Memory, Historians, and a Jug of Beer

Down The Memory Hole

A state that successfully obliterates the past can easily exert control over its citizens.  A state that manages to be successful in comprehensively revising the past after its own image according to its Ministry of Truth (or Education) has the potential to exert totalitarian control.  In the West we have not yet witnessed such an all encompassing dominion, apart from the Stazi in Eastern Germany.  It is significant that the GDR seriously attempted to revise comprehensively the people's memory of its past.

Historians and chroniclers, therefore, are very important.
  Keeping the state away from control of historical narratives, leaving them open to non-directed inquiry and research, is a vital ingredient of a free people.  From the perspective of an overreaching state,

(t)he past is dangerous, not least because it cannot go away.  It is simply there, never to change, and in its constancy it reflects the eternity of God.  It presents to the young mind a vast field of fascination, of war and peace, loyalty and treason, invention and folly, bitter twists of fate and sweet poetic justice.  When that past is the past of one's people or country or church, then the danger (to those who seek control) is terrible indeed, because then the past makes claims upon our honor and allegiance.  Then it knocks at the door, saying softly, "I am still here."  And then our plans for social control--for inducing the kind of amnesia that has people always hankering after what is supposed to be new, without asking inconvenient questions about where the desirable thing has come from and where it will take us--must fail.  For a man with a past may be free; but a man without a past, never.

That is why, in George Orwell's 1984, the workers in Big Brother's Ministry of Truth send photographs and articles and other bits of evidence of a genuine past down the "memory Hole" to be shredded into oblivion.  It is also why J. R. R. Tolkien provides his worthy Hobbits with a veritable chronicle of great deeds, glorious and disastrous, stretching all the way back to the dawn of the world.  It is one of the delights of the good in his works, never the evil, to enjoy a jug of beer, a good smoke, and a story of the old days, when Feanor forged the rings of power.

For to honour the past is to dwell richly in time, since you assume that those who come after you will, if you are worthy of it, honor you in turn.  [Anthony Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2010), p. 123.]