Disorders Of Memory

By Charles Krauthammer

Washington is in the grip of a memorial epidemic. The success of the Viet Nam Memorial has spawned demand for more. Memorials are in progress to Korean War vets, to black Revolutionary War patriots, to women in military service, to law-enforcement heroes, to women in Viet Nam, to Francis Scott Key, to Kahlil Gibran (!). The hunger for memory etched in stone is exactly what one would expect from a culture that, having just now transcended paper and entered the radically ephemeral world of video, finds itself living in an ever moving pastless present.

The first casualty is memory. Every advance in writing, from stone to clay to paper to electronic blips, is at the same time an advance in erasing. In the electronic age erasing has become literally effortless: it takes an act of commission -- you must command your computer to SAVE -- to retain information. Simple omission, or an electrical storm, turns computer thoughts to ether.

The ultimate instrument for forgetting is television. It is inherent in the medium. The flickering image is impossible to retain. Who remembers the once ubiquitous Mike Douglas? Frank Reynolds? Michael Dukakis? Pastlessness is inherent in video, with its fast cuts and dissolving shots and rerecord button, with its moving tape forever recording a vanishing now. For a television society, every day is Today, This Morning and Tonight. Television life is a rolling present relieved only by commercial breaks.

"To live in the present is like proposing to sit on a pin," wrote Chesterton. Science makes a more severe judgment. It calls living in the present psychotic. Not happy-go-lucky, devil-may-care living in the present, but the real thing. Some individuals by reason of accident or disease (generally alcoholism) suffer from what is called Korsakoff's psychosis: they have no memory. Not that they have forgotten their ancient childhood memories. They often retain these. But they have lost entirely the capacity to establish new memories. Everything they see, everything they hear, everything they think, they forget within seconds. Introduce yourself to a Korsakoffian, leave the room, and return a minute later. He will have no recollection of you.

Not surprisingly, the amnesic society behaves much like the amnesic individual. The Korsakoffian patient, for example, fills in his gaps with fiction. He makes up stories, often gigantic confabulations, to make historical ends meet. The video culture too fills in the gaps of real life with mountains of fiction. (The average American absorbs more make-believe drama in a year than his ancestors did in a lifetime.) And it ties history's loose ends with a form of fabrication it calls docudrama.

The Korsakoffian, moreover, has trouble functioning. He is always getting things wrong. As modern industrial culture becomes more visual, its images more transient, it has a hard time learning. It too is constantly surprised. Take the shock with which news of the Chinese crackdown on the democracy movement was received. Given Communism's 70-year history, marked by repeated reigns of repressive terror, only a forgetting culture could have been so taken by surprise. The week after the Tiananmen massacre, Hungary, which has a harder time forgetting, staged a moving reburial of the men executed for leading the 1956 rebellion. The commemoration reminded us that Western Communism in its 40th year produced precisely the same atrocity -- freedom crushed with tanks and terror -- that Eastern Communism is producing in this, its 40th year.

But amnesia, the disorder of advanced electronic societies, is not the only possible derangement of national memory. There are cultures that remember nothing and cultures that forget nothing. Forgetting nothing might be worse. Remembering nothing produces a mere mindless, stumbling insouciance. Forgetting nothing produces paralysis and death.

Beirut's warring factions, for example, have a prodigious capacity for remembering injury. So too the Northern Irish, whose Protestants celebrate the Battle of the Boyne -- next year is the 300th anniversary -- as if it took place yesterday. The inability to forget, to let the slate be wiped clean, freezes societies in anachronism and turns blood feuds into endless civil war.

It is because the inability to relinquish the past can produce such horror that memory -- what place, what price, what power to give it -- is a central question in the great historical transition from dictatorship to democracy. All the new Latin democracies, for example, are emerging from periods of brutal dictatorship. What to do with this past? Uruguay chose, by referendum, a forgetting. It voted to let the brutalities of military rule be bygone. Argentina did the opposite. It prosecuted those who gave the orders for torture and execution. The Argentine experience, however, with its semiannual military revolts and its reversion to Peronism, seems an argument against too much remembering.

Too much remembering. In Funes, the Memorious, Jorge Luis Borges tells the story of a man who suddenly gains the ability to remember every iota of information he has ever apprehended. Every vein of every leaf of every tree, every formation of every cloud in every sky at every instant of his life he sees. An avalanche of knowing renders him inaccessible, mystical and finally defeated. Funes dies young. No mind can apprehend God's work, or man's, in all its detail and survive. Forgetting, for men as for nations, is a biological necessity, like sleep, a respite from consciousness.

We children of the electronic age, however, suffer differently. Forgetting is all we do. We so feel ourselves forgetting that we contrive monuments of stone -- to vets, to cops, to Kahlil Gibran, to whomever -- to anchor ourselves in time. That which is written in stone endures, we figure. If the Ten Commandments were given today, they would be flashed on the great Diamond Vision screen at Yankee Stadium, and by sunup not a soul would remember.