The power of memory

Alexis de Tocqueville, known for his observations of the early American republic in his Democracy in America, published later in his life a reflection on his native country of France, which had undergone a series of massive and violent revolutions. In the preface to his L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution, Tocqueville perceived a profound power of historical memory for a nation’s people. He wrote:

The French made, in 1789, the greatest effort that has ever been made by any people to sever their history into two parts, so to speak, and to tear open a gulf between their past and their future. In this design, they took the greatest care to leave every trace of their past condition behind them; they imposed all kinds of restraints upon themselves in order to be different from their ancestry; they omitted nothing which could disguise them.

Tocqueville posited that the ideological undercurrent of the French Revolution sought to utterly destroy the old regime—which included an erasure of the national memory. In the view of the radicals, to birth a new society necessitated the obliteration of all that preceded it. This effort included the rejection of the political and social customs of the French aristocracy and was extended to destroy any vestiges of the old religion as well. The French Revolution, in all its violence, was an effort to reframe and rewrite the totality of national identity, which required, as Tocqueville noted, severing the people of France from their past.

The United States appears to be in a similar crisis of historical consciousness. Our nation’s past has surfaced in recent years to the forefront of public debate, especially after The New York Times published the (in)famous 1619 Project, which aimed to “reframe the country’s history” around the narrative of slavery in America. The nation’s founding, according to the project, must begin with 1619 when the first slaves arrived in Virginia. Since its publication, the 1619 Project has grown in stature and prominence, most recently enjoying the release of a documentary series on Hulu.

This is an impressive feat, especially since many of the historical claims made by the contributors to the project have been debunked. Still, the project complements other sustained efforts to reframe and reimagine American history—from John Witherspoon to Mt. Rushmore to Jonathan Edwards, to the influence of Christianity on America’s founding, our public square redounds with crucial, indeed, consequential debates about our past.

Memory is a powerful agent. It can evoke within us profound emotions of joy and misery, pride and shame, hope and despair. As individuals, we experience this every day and are well acquainted with the force of our memory in not only causing emotional responses but in stimulating actions in the present.

The truth of memory’s power in the life of an individual, however, extends to broader communities and even nations. In this way, as Wilfred McClay argued, “History is to social identity what memory is to individual identity.” The connection between historical memory and national identity was precisely the point Tocqueville noted at the beginning of the Ancien Régime. For the French revolutionaries to cultivate a new social identity and purpose was inescapably an act in historical thinking—or, in their case, historical deconstruction.

National memory, in other words, bears enormous influence on the way citizens view their present circumstances and can aid in directing their future national goals. If national memory functions for a society in the same way it does for an individual, then how we remember our past becomes as significant as the actual historical events themselves. Our national stories have interwoven within its chronicles teleological threads that remind us of who we are, where we’ve come from, and the kind of nation we must endeavor to be. In fact, as McClay opined, “Without points of reference provided by historical consciousness, we soon forget who and what we are, and we perish.”

As Tocqueville observed, national memory was an obstruction to revolution. A true historical memory will avoid hagiography while not teetering off the cliffs of deconstruction—it won’t suppress the moments that make us cringe nor will it veil moments of triumph. Done rightly, teaching and writing history aids in the development of a healthy civil religion, one that roots our citizenry in an accurate presentation of our past, and nourishes good citizenship. History is always an argument, but our aim must be to create a unifying historical consciousness that, above all, inculcates lasting hope in the American story.