A friend shared a philosophical cramp with me about institutional memory. She said that she has, ‘the niggling sense of wanting something that translates the essence into the present from a past era.’ Specifically, she is troubled that institutions have amnesia about problems they have solved in the past when they face analogous problems in the present.
Her cramp raises profound questions and implies an entire culture of preservation of the past in multiple ways. In general, memory is a current impression of the past. It uses paradigmatic configurations to articulate those impressions. Memory is not the repeat of past events. It is an impression of the past paradigmatically configured in the present. For clarity, we must distinguish between actual past events and narratives about them. One is data-based. The other is story-based. Past events and narratives of those events are different. The latter are biased by paradigms and omissions that shape their construction. They rarely depict the total context of the events recalled.
If we step back, contemporary culture contains multiple technologies, strategies, media and paradigms with which the past is told. Literary critics tell us the paradigms that guide story telling are character, plot, genre and setting. Journalists narrate the history of current events. The Kodak Company thrived for years on snapping shots of events history wanted to preserve. Historians arrange historical data in coherent tales of struggle, revolution, war, technology and progress. Therefore, memory recording is a cultural industry.
Notwithstanding the limitations of omission and biasing that memory preservation paradigms may create, memory is the foundation of all our knowledge. Without memory we can’t know what we know. Without it we have no religious, national or ethnic identity. Our history is the context that sustains, nurtures and controls us. Without a memory we cannot understand who we are or predict our destiny.
As a tool of problem solving, memory uses analogic thinking. A case-by-case evolution of court-made common law is guided by the policy that past decisions should have precedent value. Past decisions should be used to solve analogous present conflicts. Problems in the present should be resolved similarly to the way they were resolved in the past. To ensure that continuity, court decisions are compiled in casebooks as the institutional memory of how cases were resolved and decided. They reflect what it means to have institutional memory of how problems were solved. Institutional memory is the recorded history of problem solving that guides future decision makers in reaching a just result. Similarly, when witnesses give testimony what they say is recorded to provide a record of court proceedings that remove disputes about what was said and what wasn’t said in a court of law. Contracts are institutional memories of what people promised to do for one another. Wills tell the world how the decedent wanted his or her property disbursed. They are memorials of his or her testamentary intent. Lawyers who are suspicious of clients’ disloyalty create a memory with ‘CYA’ letters to remove disputes about what they said to clients. Skilled mediators who have brought opponents to an agreement refuse to let anyone leave the room until a complete account of the agreement is signed and delivered to each party.
Accordingly, memory recorded in the numerous ways we have discussed here is the core of social stability. That’s why I say my friend’s ‘niggling sense’ is very important.
"Holocaust memorial Berlin"by d.i. is licensed under CC BY 2.0