Scientists may be able to reverse memory decline in individuals (Scientists reverse memory decline using electrical pulses, 8 April), but are they any closer to finding a remedy for our collective dementia?
To read the news, it’s hard to escape the feeling that we are currently in a kind of fugue state. At any moment a politician may be claiming to inhabit a plucky Blitz spirit, an anti-imperial defiance, or a divine role in the plans of the Almighty – indeed sometimes all at once. Couple that with tone-deaf promises to resurrect the United Kingdom’s global ambitions and you’ve got yourself a cabinet minister’s speech.
There is a tendency to pathologise leavers’ sometimes radical interpretation of the past as nostalgia, amnesia or dementia. I am not certain how helpful, as opposed to misleading, such a formation is. But the historian David Andress, who witnessed his father suffering from dementia first-hand, is in a good place to make a judgment.
In Cultural Dementia he repudiates a collective failure to come to terms with the collapse of a historical bubble, when racist empire underwrote domestic achievement and granted international prestige. Hence this cakeist wish-fulfilment and contradiction, where one can role-play the oppressed while refusing to disavow imperialism.
Our relationship with the past will not be resolved with merely more “historical awareness”, argues Andress, but it is hard to see how else it can be treated. Can Boston University’s neuroscientists help? A healthy “working memory” is vital to interpreting the changing world around us, but currently we as a society are going to work in our pyjamas.
Kyle Hoekstra
Selsey, West Sussex
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