New Year, Same Old, 28. Going Down to the Basement.

Memory. It consists of remembering things that happened, things that were, whether we remember them rosily, or in their crudeness. It consists of having the past in our consciousness, and understanding that we are our past.

Yesterday was the liberation of Auschwitz. Seventy-six years ago, Soviet troops arrived at the sprawling complex, and liberated the few skeletal survivors that were still there. Thousands others had been taken into Germany on a death march, which would kill many of them. Among those who survived the march, only to die later, were Anne and Margot Frank. 

A hundred and two years ago, the Spanish flu was ravaging the world in its most deadly wave. Many who had escaped the illness earlier, were now struck down. Some pooh-poohed the danger, and refused to take precautions. The tragedy of that flu was that it tended to kill the young, the middle-aged, and the healthy.

2021, and we have another pandemic, and the threats of a rising wave of intolerance like the hatred that led to the creation of Auschwitz and other death camps. Not everyone believes in the current pandemic, nor does everyone believe the Holocaust happened. Where have we gone wrong?

A lot of the fault lies in the educational system. Parents choose to teach their children what they think is important, but the educational system should teach what society knows is important for future generations to know. The system has so been twisted to conform to both individual opinion, and the job market, that it no longer creates thinking humans, but rather cogs that fit into the economic system, and whose minds fit into certain belief niches. 

What is badly taught, is scientific thought and history. Scientific thought is not merely teaching math and chemistry and physics, and other subjects that will lead to mastery in today's technologically challenging world. It is learning how to take evidence and make informed decisions on that evidence. It is learning empirical thought. It is not taught in science classes, nor even in philosophy classes at high school level. There, it is merely described, and students have to know what the term means, but it is never used in discussion. 

History is considered unnecessary in today's world. What is the use of learning dates and who was king when and what battle was fought where? But learning history more deeply, analyzing the reasons for the battles, learning what common people thought, helps us understand ourselves better. Humans don't change. What can change is how we react to the world by understanding our previous mistakes. Our memories can change our future. If we forget what we did, we'll do it again, in different ways. 

We are our history, so why do we ignore it? It's like watching a horror movie, screaming at the main character not to go down into the basement, where we know the monster is hiding. So many of us now are that character, whistling happily down the steps into that basement, ignoring all the warning screams from those watching them. People who negate the pandemic and refuse to take precautions. People who adulate extreme-right wing policies that criminalize innocent people based on their differences from us. They all ignore their memories.

Life continues.