Collective Memory
Readers have voiced the opinion that the most important idea developed in this book on religion is the one that relates to collective memory. Collective memory consists of memories shared by members of groups. This is public memory. It is most important in connection with people who have died, events that have passed, and works of art that occur in time such as musical pieces and productions in the performing arts. After a person has died, what remains of that person may consist largely of memories. Whether that person is remembered at all, and if remembered, what those memories consist of is a highly tenuous matter. Thousands of people were born in 1926, but only a few are remembered today. One of them is Marilyn Monroe. And everyone remembers her as a sex icon. Nobody remembers that she grew up in an orphanage and worked in an airplane factory. Thousands of speeches were delivered in 1963, but only a few are remembered today. One of them is Martin Luther King Jr’s “I have a dream” speech. Why is this one remembered while most of the others, even those by King, are not?
Collective memories evolve. A person who has died may be remembered for one thing today, for something completely different a few years later, and not be remembered at all a few decades after that. In Chapter 5 of Religion, Power, & Illusion I propose that collective memory is governed by the same Darwinian law of evolution that governs biological species. I call this theory the natural selection model of collective memory. Biological species evolve in response to environmental pressure. If the food supply for a certain species of bird, for example, should change in a confined region, the birds having beaks most suited for eating that food will prosper and become dominant in that region while other birds will tend to die out. Analogously, collective memories evolve in response to social pressure. Memories that address the needs of the present will be recalled more vividly than memories that relate to useless issues. The former will be deemed important and will be retained, while the latter will be considered unimportant, and will be forgotten. In this way, collective memories shift so as to promote the survival of the society in which they occur.
Two consequences follow from this interpretation of collective memory. One is that the evolution of collective memory is an inexorable process that operates according to a scientific law. There is no give or take in the process. Collective memory is guaranteed to evolve when the needs of society change. Human choice plays no part in the process. The other consequence is that, with the passage of time, how something is remembered may bear little resemblance to the person or event from which it originated. This is especially the case when there is no permanent record of what is remembered. Records such as writings, photographs, sound recordings, and paintings serve as anchors that tie collective memories to the past, but when there are no such records, collective memories can drift a great distance from where they originated. Without a permanent record, people may “remember” things in a way that totally betrays the way they actually happened. This fact reflects the way life forms evolve in biology. Today’s birds evolved from the dinosaurs, to which they bear little resemblance. Anyone familiar with a bird, that it has wings, feathers, warm blood, and an attractive appearance would never guess that it evolved from a being that had none of those features.
In this book on religion, the natural selection model of collective memory is used to explain beliefs that people living today have of the Hebrew Exodus and the person of Jesus. In the case of Jesus, the theory explains why people today believe that Jesus rose from the dead, that he is the Son of God, that he is the Messiah, that he performed miracles, that he was born of a virgin, and that he died for the remission of human sins. Regarding the Exodus, the theory explains why people today believe the Exodus was a daring escape instead of something else, that it involved thousands or millions of people instead of just a handful, that it was followed by great military victories, and that it lasted forty years instead of a matter of weeks. These explanations are enabled by the fact that many years elapsed between the death of Jesus and the writing of the Gospels, and even more years between the Exodus and the writings that memorialized it. These time spans allowed for collective memories to evolve in such a way that the stories completely belied the original facts. Furthermore, the collective memory theory explains these things without appealing to miracles and this, in my opinion, makes it more credible.