(cache) Passionately Promoting A More Perfect World

On Not Forgetting

tchtchtchtchtch:
sinesalvatorem:
I basically remember my high school experience as being a lot of empty monotony punctuated by a few experiences that were incredibly valuable. One of the most valuable such experiences was when I was asked to participate in the National Memories Project.
The National Memories Project, like every other project I’ve ever been asked to participate in in high school, was clearly run by people almost as ADHD as me. There was an initial flurry of activity before the idea quietly died and the material we compiled never ended up on the radio. But, like, oh well. I am honestly not in a position to judge.
The basic idea of the project was to get bright young high schoolers to go around meeting senior citizens and asking them questions while having a (digital) tape recorder running. After we’d had our tape recorders for two weeks, we all met up to talk about what we’d gotten. Most of the other folks in my school had like ten minutes of recordings total from two people. When I asked why only that, they said it was because they hated being near old people, so they were only going to do the minimum effort.
Meanwhile, I had almost 6 hours.
While I will admit I often do things by half measures, I tend to do that first half really thoroughly. This legitimately seemed to me like a great idea and, while I had nothing against talking to the elderly, it basically hadn’t come up before. There was little overlap in social circles, after all.
My first problem was having no idea what to ask. I decided to settle on five questions to begin with: “What’s your name?”, “When were you born?”, “What was your life like growing up?”, “How have things changed since then?”, “If there was one thing you could restore, what would it be?”.
With these in mind, I went to visit and interview my grandmother. While I visited her home roughly once a week (until she passed away), I hadn’t really asked historical questions. I decided that I would ask her the questions I had, let her ramble as much as she liked, and then ask followup questions launching from anything she brought up. At the same time, I’d scribble notes on which questions were most informative and what I should ask other people when I interviewed them.
She spoke to me for almost two hours and, in that time, I gradually saw a vision of the past that I hadn’t gotten before. Furthermore, I got a framework for what to ask about, so that I could fill in more information when I asked other seniors. Finally, I got referrals from her, so that I would know which of her neighbours or friends or church members would be receptive to an interview.
I learned about the period preceding our independence. How the economic system was under British rule. How some of us went off to fight in the Second World War as part of the British Army. How shocked everyone was when the RAF landed here with the first airplane ever seen in our country.
I learned about the independence process. The context behind a lot of the terminology and in jokes I heard around me which referenced events during the independence process. What social and material conditions prompted the move toward independence and how different sectors of society reacted.
I learned about what various people thought of the Revolution. How they perceived life under Socialism and the goals of the Socialist movement. What they thought of the subsequent collapse and US invasion. Who they blamed for the collapse and whether they believed the later invasions was justified. Whether they preferred the current liberal democracy to our earlier system.
I learned about how various technological developments affected society. When radio first arrived during my grandparents’ childhood, and television arrived during my own parents’ childhood. How people used to crowd around the windows of the middle class folks in town to watch their TV, and how you used to have to walk a mile to the bank to make a phone call.
I learned about how civil society itself changed. About how Catholicism was the backbone of civil identity, which was shared by >90% of the population and almost universal in the working class. About the explosive growth of Protestant Churches that had pushed back Catholicism until it was barely over 50%. About how access to education expanded. From the days when poor kids went to school part time until leaving after sixth grade, to the present day, when the first two years of college cost the equivalent 40 US dollars per semester.
And, throughout, the small slices of life from each individual. The man who, as a boy, used to climb coconut trees to watch the sea whenever he was upset. The woman who, as a little girl, set up a stall in the marketplace where she pretended to sell rocks and napkins. The man who used to catch crayfish in the river and once screamed like a little girl when a massive frog jumped onto his head.
But it was particularly interesting to learn what they wanted to restore. They cared less about politics than I might have expected, and were mostly fine and dandy with things like gender equality and various immigrant groups. They instead wanted to restore things like the slower pace of life when you could just sit in a tree and watch the sea. They wanted the comradery that came from having twenty kids huddled around a window to watch a grainy television screen. They wanted the feeling of working toward a Great Project that they had during the independence process, or the later Socialist revolution.
But the most common complaint was that they wanted their grandchildren to talk to them the way they used to talk to their own grandparents. And, based on how happy all of these strangers were to have me listening to them, I knew that this was important to them.
I’ve occasionally seen people recommend that you read old books in order to better understand the perspectives of those people. That it is incredibly easy to forget today what seemed most obvious and essential yesterday.
Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united—united with each other and against earlier and later ages—by a great mass of common assumptions.
-C S Lewis
For the same reason, there’s much to be said for speaking to old people. While they are less of a snapshot of the old perspective - because their own thoughts have of course been developing all the time up to now - they are people who at least lived in the old perspective. If the past is a foreign country, they are the expats who used to call it home.
Furthermore, they’re also responsive and holistic in a way that old books are not. Historians like boring diaries because they record all sorts of things that wouldn’t have seemed interesting then, even if they’re surprising now.
Similarly, seniors are a repository of lots of information that isn’t especially filtered for “Was it interesting in its time?” They remember all sorts of random anecdotes about their lives that give a flavour of the times but would never have made it into a book that was aiming to be read in those times. After all, old books were written for the people of old times - not for posterity.
And they’re responsive in that they handle queries better than an old treatise might. When something in conversation activates your “Wait, you did what?” response, you can ask more questions to walk you down that road. You can get a much more varied survey of the historical frame of mind in much less time than if you read books linearly.
Of course, as someone with a special interest in history, I may be biased in thinking that this is the coolest thing ever. However, I also think it’s valuable. Knowing how people used to think helps you figure out how things got to where they are today. Seeing how different the past was can help you to understand how much change can happen when you look ahead. Seeing ideas you never considered before can help you to broaden your horizons. Also, like, learning things is fun.
So, if you agree with me on any of this, I encourage you to read old books, speak to old people, look through boring journals, and open yourself up to just how much of the past you might be missing from your current vantage point.
I love this.
I also feel a strong pull to not forget the past and not let knowledge and accumulated experiences slip away unrecorded. Last year I sat down with my grandma to ask her about her experiences growing up, and I kind of want to continue since we didn’t get very far.
The difficulty is that spending time with my grandparents is also stressful because their values are very different from mine in ways that affect me negatively. :/
Around 1999 or 2000, I spent a while talking with my mother’s mother about her experience of Pearl Harbour and World War 2. She had been a child in Los Angeles, California, on the West Coast of the continental United States, the bit geographically and psychologically closest to Hawaii, in part because of the Navy bases in both places having a significant amount of movement between them. So people in LA often personally knew sailors who were currently posted to the Pearl Harbour base.
And she knew Japanese people, went to some flower arranging classes taught by Japanese diplomats’ wives.
And my grandmother still defends the Japanese Internment. I listened to her, how it seemed like a good idea at the time.
A few years later, 9/11 happened. I lived at the edge of the NYC commuter area, and you could see the smoke from the shore. People from my town died, although no one I knew personally.
People proposed locking up all the Muslims, and I felt fear and that didn’t seem like a bad idea in those days. And I remembered my grandmother’s words, and I found courage to overcome my fear and not endorse a repeat of a mistake we have already made. But I feel empathy now, for the Californians of the era of the Japanese Internment. I understand why they did what they did.
Even when the old people have viewpoints you find abhorrent, you can gain from listening to them. It gives a broader perspective, that you will need when you face once in a generation problems.