Historical Consciousness

Acquiring Historical Consciousness: The Mystic Chords of Memory by Wilfred M. McClay

Editor's Note: The throbbing sounds and breakneck pace of '90s communications and entertainment threaten to drown out the strains of an older music. In this piece, excerpted from a 1995 speech in the Heritage Foundation's Russell Kirk Memorial Lecture Series, Professor McClay points out the need to acquire a historical consciousness which allows us to "hear" the past over the hubbub of today.

Historical consciousness is to civilized society what memory is to individual identity. One cannot say who or what one is without some selective retention of experience and source of continuity. One cannot learn, use language, pass on knowledge, raise offspring, or even dwell in society without the aid of memory. Without memory there are no workable rules of conduct, no standard of justice, no basis for restraining passions, no sense of the connection between an action and its consequences. And there can be no recognition of the sacred, no act of consecration or devotion to the unseen--for nothing exists but the proximate and the sensate. A culture without memory will necessarily be barbarous.
The study of the past should cause us to recognize the ways that the past has authority over us. For historical consciousness is not merely an awareness of the past and of one's own connection to it. It is cultivation of respect for what cannot be seen, for the invisible sources of meaning and authority in our lives--for the formative agents and foundational principles that, although no longer tangible, have made possible what is worthy in our own day. We see, then, that historical knowledge and historical consciousness are two very different things; and the acquisition of historical consciousness, properly understood, will have to be something different from the academic study of history--though the latter does not preclude the former. The acquisition of historical consciousness means learning the discipline of memory, which is far more than a matter of personal memory--though that is, of course, where it begins and ends.

Historical consciousness means learning to appropriate into our own moral imagination, and learning to be guided by, the distilled memories of others, the stories of things we never experienced firsthand. It means learning to make these things our own, learning to look at the world through their filter, learning to feel the living presence of the past inhering in the seeming inertness of the world as it is given to us. An outside observer cannot easily tell when an individual's vision of reality itself has been transformed. But let us imagine a visitor to the battlefield at Gettysburg who knows the history of that battle and war, knows the text of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, and knows something of subsequent American history--not only knows those things, but has digested and internalized this knowledge. That visitor will experience something very different on his visit from what an uninformed eight-year-old will see. What the educated observer sees when he gazes at the modest grassy bump of Cemetery Ridge will be, in a sense, more real than what the unimpressed child sees, even though they are looking at the same thing.

Part of what makes our visitor different, too, is the fact that he comes to Gettysburg as a part of what sociologists call a "community of memory." His reactions are not determined merely by his idiosyncratic impressions, though he may well have had some, or by his extensive knowledge, however detailed it may be. Instead, he is one of many people who remember what happened in that place, and in some way he is connected to all of them, to all who are bound together by remembrance of that story. In the end, communities and nation-states are constituted and sustained by such shared memories--by stories of foundation, conflict, and perseverance. The leap of imagination and faith, from the thinness and unreliability of our individual memory to the richness of collective memory, that is the leap of civilized life; and the discipline of collective memory is the task not only of the historian, but every one of us. Historical consciousness draws us out of a narrow preoccupation with the present and with our "selves," and ushers us into another, larger world--a public world that "cultures" us, in all senses of that word. Historical consciousness is, then, part of the cement that holds America together and makes us willing to strive and sacrifice on her behalf.

One might think of the Gettysburg Address as an exemplary text in this respect, since it sought to give meaning to the suffering of the present precisely by reference to the visionary sacrifices of the Founders. An even better example, however, is Lincoln's first inaugural address. To understand the appeal Lincoln was making, we need to recall the setting in March of 1861. Lincoln had won the election in 1860 without carrying a single Southern state; now seven states of the Deep South had already left the Union and crucial border states were on the verge of doing so as well. The Union that Lincoln so greatly cherished seemed to be dissolving before his eyes. With this inaugural speech, Lincoln began his attempt to counter that disintegration. He made it clear that, so far as he was concerned, the union of the states under the Constitution could not be broken. The speech takes a variety of turns, offering legal, political, moral, and prudential reasons for its case. Its tone is by turns both conciliatory and stern. But with its final clinching paragraph the speech soars to immortal heights: I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. It is a rich, complex, intricately balanced image. When they are sounded, these "mystic" chords have the power to connect past and present, inner and outer, private and public, household and polity, locality and nationality in a single harmonious whole.

During times of confusion and crisis, such as the nation was facing, it could find composure and direction in recalling the Spirit of '76 and the Founders' heroic sacrifices. For Lincoln, though, the battlefields and patriot graves deserved our reverence not simply for sentimental reasons, or out of reverence for our ancestors' great sacrifices, but because of the cause for which they sacrificed. It would not have been enough had they merely died for the 19th-century equivalent of baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet. They died, as Lincoln expressed it in the Gettysburg Address, in order that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth. The mystic chords of memory, then, also draw us back to first principles and to an understanding of America as a nation self-consciously founded with particular ends in view.

From this perspective, the United States is a nation with a uniquely creedal sense of national identity. One becomes an American less by descent than by consent. These examples remind us that acquiring historical consciousness is not merely an intellectual matter, but also a matter of taking stock of the way we live, of what our pastimes and pleasures, families and marriages, habits and aspirations, all say about our connection to the past--and, therefore, about ourselves.
Wilfred M. McClay is Associate Professor of History and teaches at Tulane University in New Orleans.