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| Forced forgetting |
Winston Smith, the nebbishy protagonist of George Orwell’s prescient novel 1984, worked in the Ministry of Truth revising past texts to conform to current assertions of the governing party. This great book, which gave us the two-way telescreen for surveillance, the Two-Minutes Hate, and Big Brother, describes almost in caricature the workings of an ideological totalitarian state. When I first read the book, the year 1984 was still in the future, and one could think there was still time for the predictions to come true. Just over forty years later, many of them have.
As if it were not enough always having on our persons our so-called smartphones, we bring Alexa and her sisters into our homes and expect to be listened to by them all. Hey, Siri! The Daily Outrage presents a villain to receive universal opprobrium, often delivering into the firestorm someone who until that day had been popular, or respected, or anonymous. The identity of Big Brother is something of a mystery, but the effects of his supervision are acknowledged in the mundane, almost subconscious steps taken to avoid his disapproval.
Similarly, the memory hole has become a fixture – but where? This great forgetting-contraption that devours reports, records, and reflections must be somewhere, must it not? Someone must stoke the furnace, maintain the fans, and decide what goes into the slot?
Orwell’s model for his future society was Stalin’s Russia. He had seen or possibly only heard of basic practices there, exemplified by but hardly limited to the airbrushing out of photographs of Trotsky, who had started a hero but become an enemy of the revolution. That required changing the past to support the assertions of the present.
I re-read 1984 about eight years ago and was astonished at its prescience. Orwell gets so much right about the technology of surveillance and oppression, and especially the manipulation of language. Some other tools and techniques of suppression he misses; for those you must read Brave New World, a similar dystopian vision by his contemporary Aldous Huxley. We can talk about those some other time. But if you think you can guess what brought the memory hole to my mind this month, you are almost certainly wrong.
Not where I started, but the awareness at which I have arrived is that the memory hole is a phenomenon that appears at most levels of human society, including the personal. We are all inclined to leave out of our own histories the aspects and actions that do not conform to the image we want to project, and not only when we are applying for a job or courting a mate. We are inclined literally to forget what we ourselves have done that does not belong to the image of ourselves that we prefer, or even need.
Maybe I am saying that there is a little memory hole in each of us. Neither is this what got me started on the subject, however. I think it is an insight into why the “memory hole project” can be and has been so successful in its several iterations in our own period of history to the great detriment of many, even all. If we acknowledge its appeal and search to find how we ourselves have applied it, perhaps that will help us identify the tactic when it is used against us by someone else, whether on an intimate or a more expansive scale. It may well be philosophically impossible to prove a negative, but we can be aware of the negating power of the memory hole. Awareness of this present danger is the first step toward escaping it.
Monsignor Smith
