiction of that regime, a piece of ‘intelligence’ which was subsequently exposed as a faulty, if enabling, fiction. However, that the reason for going to war ultimately proved to be another instance of imaginative invention, every bit as much a representation (or spin) as elements of Herodotus’ Histories, did not bother the advocates of that invasion unduly after it was discovered, evidence that people are still as enthralled by mythic embroidery masquerading as objective fact as they ever were.

To be sure, in Herodotus’ day it was the Persian Empire which was the aggressor, looking to colonise Greece, and the united city-states, including Athens, were merely defending themselves. The notable difference in our day is that it is the democrats who are doing the invading, with the sanctioning intention of toppling an absolute ruler, or eradicating terrorism. Again, how often today do we hear the sound bite, employed not only in defence of Israel’s right to defend itself, but also in support of its continued existence, that it is ‘the only democracy in the region’? Without too much of a stretch, it could be argued that Herodotus was indulging in an early version of what Edward Said subsequently termed, in the title of his masterly book which almost single-handedly founded postcolonial studies, Orientalism (1978). Having initiated the debate, Said developed it further in Culture and Imperialism (1993), sensitising the average western reader to this strange and sinister colonialism of culture. Sadly, these tropes will not cease, for obscurantism is not the sole prerogative of any epoch, or political grouping.

Said’s originality was evident in the way he defined the subject of his book.  Orientalism is, first, an academic specialisation: a topic studied by archaeologists, historians, theologians and others in the West who are concerned with Middle Eastern and North African cultures. But Said added two further meanings to the term. Orientalism is also something more general, something that has shaped Western thought since the Greeks: namely, a way of dividing up the world between the West and the East. What appears to be a simple geographical fact is, says Said, actually an idea. The division of the world into these two parts is not a natural state of affairs, but an intellectual choice made by the West in order to define itself. The third meaning for Orientalism is more historically specific. Since the latter part of the eighteenth century, when European colonialism in the Middle East developed most fully, Orientalism has been a means of domination, a part of the colonial enterprise. Said argues that colonialism is not only about the physical acts of taking land, or of subjugating people, but is also about intellectual acts. The academic study of the Orient is unthinkable outside its colonial context and vice versa. So, rather than just an innocent scholarly topic, Orientalism is a general way of imagining the world’s divisions and a specific mechanism for furthering the colonial quest.

Following Foucault, Said describes the Orient as a product of discourse; that is, not as something in the world that is discovered and analysed, but as something created by Western institutions and ideas. The definition of the Orient is a means of regulating it; the apparent truths discovered are in fact ideas circulated and accepted as part of Western colonial activity in the Middle East. The sense of the Orient as a discursive construct, in turn, enables Said to make one of his most important and striking arguments: what the West believed it had discovered about the East tells us little about the colonised cultures, but much about the coloniser’s. The texts and disciplines that comprise Orientalism – historical narratives like that of Herodotus, analyses of religion, travel writing, etc – reveal the values and preconceptions of the West, of the way people in Washington or Paris or London, or indeed fifth century Athens, wanted to see themselves, their fears and ambitions and prejudices. In particular, the image created of the East is used as a means of constructing one’s own identity. The picture of the East functions as a distorting mirror image, enabling the West to say that whatever they are, we are not. This emphasises the way in which a duality, often referred to as a dyad, is set up: West and East, us and them.

In spite of the growing influence of Asian nations and the recent ‘Easternisation’ of international politics and trade, such exclusively Western- or Euro-centric readings still predominate our understanding of global history. This is a mindset which has been challenged, in what can be seen as a continuation of the Orientalism project, by Peter Frankopan, in his The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (2015), and The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World (2018). One would do well also to have a look at Palestinian-American Rashid Khalidi’s books Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (1997) and The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (2017), in which he depicts Israel as a settler-colonial state, and argues that the modern history of Palestine can best be understood as ‘a colonial war against the indigenous population’.

Proxy Wars

Both of the ongoing international conflicts which dominate the news cycle in these times, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the Israeli-Hamas hostilities, are in truth complex proxy wars. Appeasement, or its more recent first cousin, conflict management, does not work. As Professor Yossi Mekelberg, of the venerable Chatham House Think Tank, has written:

One conclusion from the collapse of the status quo between Israel and the Palestinians is that conflict management is a fallacy that has failed time and again. As a long-term instrument it at best buys time until the next round of violence begins. More than 75 years of conflict between Israel and the Palestinians have seen periodic outbreaks of hostilities and periodic efforts to bring peace based on a two-state solution. For most of this time the focus has been on managing the conflict. This exposes a lack of belief that a peace agreement laying to rest the differences between the two peoples can be reached. It also shows that the international collective security mechanism set up after the Second World War has failed in its mission to peacefully settle conflicts.This conflict does not need management, it needs its root causes to be addressed.

