What We Have Forgotten
13th November 2022
What have we forgotten? It’s a good question to ask ourselves this Remembrance Sunday. Forgetting is not just a question of missing friends’ birthdays or failing to send Christmas cards to second cousins. There’s a deeper, almost metaphysical form of forgetting, when we forget the inward meaning of an outward sign.
The tragedies of everyday life are made up of such forgettings. One day a woman looks up and forgets to see the man she loves in the face of her husband. A man breaks a window and rifles through a cash register. He has forgotten what it was to be a child who felt a fearful awe at the fault of breaking the law, innocence is the easiest thing to forget. A student sits alone in his room, staring at a screen, he has forgotten the joy of leaving the house in the morning, the smell of the air, the wave of sound and light that carries you from your doorstep into the world.
Tradition, made much of on the Right, decried on the Left, is in its true sense nothing more or less than remembering. We cannot and should not seek to arrest movement and change, which is the nature of life, and those who forget the past are as guilty of this as those who cling to it. Tradition looks Janus-faced to past and future in the same gesture.
Progressives, on the other hand, are like sociopath Scarlett O’Hara: “Tomorrow is another day.” This is what made Fleetwood Mac’s Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow the perfect song for Bill Clinton and indeed for the modern Democratic Party in genereral: Yesterday’s gone. Yesterday’s gone.