Remembering
I was thinking yesterday about the imagination of our ancestors, those early humans who trod the landscape figuring things out as they went along, learning. They lived short, brutish lives but they found ways to make them longer, and safer. Of course they made mistakes along the way, and we’re still making mistakes, but we’re still learning.
The difficulty, I think, comes in the remembering. The collective memory is a faulty thing. We’ve all told a secret around a circle and seen how it comes out. That’s how it is with the collective memory. We encounter a terror, respond successfully, change our behavior, then forget the terror leaving only the behavior, which in its turn becomes something to question, because no one remembers the original terror.
I imagine that’s why laws came about, because being imaginative beings, we realized the frailty of memory and started writing things down. Codifying them. Making the world safer. We learned about danger and the value of things such as clean water, sanitation, food safety, and chemical safety. Of course, no one alive today remembers what it was like to have streets full of horse manure or raw sewage, and few people remember the skies so full of pollution that it blotted out the sun and people died. So, now we’re in the questioning period. The story has gone around the circle and come out the other side, unrecognizable. Meanwhile, the terror waits for its curtain call.