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| Letters and numbers disintegrate |
Record must be kept to make memory possible, to pass from one mind to another what could but should not be forgotten. This record must do more than just exist, it must be extolled, examined, and appreciated. The work of history has two sides, the recording and the recalling. In simple or local matters, the work of history has for ages before us been simple and local. Families recall and relate the stories of their forbears, adding to that the remembering and retelling of what they themselves have done and been, the newest chapter in the recounting of a unitary reality, a whole history by no means ended. On a grander scale, societies have developed entire treasuries of literature, music, and monument to celebrate what need be remembered for the social identity to flourish.
To relinquish this responsibility to a repository of data and text is to make vulnerable the family and society to forces hostile to the identities they cherish. In 1984, Orwell forecast this vulnerability. The development of technology since he wrote it has exacerbated the vulnerability. The proliferation of media has not made remembering easier, but rather forgetting. It is a byword to acknowledge that any question of fact is resolved by consulting external media – smartphones – rather than memory or any other authority. That media can be manipulated much more easily than the archive at the Ministry of Truth.
Our own willingness to forget, to let somebody or something else do the recording and recalling for us, is to store our treasure in the house of thieves. To reach for what we placed in their care and receive back something amended, edited, or even disfigured is to be victim of a crime without evidence. There is no way to demonstrate what has been done; all that was borne away to the flames of the furnace on a current of warm air.
This explains one of my preoccupations over recent years, the dissolution of text. Whereas once we could cry, Show me where that is written! and find acceptable, even compelling proof, now what is written has become so fluid both in form and in meaning that we find ourselves reaching for fog. Where one word has not been swapped out for another, the meaning of that word has been eroded or transformed, sometimes by use and more often by abuse. There may be an editor in a cubicle somewhere, but it is more likely that mouths and minds have magnified polemic to scrub away evidence of prior meaning and even understanding.
Our society has long relied on text to safeguard memory, history, and reality itself. Now, even civil, financial, and personal documents of record are virtual, electronic, and ethereal, easy to edit or even eliminate.
Our most fundamental identity, as children of the loving God rescued by the sacrifice of His divine son, is preserved in a written account of that same God’s making known of His identity and ours. This holy writing, the sacred scriptures, has long served as touchstone and authority. But these texts too, long vulnerable to the necessary perils of translation and editing, are corroding into illegibility before the caustic waves that dissolve text and language.
Look at the very communities founded in commitment to this text to the exclusion of any other authority; they no longer know what they mean, and no longer know what they believe.
In the earliest days of our family and our society, the Church, the truest story was not yet written down, but was nonetheless shared, heart speaking to heart. The eventual writing down was a repository of a reality that preexisted it, a revelation and experience. It was an aid to recalling, but not a replacement. To remember this is to reclaim both our own history and our responsibility for it, not to outsource our memory and with it our identity.
Monsignor Smith
