Inserting Present Knowledge Into Memories

One of the myriad tricks that our human mind can play on itself is to relive the past through memory with all of the accumulated skills, knowledge, and experience of today. And then wonder why we behaved as we did back then! We automatically project our current status as “finished product” onto the past, but we also insert into our personal memories our more complete understandings of the context in which our life experiences took place. So, a slightly out of the ordinary, but ultimately forgettable civil defense drill I took in the first grade (without knowing then that it was a civil defense drill) becomes a bigger memory with the later knowledge that it took place during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. My memories of my high school teachers are, today, very negative and critical. But if I were to remember my attitude toward them then (without inserting my present viewpoint into my memories), then I would recall that I just thought that’s how teachers normally went about doing their jobs.

Taking life as it comes at you is a totally different type of beast then the revised version that we hold dear to our memories. Historical revisionism is another example of this flaw in reasoning. Revisionism, especially the type that envisions vast conspiracies as having manipulated the trends and events of history, tends to make the faulty assumption that those powers who were behind the scenes had the same kind of relationship with time that the revisionist had: instead of taking on reality as it unfolds in the present, they are somehow able to create, from a “future” vantage point, an intricate network of “previous” actions and events inevitably leading to the current situations that the revisionists look back from. This is an absurd presumption, when you come to think about it. Just look at the latest conspiracy talk about the 9/11 attacks (especially the “inside job” angle). The so-called “insider” conspirators would have had no more of a clue to the future than anyone else would. Just look at a true conspiracy to see the kind of thing that really happens: the Watergate break-in and cover up was a conspiracy founded on secrecy among its participants that dismally unraveled on a grand scale and led to the fall of the Nixon Administration. Now that was a much more plausible model for a conspiracy.

I believe that this tendency to insert present knowledge into past memories is a natural human trait and makes itself known throughout the world in oral histories. For example, at the turn of the century, a missionary to a West African tribe who was an amateur astronomer once revealed to them that Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, had a faint companion star (called the “Pup”). This tribe incorporated this knowledge into their oral history until, after a couple of generations, the knowledge of the existence of this invisible (to the unaided eye) star was something that, as far as they were concerned, had always been with them. In the early 1970s, Erich Von Daniken used their knowledge of the “Pup” star as evidence that ancient astronauts from space had come down to Earth in ancient times and bestowed this knowledge upon the natives. But an honest seeker of the truth would ask, “Which is the more plausible and simpler explanation”?

As a former President once said in a different context, we need to be kinder and gentler to ourselves when we look back upon our lives and anguish over some of our earlier decisions and actions. We tend to forget the enormous level of ignorance and uncertainty with which we must deal at every point of our present moments. Even now, I’m sure that I’m doing things about which, from a future vantage point, I’m likely to be scratching my head, wondering, “What was I thinking then ?”!!