In Part One I listed the benefits of the past that David Lowenthal lays out in The Past is a Foreign Country — familiarity, affirmation/validation, identity, guidance, enrichment, and escape. Next I’m sharing the potential burdens of the past (which Lowenthal goes so far as to call “Threats and Evils”) and ways that people throughout history have reacted to an oppressive past.
Dangers of Revisiting the Past
“The past not only aids and delights; it also threatens and diminishes us. Most of its advantages involve drawbacks, most of its promises imply risks.”
“Traditionally the past has been as much feared as revered. Most of its teachings have been threatening and doom-laden, dominated by ominous or tragic figures.”
“The sheer persistence of a prosaic past may diminish the present.”
“The danger often lies in our tendency to overrate the past’s importance or virtue by comparison with the present.”
“Many elderly people are so taken up with relics, heirlooms, and mementoes as to preclude concern for the living. Over-indulgence in memory likewise shuts out present experience.”
“Excessive devotion to the past precludes creative attention to the present if only because time, space, energy, and resources are finite.”
Exorcising the Past
“Wholesale destruction of a dreaded or oppressive past has marked iconoclastic excesses since time immemorial.” (E.g. the sacking of the great library of Alexandria, the English monastic dissolution)
“To exorcise bygone corruptions, even one’s own treasured relics may have to be destroyed.”
“Some simply eradicate past vestiges, unconcerned with what will replace them…. Others eliminate the old so as to make way for the new.”
“Alternatively, one may destroy one’s own ties with the past.”
“Others tame the past by giving its relics a new function.”
“Satire is another mode of neutralizing the past.”
“Other ways of neutralizing the past range from trying to understand it to selling it off.”