Mechanisms of Cultural Memory
How will your House know and remember who it is? How will members remember their ancestors’ stories or choose which ones to remember? How will they communicate their values to future generations? In allowing cultures to break up and reform with every generation, the Index runs the risk of causing people to lose a sense of connection to their ancestors.
Cultural memory is most classically maintained through oral traditions in which myths and stories (often set to song, rhyme, or rhythm to make them easier to remember) are passed between generations. While anthropologists have demonstrated that oral traditions have remarkable fidelity as a cultural transmission method, the invention of paper has rendered them fairly cumbersome when contrasted with available alternatives. Furthermore, just writing down stories is not enough to remember them—in fact, writing something down or saving it on a computer increases the rate at which you forget it.[[30]](#_ftn30)
In this book’s chapter on sentience, we discuss how humans use their internal narratives as sort of a compression algorithm for more complicated and nuanced experiences (and that this algorithm is very lossy). Cultures work in a similar fashion, creating not-necessarily-true narratives about their origins, histories, and roles in the wider world. The romanticism of these stories can be important keys in cultural units that can be lost in the world of ultra-modernism. This is why Praxis (the company trying to start its own country) is constantly using its blog to wax poetic about archeofuturism.
Holidays present another mechanism for maintaining cultural memory. What is cool about this mechanism is that an overview of a culture’s important holidays typically will give you a very good understanding of how a culture sees its own history and priorities. For example, Jewish culture has copious holidays around remembering specific impactful events from across Jewish history. This contrasts heavily with groups like Protestant Christian cultures in which almost every holiday is about remembering part of a single individual’s (Jesus’) life at only one very specific moment in history. Jewish and Protestant holidays also contrast with those celebrated by Catholics, which celebrate many saint-focused holidays that highlight the type of life that is worthy of emulation.
These three varying ways of remembering history through holidays say something specific about the way each culture sees itself while also shaping each culture. Jewish cultural holidays are much more like a mythologized record of important trials the Jewish people underwent throughout history, similar to secular holidays such as Thanksgiving and Independence Day. This demonstrates the importance of the Jewish people as a part of Jewish identity while mostly deemphasizing specific individuals. On the other hand, Protestant holidays clearly imply that Jesus matters above others while divorcing their culture from history more broadly.
Meanwhile, the way Catholic saint-focused celebrations elevate specific individuals as paragons to model one’s life after suggests the type of person you choose to be matters more than a historic tradition. Catholic saint-focused celebrations also allow the church to quickly canonize members of a population undergoing conversion, allowing individuals in new ethnic and cultural communities to see themselves celebrated and recognize a path to becoming a good Catholic.
As our own House will primarily focus on instilling core values in future generations and giving them the best shot possible in life, our holidays are focused on imparting skills and values and not on maintaining “autobiographical memory” or elevating individual people. We expect many Houses will incorporate traditions with these kinds of goals and it will be interesting to see how they play out. For a deep dive into crafting holidays, see the chapter: “Holidays and Traditions” on page 618.
Outside of holidays, some cultures use scriptures or oral canon as a means to pass down cultural memory and family identity. This is another area in which Jewish culture is something of an exemplar. Given that most of our readers will hail from some form of Judeo-Christian tradition, most will have at least the early Jewish religious texts in their canon and can therefore see how multiple writers, in multiple styles, recorded history in a manner that was palatable to their own historical periods.
Human culture as a whole owes a debt to this process, as it has preserved some of the oldest recorded history we can access. However, most cultures that leverage this cultural memory mechanism stop recording history in detail after certain points. For example, the Mormons did this for a few generations after Joseph Smith and then largely stopped as their history merged with “general history.”
A practice we’ll call “narrative genealogy” is yet another mechanism cultures use to transmit a sense of cultural identity. Narrative genealogy involves telling young children stories of their recent (usually within eight generations) personal ancestors. This mechanism of cultural transition can either be culturally institutionalized, as it is in some Native American tribes, or adopted at the family level, as it is in our family.
A pointless way of practicing narrative genealogy is to focus on widely respected “hot shot” members of your family and only painting them in a positive light. This really only conveys to kids: “You are better than other people,” which is not a helpful lesson. As such, this approach rarely survives as a cultural mechanism over the long term.
More constructively, narrative genealogy uses ancestors’ stories to convey certain values. For example, while I (Malcolm) am descended from a handful of fairly well-known politicians and businessmen, they were mostly absent from ancestral stories my family told me as a child. The stories told most instead showcased ancestors who exemplified our values.
For example, my brother, Miles, was named after an ancestor who fashioned yokes for his family so as not to waste money on cattle. I, Malcolm, was named after a person who, as a boy, was put on the roof with his brother and told to sit still and pray while his dad had an important business meeting. They did not listen and while playing quietly, Malcolm’s brother fell off. Malcolm held his brother, who was hanging off the roof, without making a sound for the entire business meeting until his arm went necrotic and later had to be amputated.
Eli Hendrick, an ancestor and inventor whose house was full of mechanisms like automatically opening doors, got his start redeveloping the way oil is processed after getting scammed by a con man into buying a fake oil-processing formula. Not wanting the time he spent figuring out exactly why the scam process did not work to go to waste, Eli developed a new, real way to process oil.
While each of these stories has an element of mythology, all convey some element about what it means to be a “Collins,” such as thrift, dedication to family, endurance, and the belief that every failure is a learning opportunity. What they don’t do is paint a picture of all my ancestors being awesome.
This is a big problem with institutionally manufactured “pride” events as mechanisms of cultural transmission. Many either end up showcasing people who were just awesome at everything or highlighting martyrs who were killed for being part of that group. While these can be useful in imparting history and showing kids what they are capable of, they suck at telling kids what is distinct about their culture other than that they were victimized. How are people of their culture different from people of any other culture?
One method for cultural transmission that we think has a lot of promise (but which we have not seen used in practice) involves having every generation write down their own thoughts about their role in the world, as we did in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life, then have the next generation edit it to represent knowledge the previous generation either didn’t have or got wrong. If things go perfectly, a few hundred years from now, there will be copious derivations of these books and canons of additions across many family lines. The Index will be able to track which sorts of changes helped families and which hurt them at a systematic level. Of course, we love the idea of different families creating different canons like this, just as we would be thrilled if some of our descendants completely rewrote a book from scratch.
For elaboration on intra-cultural competition, see: “Cultural Rivalries” on page 738 of the Appendix.