What does it mean to bury the past? It is like burying the dead, which means not just acknowledging the fact as in “Gilgamesh” where the hero sees bugs coming out of his dead friend’s nose, but having come to terms with it, funeral rites a very ancient form of ritual perhaps to acknowledge that people have to be accepted as really dead because they visit us as ghosts and memories, no one really dead until Aldous Huxley replaces rituals with allowing factories to recover and recycle chemical remains. Then dead people are really dead because people now actually dead people really are. Similarly, burying the past is to do more than acknowledge that past times are over, whether the Romantic Age or hula hoops or JFK, but have come to terms with that fact, moving on or not with that sensibility. People can do that. It is possible for consciousness to transform dead people and past situations to become established as in the past. Here are some ways by which to wrestle with the past so that it is over.
Just as difficult as burying the dead, who are resurrected in our dreams and fantasies, ever finding new guises, until visits to burial grounds recognize people as truly interred, it is also difficult to bury the past because memories from the past continually arise, that the nature of memory, and dressed with new meanings and insights. I remember when an undergraduate in the Fifties joined a few people to picket Woolworth’s on 113th St. near Columbia because the company wouldn't employ black clerks. We were a nerdy lot and not very threatening but for some reason the New York City Police Department had assigned two patrol officers to watch over them. As we were ending our stint, one of the officers came over to me and sailed “Boys, you are very idealistic, but nothing is going to change,” I said nothing, but I remembered that and thought, ten years later, we had changed the world, what with the passage of the civil rights laws in the mid-Sixties, the thought of that minor contribution giving me and others considerable satisfaction. Twenty years later than that, I remembered the incident, along with some other minor protests by me, as part of the civic engagement of my generation and something tyo remember proudly. But fifty years after the March on Washington in 1963, which I also attended, I lamented how slowly was the progress in race relations and that this week if I were still young I would fly East to Nashville, as I once did to Montgomery, Alabama, to bear witness of my protesting against censoring black men for insisting that there be an end to gun violence. When will my memories be finally part of the historical past where we mention the fashions of those bygone days, or the popular music of the time, rather than part of current events, news atrocities like George Floyd or legislative expulsions as occurring in the current news. I want the past to be over, the era of racial unrest over, having gone on to something else, like space exploration or electric cars or a national minimum yearly income, rather than a rut through which plows endlessly furrow. So dealing with the past means becoming satisfied when it is ended, or at least that is the point of view of a non-primitive person.
At least in imagination, civilizations are social structures that have to be deeply interred if they are to be ended once and for all. We speak of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire even though there were successor empires such as the Byzantine Empire and modifications of the Roman Empire like the civilization around Ravenna, however much there was a decline in learning and architecture during the Dark Ages. Current movies imagine the destruction of civilizations as being occasioned by atomic weapons and plagues rather than by political catastrophes, A war could end world wide civilization whereby as the Korda/ H. G. Wells movie “Things to Come” imagined would happen if there was a world war two that deteriorated to a city people fighting with the hill people for control of a coal mine controlled by a leader known generically and therefore more primitively as “the Boss”. What results is the end of science and technology and other sorts of learning awaiting a new Renaissance.
But the truth of the matter is that civilizations can not be so deeply interred so as not to persist or be quickly brought back to life. The impending apocalypse, the Second World War, did not devastate civilization even after atomic weapons had been introduced. The United States prospered and so did the conquered nations, Germany undergoing an economic miracle twenty years after its defeat and Japan reborn at about the same time. The doldrums were the nations like the USSR which suffered from internal dynamics, just as North Korea did. Most nations rise up, but maybe not Bangladesh and sub saharan nations and so there is a question as to why. And the fear of nuclear war as the end of civilization resulting from the Cold War becoming hot also did not happen even though it could have been if not that rational leaders on both sides saw the wisdom of arms control measures because atomic warfare had no military utility except to scare people. So nations are interred, as I say, mostly in imagination, and without sufficient wonder at how civilizations persist despite their adversities.
