PRESENT-ISM The Difficulty of Thinking about the Past

When it comes to the past, whether it’s your own personal history, some other person’s history, or the history of an age— it is very, very difficult to think clearly and intelligently. There are several reasons for this. Let’s start with your own history and your cognitive awareness of that history, what we call memory.

When it comes to memory, there are so many different kinds of memory; there are also many different brain areas and functions responsible for the different kinds. There is short-term working memory and long-term memory. There is autobiographical or narrative memory which is how we sustain a stable sense of self across time. There is semantic memory, procedural memory, flashbulb memory, etc. There is implicit and explicit memory. Lots of kinds of memory!

How does memory work? Well, we know that it certainly does not work like the memory of a computer. Push “save” and the computer’s memory encodes and stores the code and when you retrieve it later by “opening” the file, what you stored is what you get— high fidelity. Not so with human memory! First, what and how you remember depends on the code and the coding you use— it is a construct of your perceptions, understandings, sensory-awareness, beliefs, etc. And then every time you retrieve the memory and refresh it, you reconstruct it so that it is changed ever-so-subtly and unconsciously by your current state of mind. How about that! What you are currently thinking changes what you previously thought.

Precisely because remembering is re-constructing, there is no “pure” or pristine memory. We do not remember things so much as they were, but as we are. This also explains how memories can be changed and always is being changed. It explains how you construct false memories and how false facts can fairly easily be imprinted into your memories.

Daniel Gilbert in Stumbling on Happiness (2005) described the power of experience on memory.

“There isn’t a view from nowhere. Once we have an experience, we are thereafter unable to see the world a we did before. Our innocence is lost and we cannot go home again.” (p. 57)

The same dynamics occur when we try to “remember” (understand, comprehend) the past of individuals from previous ages or even an age. Gilbert’s book focuses on one thing— why we are so bad at predicting our personal and emotional futures. He notes that it is a cognitive fallacy to view the past via presentism.

“Historians use the word presentism to describe the tendency to judge historical figures by contemporary standards. As much as we all despise racism and sexism, these isms have only recently been considered moral turpitudes, and thus condemning Thomas Jefferson for keeping slaves or Sigmund Freud for patronizing women is a bit like arresting someone today for having driven without a seat belt in 1923. And yet, the temptation to view the past through the lens of the present is nothing short of overwhelming.” (2005, pp. 161-2)

It is very, very difficult to take second perceptual position with another person as you try to empathize and understand what the other is experiencing on their terms and from their perceptive. It is even more difficult to put ourselves into the historical cultural frames of mind of a previous age and seek to truly understand how people thought, reasoned, felt, perceived, etc. The easiest thing, and the most fallacious thing, is to evaluate (judge) them from our perspective— our values, our understandings, our frames-of-mind, our frames of reference, etc.

Yet when innocence has been lost, you cannot go home. You can’t even do that with your own past (history). Try to remember what and how you thought and felt when you were five. Or when you were twelve. You can’t! And worse, notice how easy it is to judge your past self for something stupid that you said or did. Yet how unfair to that past self to judge through today’s lens. Since then you have learned a lot, experienced a lot, matured, grown up, left home. The innocence of that previous stage of life is gone. And you can’t go back.

Where you are today—how you are thinking, feeling, perceiving, valuing, evaluating, etc.— determines and governs how you re-construct past memories. It contaminates what you remember. It affects your memory of your own life and of all those who came before you.

Regarding Thomas Jefferson in the reference above, today it is impossible for us to put ourselves back into the cultural and social context of the late 1700s. Slavery had been going on for hundreds of years. The slave industry was running strong and only in the 1700s did the more enlightened came to the conclusion that it was wrong and dehumanizing. It took longer for those in the industry to see it. Both the ship-owners who transported the slaves and the tribal chiefs who gathered their own people, jailed them, and sold them had vested financial interests in that industry. So it took them much longer to accept that their industry would end.

We didn’t live in that world— in that cultural milieu. And because we didn’t grow up in a culture in which that was accepted as normal, it is nearly impossible today to even imagine that. When asked why Truman didn’t try to escape his constructed world in the movie Truman, the director (played by Ed Harris) said, “We all accept the world as it is given to us.” You and I do the same. Living in culture is living within a mental/emotional environment of which we are mostly unconscious. I wonder what are some of the cultural things which we accept today that might be consider shocking and abhorrent in the future? Presentism— the cognitive fallacy that contaminates looking at the past because we use the lens of today. It prevents us from truly going back.