The Northern Ireland Peace Process, which culminated in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 (‘Sunningdale for slow learners’), provides some hope that reconciliation is possible in ‘lost cause’ situations, even if underlying tensions still persist. At least it put an end to what were euphemistically termed ‘The Troubles’, with their violence and loss of life. A United Ireland will happen sooner or later, and it will be an economic problem, much as the reunification of Germany was: Britain does not want to continue footing the bill for the statelet, and the Republic of Ireland is charry of taking it on. Meanwhile, most of those resident in the territory – from whatever side of the Unionist/Nationalist sectarian divide – are more preoccupied about having to pay for G.P. visits and prescriptions, should they find themselves in a New Republic.

The Russian/Ukrainian stalemate might be resolved if Putinistas were to be purged of their nostalgia for the Russian Empire and the former reach of the U.S.S.R., and had their fears over N.A.T.O. encroachment addressed; and if Zelenskyyites were not so ardent in their pursuit of N.A.T.O. membership. The Russian invasion was not, as is routinely heard in Western governmental and media discourse, entirely ‘unprovoked’. As Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs of Colombia University has written:

A far better approach for Russia might have been to step up diplomacy with Europe and with the non-Western world to explain and oppose U.S. militarism and unilateralism. In fact, the relentless U.S. push to expand NATO is widely opposed throughout the world, so Russian diplomacy rather than war would likely have been effective. […] The key to peace in Ukraine is through negotiations based on Ukraine’s neutrality and NATO non-enlargement.

As for the seemingly intractable Israeli/Palestinian conflict, with its attendant apartheid, ethnic-cleansing and genocide on the part of the more powerful and well-resourced combatant: if Israel were suddenly left to fend for itself, without being massively underwritten by the U.S. and the E.U., it would soon have to start behaving itself, and acting in a civilised manner with its neighbours – just as a reduction in Iranian (bankrolled by Russia), Qatari and Yemeni support for Hamas would greatly alleviate tensions in the zone. Alas, this is not going to happen, given the North American imperative for a strategic foothold in the region and Zionist funding of their politicians through AIPAC, coupled with German Holocaust guilt, and the onus on oppositional sympathisers to provide some sort of counterforce. The only difference between the I.D.F.’s war crimes and those of Hamas is that the latter lacks the technology to do as much extensive damage, because the former enjoys such disproportionately huge investment, and impunity.

History makes no mistakes because it has no purpose – that much Hubert Butler must have known by that time (1930s and 40s) if only because at Oxford he read the Greek and Roman classics. In any case, the dishonesty, self-deception and self-aggrandizement of those evoking history to pull the trigger didn’t escape him, not did their utter humanness. His knowledge of Russian…and of Serbo-Croatian,not to mention his French and his German, helped him along the line, no doubt, enormously. The detection of humanness in those whose words and deeds obscure it is, however, his own feat. On the other hand, this must have been easier for him, an Irishman, since schizophrenic uncertainty is humanness’ integral part.

So wrote the great Nobel Prize-winning Russian poet Joseph Brodsky in ‘On Hubert Butler’ (1994). In what could be read as a corrective to the notion of this blind, ahistorical history, he also gave this insight in his essay on the work of the great Greek pre-Modernist poet, Constantine Cavafy, ‘Pendulum’s Song’ (1975): ‘The only instrument that a human being has at his disposal for coping with time is memory, and it is his unique, sensual historical memory that makes Cavafy so distinctive.’ However, if the school principal in the ‘Nestor’ episode of Joyce’s Ulysses, Mr. Deasy, is blatantly antisemitic in his exchanges with Stephen Dedalus, Brodsky, in another essay, ‘Flight from Byzantium’ (1985), is patently Islamophobic, displaying a smug ignorance and revulsion of ‘the East’. Indeed, so vitriolic is his repugnance, it is tempting to speculate that he is intentionally verging into parody:

The delirium and horror of the East.  The dusty catastrophe of Asia. Green only on the banner of the Prophet.  Nothing grows here except moustaches. A black-eyed, overgrown-with-stubble-before-supper part of the world.  Bonfire embers doused with urine.  That smell! A mixture of foul tobacco and sweaty soap and the underthings wrapped around loins like another turban.  Racism?  But isn’t it only a form of misanthropy?  And that ubiquitous grit flying in your muzzle even in the city, poking the world out of your eyes – and yet one feels grateful even for that.  Ubiquitous concrete, with the texture of turd and the colour of an upturned grave.  Ah, all that nearsighted scum – Corbusier, Mondrian, Gropius – who mutilated the world more effectively than any Luftwaffe! Snobbery?  But it’s only a form of despair.  The local population in a state of total stupor whirling its time away in squalid snack bars, tilting its heads as in a namaz in reverse toward the television screen, where somebody is permanently beating somebody else up.  Or else they’re dealing out cards, whose jacks and nines are the sole accessible abstractions, the single means of concentration.  Misanthropy?  Despair?  Yet what else could be expected from one who has outlived the apotheosis of the linear principle? From a man who has nowhere to go back to?  From a great turdologist, sacrophage, and the possible author of Sadomachia?