There are some civilizations that do indeed die and are awarded a burial where there is a moral to be made of its demise. The society that died on Easter Island, using its last trees to build their totems and so wasting their last natural resources, according to Diamond’s “Guns, Steel and Butter'', is a paean to environmentalism in that people should be practical rather than wasteful, though small societies are just too fragile to endure, as is presently with regard to the Seychelles, a set of islands just above sea level and likely flooded out if there is even a modest rise in sea levels. Move the population to higher ground and, if pinch comes to shove, abandon Miami, long threatened by inundation but never accomplished. But there are civilizations that actually do die as happened with the Aztecs, their remains blending into the Mexican Indian population, and the Western American Indians, devastated by whiteman terror, hunger, and the other privations that occur from hunter gatherers ever encroached by farms and pasturage. The Indians are strangulated to extinction.
One example of a real extinction of a population is documented in the life of Ishi, a California Indian where the remnants of the tribe died off and alone for years who wandered into a town hungry and exhausted and expecting to be killed but who instead was turned over to an anthropologist, Albert Kroeber, who was able to converse with him and get him settled in the Berkeley anthropological museum where he spent his ensuing life. What was it like for him to be a true survivor, very different from the Holocaust survivors who had new lives in the US, Israel and elsewhere, even in the reborn Germany, deciding only what they wanted to or couldn’t forget, but just unwilling to discuss? Ishi was a single survivor and so alone in a special way. Did he mourn or reflect? There is something to be said for living amid the remains in a museum, however distorted it might be in relation to his memories. Maybe it was company with the past and therefore comforting but maybe a poignant pain of what had been lost. Those who survived Cortez became part of the Mexican Indian population but there are no interviews with them.
While people bury and rebury people and pasts, those not easily staying dead, and mostly in imagination watching civilizations die, institutions are a kind of social species that people preserve to allow to sustain themselves because they provide hierarchical orders that people think both meaningful and satisfactory, so that a religious insight like Christianity is sustained and deepened even if the Messiah is thought to have died so as to sustain the abiding sense that life has to be redeemed from its awful ways. The emotional hierarchy of states of failure, the emotional range of people from sinners or merely shirkers, on the one hand, and good and saved and saintly people on the other, are a deeper chain of being than is the case in Jews, with their separation between he observant and the lapsed, and more important than the theological structure whereby the fanciful doctrine of the resurrection is added to the emotional hierarchy.
The primary issue of sustaining a hierarchy may seem counterintuitive. There is, for example, the commonplace observation that people are not fully independent and mature until their parents are dead and so no longer look for guidance and approbation on their part of the older generation and so are able to make their own course, under their own guidance. But that is not the case. To the contrary, people reassign themselves in thunderous prestige and power hierarchies as they age. Children get to preside over ceremonies and their parents place children in decision making out of deference to their current wisdom or their own failing judgment or even just to be rid of now burdensome responsibilities. The young people know what brands to buy and how to manage stress. The same is true of elderly teachers and with accountants who only fittingly mastered the new computer programs.Age first takes precedence and then gives up its privilege.
Age in fact is decisive in seeing how institutions preserve themselves. New Doctors remember Osler and new physicists relearn Newton. George Marshall as a young officer visited the forts in the American West where not much more than a generation ago his military forebearers had fought in the Indian Wars. The same thing happens in the institution of academic life. Harvard was founded in 1634, not long after the settlement was established in Massachusetts. Eton went back to Henry VIII, There is in each a long train of what is called “tradition” whereby people come to terms where they stand in a chain of legacies, one generation or one figure standing where they rank, like labeling U. S. President’s for where they rank, with the exception of Trump,who had no concern for his legacy, and therefore no guidelines for his behavior, and will be ranked with an asterisk, just liked chemically enhanced baseball players, to show that he was a sport rather than more or less worthy of acclaim.
