The Past Is a Permanent Dimension of Human Consciousness and Values

In 1953 a twenty seven year old American named Henry Molaison underwent surgery to relieve severe epilepsy, and the surgeons removed parts of the temporal lobes of his brain on both sides. The epilepsy improved, but he could no longer form new memories. For the remaining fifty five years of his life he lived in a continuous present, meeting his doctors afresh every day, unable to recall what he had eaten an hour earlier. He was cheerful and intelligent, and yet he could not build a life. Known to science as H. M., he demonstrated that identity is held together by memory, and illustrated in a small and tragic way the topic's claim that the past is a permanent dimension of human consciousness.

For individuals the claim is easily seen. A person is the story of what he has done, suffered and loved. Take away the story, as dementia does, and the person seems to dissolve even though the body remains. Every present decision draws on past experience, and every fear or hope is shaped by what came before. Proust made a great novel from the way a taste of tea soaked cake summoned a whole childhood. We do not simply have a past. We are made of it.

Societies, too, have memory. The sociologist Maurice Halbwachs argued in the 1920s that memory is collective as well as individual, kept alive by families, religions, nations and ceremonies. A nation remembers its founding struggles, its heroes and its wounds, and these memories give it a sense of who it is. Indians remember the freedom struggle through Gandhi's march to Dandi, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919 and the midnight speech of 1947. Nehru wrote The Discovery of India in a prison cell in 1944 to find in the long past the identity of the nation that was about to be born.

Values are inherited from the past as well. The idea of non violence in India has roots in Jain and Buddhist teaching reaching back more than two thousand years, and Gandhi drew on it. The concept of human rights evolved from the Magna Carta, the Enlightenment and the struggles against slavery. Religions carry moral teaching across thousands of years in stories and rituals. A society cannot invent its values from nothing in a generation, and those that try, as some revolutions have, discover that people return to the older loyalties. The past supplies the vocabulary in which we think of right and wrong.

The past supplies the vocabulary in which we think of right and wrong.

William Faulkner caught the sense of its persistence in a line from Requiem for a Nun in 1951, that the past is never dead and is not even past. The injuries of history remain in the present in forms that cannot be avoided. The effects of slavery in the United States continue in disparities of wealth and health, and the consequences of colonialism are visible in borders, languages and economies across Asia and Africa. The Partition of 1947 still shapes the politics of South Asia. Whole peoples live within the shadows of events that happened before they were born.

Societies have developed ways of dealing with this inheritance. After apartheid, South Africa created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1996 so that victims and perpetrators could tell what had happened, in the belief that a nation could not heal without facing its past. In Germany, schools and memorials teach the history of the Holocaust in detail, and a word, Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung, was coined for the struggle to come to terms with the past. Rwanda used community courts called gacaca to try nearly two million cases after the genocide of 1994. The refusal to forget is a way of building a more honest future, and the societies that have attempted it have generally found it painful and worth the pain.

But the past is not simply given. It is reconstructed in every generation, and the reconstruction can serve present interests. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger showed in 1983 how many supposedly ancient traditions, from Scottish clan tartans to royal ceremonies, were invented in the recent past. Textbooks are rewritten when governments change, monuments are raised and torn down, and rival communities can draw opposite lessons from the same events. Memory can be turned into a weapon, as in the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s, when medieval battles were invoked to justify modern killings.

Friedrich Nietzsche warned in 1874 that an excess of history can be a disease. A person overwhelmed by the past cannot act, and a people that lives wholly in memory becomes a museum. He distinguished monumental history, which inspires, from antiquarian history, which preserves, and from critical history, which judges, and held that each is useful in measure and harmful in excess. Societies that nurse ancient grievances, or that insist on returning to a golden age that never existed, find that the past becomes a prison. It is a permanent dimension, but it is not the only one. The future also makes claims on us.

The right relation to the past is therefore one of honest memory and free judgement. We should know what happened, including the shameful parts, and ask what it requires of us now. Values drawn from the past should be tested against present knowledge, keeping what is worth keeping and dropping what cannot be defended. Tradition in this sense is a conversation across generations, in which each takes up what it is given and passes on a version that it has questioned.

The permanence the topic describes is perhaps most strongly felt in the fact that we can never reach the past as it was. We reach it through records, which survive by accident, and through memories, which change each time they are recalled. The past is permanent as an influence and elusive as a fact. What will be remembered of us is in the hands of people not yet born, who will build their own consciousness from what we leave, and who will have values formed by a past that includes our present.