Brodsky even goes on to argue that: ‘By divorcing Byzantium, Western Christianity consigned the East to non-existence, and thus reduced its own notion of human negative potential to a considerable, perhaps even a perilous, degree.’ He also implies that: ‘…the anti-individualistic notion that human life is essentially nothing – i.e., the absence of the idea that human life is sacred, if only because each life is unique’, originates in the East, and that Western Christianity’s neglecting the experience supplied by Byzantium is the reason why college campus killers are classed as mentally ill, and presumably suicide bombers are labelled religious fanatics, as opposed to just plain evil. If supposedly enlightened classical humanists can harbour such sentiments, what hope can there be for reconciliation and mutual understanding?

Interestingly, in ‘A Man Must Not Be Too Moslem’ (1953), Paul Bowles (while admittedly, no friend of Said – See Hisham Aidi, ‘So Why Did I Defend Paul Bowles?’, New York Review of Books, 20/12/2019) took entirely the opposite tack, and was so prescient that the ideas contained therein could have been ripped from today’s headlines. He wrote:

Rationalizing words like ‘progress’, ‘modernization’, or ‘democracy’  mean nothing because, even if they are used sincerely, the imposition of such concepts by force from above cancels whatever value they otherwise have. There is little doubt that by having been made indifferent Moslems, the younger generation in Turkey has become more like our idea of what people living in the 20th century should be. The old helplessness in the face of mektoub (it is written) is gone, and in its place is a passionate belief in man’s ability to alter his destiny. That is the greatest step of all; once it has been made, anything, unfortunately, can happen.

Victims of Oppression go on to Oppress

It can be argued that what Israel is doing in Gaza, and has done to the countries which surround it since its foundation, partakes of the classic pattern of abusive behaviour, on a national rather than an individual level. ‘Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return’ as W. H. Auden had it in ‘September 1, 1939’. It is not unheard of that victims of oppression go on to oppress even more. The Jewish people, who were victims of a genocide perpetrated by the Nazis during the Second World War, are now themselves perpetrating a genocide against the Palestinian people. Perhaps Brodsky’s Jewish ancestry accounts for his self-advertised blindspot: he was merely conforming to stereotype. But the Children of Gaza by now far outnumber Butler’s ‘The Children of Drancy’ (1968/78) – with the added developmental difference that now the whole world is watching their slaughter. Yet the majority of Western leaders persist in standing staunchly by Israel and its policies, paying mere lip service to popular calls for a ceasefire while continuing to supply the weapons used for the razing of Gaza and the annihilation of its people. The last thing our planet needs in this day and age is the continued endorsement and maintenance of yet another theocratic ethno-state. We in Ireland should know this all too well. George Santayana’s famous aphorism is usually misquoted as ‘Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it’, but in its original form read, ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ Unfortunately, no one learns any lessons from history, and remembers only what suits them, which is why it constantly repeats itself – first as tragedy and then as farce.

Bad things undoubtedly follow when any ethnic or national or religious grouping (often a toxic concoction of all three) claim to have all the answers, and so start getting notions that they are The Master Race, or The Chosen People, or undertake Crusades against the Heathen or Jihad against the Infidel, or any convenient Evil Other. Note that I include here such secular religions as Fascism and Communism, which too frequently manifest as latter-day utopian belief systems which can be used to sponsor mass murder.

All wars are, at root, economic. The geopolitical importance, the religion and the patriotism, the toppling of tyrants and establishing of democracy, are just the attendant window dressing. (Doubtless, all those anti-materialists who would prefer to forget, or only remember in an approved way, will here dismiss my arguments with the classic cheap insult of ‘vulgar Marxist’ – incidentally, a phrase Foster has appropriated from Benjamin’s Theses, although used there in an entirely different context. Apparently, there exist kosher, refined Marxists, and objectionable, vulgar Marxists. Thus, E. P. Thompson is deemed acceptable within the academy, despite the fact that he expressed sentiments such as, ‘so great has been the reaction in our time against Whig or Marxist interpretations of history, that some scholars have propagated a ridiculous reversal of historical roles: the persecuted are seen as forerunners of oppression, and the oppressors as victims of persecution’ (from The Making of the English Working Class (Penguin, 1978).) Yet all wars also end eventually, if only for longer or shorter periods, either through disengagement, conquest, de facto surrender, formal surrender or negotiated peace agreement. The means of disseminating misinformation may be more covert, efficient and persuasive, but what does not change is human nature. The apportioning of blame, who has right (or God) on their side, is in most conflicts a question of ‘How far back would you like to go?’ (which is, in turn, a slightly more grown-up rendering of the childish playground staple, ‘You started it’). Would that be the first incursion or the latest atrocity, or any point on the calendar in-between?

At some point, the origin of the primordial offence recedes from history into myth – found in sacred books and the stories people tell. Sometimes it is even, conveniently, the Word of God (be it Yahweh or Allah). Arguably, memory is more historically accurate than lots of competing histories. Indeed, as has been demonstrated, many of those histories, official and unofficial alike, are based on recollections after the fact. Ultimately, history is nothing more or less than memory. Yet memory fades, unless it is recorded – however rigorously or haphazardly – in history. We currently stand as helpless as we ever were when The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, as Goya had it, and Voltaire’s admonition, ‘Whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities’ is still, sadly, applicable.

Feature Image Otto Dix, Sturmtruppe geht unter Gas vor (“Stormtroopers Advance Under a Gas Attack”), 1924.