But what if an institution or a movement dies and so people are left adrift, absent the assurances that some thoughts and structures that would seem permanent, part of what had to be, were abolished, even possibly in quick time? Germans had to understand that Hitler who had been supported by the German people through Stalingrad, now had to reawaken themselves as to owning that Hitler was a bad man. It was unsettling, unmooring, and some people also found it difficult that Stalin also had to become recognized as a bad man. And that is a highly personalized institution that people had to re-interpret. Putin still has not come to terms with a post-USSR political entity other than having shed its name but trying as best he can to recover its territory rather than looking for new allies and resources in the various Stans.
For their part, social movements may end but they do not die in that their residues remain even if the principles are no longer enunciated as a coherent ideology. Romanticism is dead in that people may not rhapsodize nature but rather regard it as endangered, but Jane Austen is alive and well in any current romcom. What remains of Modernism is the idea that art and literature can be esoteric. The high Enlightenment perseveres in the U. S. Constitution, even if a number of current congress people have strange readings of it and find its spirit of liberty strange.
Harry Truman was the only President in the Twentieth Century who had never been to college but, as Dean Acheson attested Truman was well versed in presidential biographies and so knows the customs and obligations that went with his office. But what would happen if this chain of figures and works were neglected or forgotten so as to provide guardrails or standards for a successor? I would think of themselves as bereft of the past, required on their own to rely on their own thinking or on what is to be established as natural law or custom to provide them with a way forward. The resources people use is a feature of the consequences of generations, the wisdom of history, akin to Burke’s idea of the legacy of dead generations burden upon the present, but rather a comparative anatomy which allows keeping account of highs and lows, what is to be discarded as well as adapted rather than just retained as a cumulative and unerring wisdom. Maybe it is time to allow gays to marry even if there was never a society, primitive or otherwise, which did so.
That sense of being without the crutch of prior generations happens in what seems at the moment the decline of the liberal arts tradition that is at least a millennium old.For myself and other people I know, it is unsettling and isolating to do without the resources of the great books as the way we found a way to orienting and move forward in our intellectual endeavors because that way of thinking was the way we thought and thought was a necessary aspect of thinking. We neither wanted to or thought to bury our dead white males (and females and people of color) but to find them freshly applied and reminded as the basis of the corpus of wisdom. Individual schools can die, though the Italian and the French and even the American universities are long in duration, but here we are speaking of the diminishment of a way of thought so central to thought itself that even diminishing it is itself a catastrophe akin to a great plague from which can be recovered only with the passage of centuries. Meanwhile, how to cope with the decline of such intellectual sustenance especially when in a few generations it seems so many people seem not to have missed it, just like the business professor I cited a few posts ago about how you can buy books after you have made your bundle?
It takes volition and work to repeatedly bury the past of people and civilizations and to sustain as akin to alive for people and social and intellectual movements. But you can leave alone most people to just die even as ideas eventually do and souls are not reborn into new bodies, there being a stable and immortal stock of them, as Plato thought even though Durkheim thought, mistakenly, that societies were eternal even if invisible. (What if the population increased? Would it be necessary for Plato’s universe to manufacture new souls to make up for the shortages?) The result of sequential rather than steady state or simultaneous lives is because of that same social mechanism, the existential and inevitable fact of the succession of generations. Most people just die, remembered fondly of a grandchild who elaborates whatever inkling of a person remembered or a student who remembers a thought a professor uttered, but mostly just an exit from the stage, decluttering the scene so that the plot can move on to new events until the story rather than its characters are over.
Perform a mental experiment. Think of the minor actresses of the Forties, like Ann Rutherford or Bonita Granville, who only film buffs will remember because Ann Sheridan was the straight man opposite Cary Grant in “I Was a Male War Bride ''. Or all the anonymous chorus boys and chorus girls who accompanied the stars in Thirties musicals, full of youth and vigor and health and now all dead and nothing to show for it but the amusement of someone knowing that great-grandma was in a Fred and Ginger musical, those two excepted because their stars illuminate the permanent sky because we can no longer do without them once they have been. Yes, maybe permanence is a sliding scale so that some characters last one or two or even three generations before fading away, but that is the lot of life (rather, of death), to experience a dead person as a fading shadow. You don’t have to bury the dead in the modern world because they just disappear.