James Maxey recently posted an entry on his blog about remembering the events in his life with arcs and storylines. I used to be obsessed with memory, perhaps because I was frequently praised for having a good one. I remember feeling frustrated with my parents if they ever told a story wrong, and bless my own heart, I often tried to correct them.
Since then I’ve realized that memories (even mine, perish the thought) are imperfect and while it may be comforting to believe that somewhere locked in our brains is the perfect recollection of dates, events, smells, tastes, and feelings, scientific studies suggest otherwise. I would point you to those scientific studies but alas I can’t remember where to find the link.
What I find interesting, or perhaps troubling, is given that our memories are imperfect, and at best all we can remember are collages of perceptions, all of our future perceptions, actions, and thoughts are in turn influenced by those perceptions. In essence we take flawed data, assume it to be not flawed, and then use that data to collect more flawed data. Occasionally we become self-aware of this flawedness and try to adjust, but lacking the capacity to calibrate to 0 makes it very difficult.
When I taught English at SIU I tried to get my students to question whatever it was that we were reading or discussing. How is the reasoning flawed, the support biased. To whom is the article addressed and why is that important. At the other end of that spectrum is the world view that because everything is flawed, biased, ignorant, we must tear it down or worse, believe the opposite. To use an extreme… ‘This scientist misrepresents his data about global warming, and he doesn’t disclose his inherent self-interest THEREFORE he is wrong and global warming doesn’t exist.’
Well, that’s not *exactly* what they say, but my perception of many arguments on the subject given to me by 102 students boils down to that.
Conspiracy theories seem to operate on the same premise. 9/11 triggered a series of events that led to the invasion of Iraq. President Bush wanted to invade Iraq in the first place, therefore President Bush planned 9/11.
What?
And again, that’s a bastardized imperfect distillation of 2 hours of nonsense, but most of it all seems to echo the idea of ‘Because I can conceive of another reason that is based on the premise that everyone lies, serves their own self-interest, and nothing is what it seems, my conception of what could be true therefore must be true.’ I always liked that line from Sherlock Holmes by way of Star Trek: After we eliminate the impossible, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truth.’
Oh irony, thy name is internet! I was afraid of misquoting the line, so I typed in a few phrases from it and did a google search. The first link? An article about 9/11 conspiracy theories which ends with the phrase, “Most importantly, they need to ask and seek an honest answer to the question: who benefited from the catastrophe that killed thousands on September 11, 2001?” I won’t read the article, nor will I link to such hogwash, but after skimming a few paragraphs it seems to suggest that Israel is responsible for 9/11. I think it’s very important to keep an open mind for possibilities. But at the end of the day, if you’re going to cling to one of those possibilities you better believe in it for more than a love of old quotes!
What’s frightening to me is the short memory of the world. If someone spouts nonsense for long enough, eventually people start to repeat it and it repeats and repeats until eventually you forgot that it was nonsense. There’s an excellent video on Ted.com where a woman talks about memes. I happened to watch it after discussing the movie Religulous with my brother in which he was trying to reason through the evolutionary process that led to religion. After watching the video I started to look at information as an amoral entity, stripped of value judgments of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ or ‘more right’ or ‘more wrong’. Information spreads and adapts itself in such a way as to foster its being spread.
When did we start saying ‘So help me god’ after the Presidential oath? It’s not in the constitution. Why do we say ‘under god’ in the pledge of allegiance? It wasn’t added until the 1950s but listen to some right wing whacko talk about it and you’d think that all the founding fathers carved it into their skins.
Why do some denominations think Catholics aren’t Christians? Where do they think the Protestants came from? Why do Christians forget that Jesus was Jewish? And that for a time, in order to become Christian you had to convert to Judaism. Why is the Catholic church suddenly against abortion? They didn’t have a problem with it for the first 8 or so centuries of their existence. Mary Magdalene is a whore? Since when?
I hate to pick on religion so much, but it’s one of the quickest and easiest examples of where information has deviated so much. Groups cherry pick Leviticus to support some bigotries, but not others, yet stomp and holler with righteous indignation they’re just being true to the source material. Stone your leaders to death every time one of them has an affair, then I’ll let you keep that argument.
I take it back, I love to pick on religion so much. I can think of nothing more emblematic of the problem with flawed perception as the idea that we should structure our laws, our schools, our way of life around the notion that god exists. God may exist. I sincerely hope he does. But every time someone says “God is watching over us and he has plans for us and he blesses the United States” and blah blah blah I want to tear my hair out. God is the safety net of the willfully ignorant. Why should we worry about the environment? God created the earth and he’ll take care of it. Why should we explore space? God created the earth and we shouldn’t leave it. Why should we worry about anything other than justifying our actions with ludicrous interpretations of a text that God himself, if he exists, did not write.
If we perceive fortuitous circumstances in our life as the work of guardian angels, who consciously and deliberately intervene on our behalf, then don’t we begin to expect that intervention? Wouldn’t it be far more productive to recognize them as random acts? Appreciate them yes, but don’t plan on them. You don’t think that when you wake up Christmas morning some immortal man with gravity defying reindeer has left you a plasma TV downstairs do you? No, you have to go out and buy your own TV. And your own Red Ryder BB gun.
That said, information, even ridiculous information, can serve a purpose. Another Ted.com video features a man who spent a year living Biblically. He ate, wore, and acted purely according to the rules of the Bible. He had to make some exceptions of course (New York law is a stickler about stoning), but overall he said that doing things because the Bible told him to, eventually became doing things because he realized they were good things to do. I’ve always been a fan of Karma even though I don’t believe in the religious aspect of it. If you do good things, good things will come back to you. Do bad things, and bad things will come back to you. I mess up all the time, but I always tip my waitress.
Given our own self-centeredness, it’s not particularly surprising that we become most irritated when people do things we don’t like about ourselves. Last week during dinner I corrected someone twice about referring to George Bush as President Bush and emphasized that while we may vehemently despise many of his actions, we still need to respect the office. I’m disrespectful all the time. Where do I come off calling someone else on it? But if I don’t call her on it, even though I don’t have the moral standing to do it, how can I make the mental connection half a beat later that says ‘Moron, you do it too. Stop it.’ Just because you shouldn’t do something, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t.
That made more sense in my head.
In an internet meme called ‘25 Random Things’ I told a story about how I bought a guitar after saving my brother from drowning. At the time I thought it was important to have a revelation about the preciousness of life and fulfilling your dreams. Over the years I’ve tried to learn to play the damn thing, but all in all it’s easier to have the epiphany than to do something about it.
That doesn’t mean we should stop trying to have epiphanies. I know that memory is hopelessly flawed, but since there’s not a whole lot I can do to turn my brain into an internal hard drive complete with Google search capabilities, the best thing I can do is crawl down off the cross, use the wood–you know the rest.