We
all know that memory is selective. That is not news for most of us. But it is
shocking to realize just how selective it can be. Some of the things we (as a
culture and as individuals) suppress are so big, it is amazing that we let
ourselves get away with it.
In
New England, they have long had a proud tradition of remembering that they were
the first in the nation to abolish slavery. Over a century before the Civil War
ended slavery in the South, Connecticut and Rhode Island passed gradual
emancipation plans. In Massachusetts, it is more of a mystery as to how
dismantling slavery came about—most likely it was a combination of public
opinion, legal cases, and a clause in the Massachusetts constitution
guaranteeing freedom and equality for all—but here too slavery was considered
banned.
So
strong was the impression of New England’s noble attitude that, for a long time,
many New Englanders believed either that slavery had never existed there or
that it was very mild. What they had a harder time remembering was that freed
slaves were not treated as equal citizens. But that’s not the part that shocks
me. (Though it should. One contemporary in 1796 acknowledged at one and the same
time that denying civil rights was such a bad thing to do that it could be
called civil slavery and then insisted they had a right to do it because every
society can decide who gets to participate in civil rights and who doesn’t.)
New
England remembered itself as the birthplace of American patriotism and freedom.
They celebrated the heroes of the Revolution. But they chose not to remember
that some of these heroes were black men who served in the Revolutionary army.
They erased black soldiers from history. In one case I read about long ago,
they literally erased one such man. If I recall, there was a famous painting
made in the 1790s which depicted American patriots in battle. One of them was
black. When the painting was reproduced in textbooks for children, the black
soldier was removed.
Why
do that? Why not remember that black and white soldiers fought alongside each
other? And how could they champion emancipation of slaves and then deliberately
fail to remember the many black men fighting in the same cause they all
participated in? One answer is that emancipation served more to promote the
self-image of white people as true believers in freedom than to help the freed
slaves who would never be granted full civil rights. And the removal of black
people from the history of the Revolution had something to do with the same
racism that denied civil rights.
Whatever
your answer is, this stands as a grand example of the selectivity of historical
memory.
Everywhere
you look, you can find more examples of incredibly shocking deletions. In The Descent of Man, Darwin expressed his
firm belief in the moral and intellectual inferiority of savages. He was
convinced that savages would never help a stranger, whereas Europeans would, (“humanity
is an unknown virtue” in savages, he would write) and gave his full assent to a
Spanish maxim “Never, never trust an Indian.”
Darwin
had completely forgotten that, in his younger days, in the Diary he kept while on board the Beagle, he had given examples of South American Indians helping
strangers, often shipwrecked European sailors. Of the Patagonian Indians, he
noted “their usual disinterested noble hospitality.” (In later published
editions of his journal, the word ‘noble’ was dropped.) None of this made it
into Descent. It is one good sign of
how hardened Darwin’s racism became in his later years. He chose not to
remember some of the good qualities in native peoples that he himself had some
acquaintance with.
Darwin
erased hospitable savages from the world just as surely as those textbooks
erased a black man from a painting, and for the same reason: So he could
create his own painting which bore no resemblance to the real world. This was
selective memory in the service of bad anthropology.
I
could go on and on with other examples, like the failure of scientists today to
remember that, fifteen years before The
Origin of Species, Robert Chambers assembled much of the same evidence for
evolution (the common descent of species) that Darwin would. He was in fact the
first to prove that evolution was a more probable theory than special creation.
But scientists and scholars have chosen to erase this from historical memory.
It is that kind of selectivity that takes my breath away. These are the kinds
of cases that make one think deep unconscious forces are at work.
©
2016 Leon Zitzer
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