Those Who Cannot Remember the Past

I suggested on January 15 that I would return to the issue of what Santayana meant by the sentence of his that is so ubiquitously quoted and misquoted.

I have returned.

The line I've invoked in the title of this entry is usually quoted in order to urge people to study history, especially some particular historical event that the person doing the quoting thinks is pertinent to whatever case he is making. If you are urging a price-stabilization treaty for coffee, and you think the coffee-industry travails of, say, the early 1960s are germane to the case you're making, you may well trot out Santayana to justify the connection. This doesn't actually strengthen your argument, any more than the echo of MacArthur just before this paragraph strengthens the significance of what I'm saying now. But it is (in either case) a way of invoking the name of one or another august historic figure -- men who were already august when the members of what we now call the "greatest generation" were young -- and of stealing for myself a bit of their  presumed authority.

Today's point, though, is that Santayana was not urging us to study history texts, or to listen to our elders when they talk about the good old days, or anything of the sort. He had in mind personal memory, not collective institutional memory.

The line appears on p. 284 of Reason in Common Sense, in a chapter called "Flux and Constancy in Human Nature." The line of thought involved begins on p. 280, where Santayana tells us: "Human nature, in the sense in which it is the transcendental foundation of all science and morals, is a functional unity in each man; it is no general or abstract essence, the average of all men's characters, nor even the complex of the qualities common to all men. It is the entelechy of the living individual, be he typical or singular." This is a startlingly individualist sentiment. Entelechy means, roughly, the actualization-of-the-possible. Reason isn't to be seen in broad terms, but as a functional unity "in each man."


So that the reason that our author discusses in the following paragraphs is that unity, that "entelechy," in any one living individual, and remembering the past is a prerequisite thereof.

As a child grows, he learns things like how his arms and legs work. He finds crawling tiresome and tests the ability of the two legs to support his weight without help from the arms. By some movements he discovers he throws himself off balance and falls. Other movements help him maintain equilibrium and remain standing. He repeats the latter movements and ceases his experiments with the former,and thus as we say "learns to walk."

That is my example of Santayana's meaning here, not his. In fact, the passage is rather dry and sans examples, but Santayana says things like: "Repetition marks some progress on mere continuity, since it preserves form and disregards time and matter,"  (p. 284).

Soon thereafter comes the passage that has motivated this exegesis:

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in whom instinct has learned nothing from experience. In a second stage men are docile to events, plastic to new habits and suggestions, yet able to graft them on original instincts, which they thus bring to fuller satisfaction. This is the plane of manhood and true progress. Last comes a stage when retentiveness is exhausted and all that happens is at once forgotten; a vain, because unpractical, repetition of the past takes the place of plasticity and fertile readaptation. In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity."

We are talking, then, in that famous quote, about the "first stage of life" of an individual -- hence my 'first steps' example.  So long as an infant cannot remember the past, he cannot learn new skills. When he can remember, when he becomes "plastic to new habits and suggestions," he starts to avoid unpleasant repetitions like falling down or bumping into hard objects, and the advance to "the plane of manhood" begins in earnest.

Santayana is working here at the intersection of philosophy with what we would call cognitive psychology. It's the sort of thing that his mentor, William James, was getting at with his famous comments about how the "blooming buzzing confusion" of infancy becomes  the ordered experience of the growing child. It is the central concern of latter psychologists like Jean Piaget and  Antonio Damasio.  It is not "learning from history" in the bookish sense usually invoked, but remembering (consciously or simply in one's bones) the past, one's own individual past.

Those who cannot remember this sentence and its meaning are, nonetheless, condemned to keep quoting it.

Retribution

My recent reading has included RETRIBUTION: The Battle for Japan 1944-45, by Max Hastings.

As the subtitle indicates, the subject is the Asian/Pacific theatre (or theatres) of the Second World War, in their final year, beginning roughly with a summit meeting in Hawaii in July 1944.

At that meeting, held as the Marines were securing the Marianas islands, FDR asked MacArthur, Nimitz, and Halsey: Where do we go from here? The most direct route to Japan involved continued island-hopping across the center of the Pacific. From the Marianas to Iwo Jimi to Okinawa. And there was a southern-Pacific variant, one that would let MacArthur make good on his vow to return to the Phillipines.

Roosevelt, rather characteristically, made no choice, and both the south and the central Pacific campaigns proceeded.

Insofar as Hastings has a 'big picture' point to make, it is that this was probably a mistake, that the Phillipines campaign was redundant and humanly a disaster. The war could have been brought to a quicker end had all the available resources been channeled through the ocean's center.

But then, Hastings' heart really isn't in making a big picture point at all. His heart is in the idea of history from below, history that deliberately foresakes the task of mapping the forest for the detailed description of lots of otherwise inconspicuous trees. I'll say something about that aspect of the book tomorrow.

A Japanese story

Apparently, there was this samarai who wanted to buy a splendid suit of armor. It would be expensive, though, and he didn't have a large income. So he ate less and less until he could put aside enough money to make the purchase.

A war broke out and our protagonist put on his newly acquired metal plating and headed toward the battlefields. But his body had become so weak from semi-starvation that he could not bear the weight of the armor, and one of the enemies soon cut him down.

A pointless little story ... yes? Well, maybe not. Okita Saburo used to tell that tale. He was an economic planner under Japan's prime minister Yoshida in the 1950s, and his listeners all knew what the story meant.

It meant that Japan should take its MacArthur-imposed Constitution and its disavowal of armed force seriously. Not as a matter of newly discovered pacifist principle but because if Japan gave up the hope of wearing a suit of armor any time soon it could instead feed itself, and develop the sinews of industrial might that our imaginary samarai forfeited so unwisely.

I just thought I'd pass that along. Guns and butter. Not a new subject of contrast, but a perhaps a valuable shift of frame for it.