Montaigne, memory, and elections.

Sometimes I get scared that yesterday never happened. That my childhood never happened, that I never had a last week or a last year. Or at least, not in the way I remember them. What if my whole life as I remember it is a fake history, a misfired neuron writing its own truth?

I've been reading too much about the corruptibility of memory and it's got me doubting my entire timeline. I'm here today and there are some things I'm sure of. I can look in the mirror and figure out that I'm in mid-20s, so I must have had a childhood. In my pocket is a receipt for Chipotle stamped Tuesday, 7:13 p.m., and that probably means I had dinner there (and haven't washed my jeans since). But, the memories in my mushy brain, lacking the heft of an invoice or a diploma, are unreliable.

Montaigne in his Essays wrote about the French: “Plato was right in calling memory a great and powerful goddess-in my country, when they want to say that a man has no sense, they say that he has no memory.” He quickly moved to disparage his own memory, claiming he had “scarcely any at all.” But of course Montaigne was no fool. Unlike his countrymen, he discerned “the difference betwixt memory and understanding.” A good memory can recall things, sure. But too good a memory, Montaigne observed, makes men stupid and lazy when, instead of thinking, they can reliably dispense other men’s opinions from the store of their memories:

“I should otherwise have been apt implicitly to have reposed my mind and judgment upon the bare report of other men, without ever setting them to work upon their own force, had the inventions and opinions of others been ever been present with me by the benefit of memory.“

The pundits handicapping the recently concluded American presidential election suffered from an affliction exactly opposite mine (and Montaigne's): instead of handling their memories with appropriate skepticism, they dug deeper into them. Conventional wisdom, aided by Wikipedia, has a robust memory. No piece of American political trivia was too obscure or irrelevant to factor into the 2012 electoral horse race. Presidential elections are always determined by the fundamentals, the pundits said. They then grabbed for their history texts and, depending on their politics, came away with their evidence: incumbents never win with a stagnant economy, challengers never unseat wartime presidents. (Electoral precedents were brilliantly lampooned by xkcd.)

By Nov. 6, commentators had culled thousands of facts from 200-plus years of American elections and the country had more theories of the election than voters at the polls. But, history heaped upon history upon fact upon figures upon the Dow Jones Industrial Average makes a history book, not a story, and certainly not the kind of narrative I want to be reading in my newspaper’s editorial pages. Pundits have their purpose (I guess), as do memories and facts, properly curated. Montaigne again:

“I have observed in several of my intimate friends, who, as their memories supply them with an entire and full view of things, begin their narrative so far back, and crowd it with so many impertinent circumstances, that though the story be good in itself, they make a shift to spoil it.”

I used to believe, back in my playground days, in the infallibility of my memory. Friends, parents, teachers and especially my sister often had it wrong, confusing the details of just who kicked whom first. Maybe it’s true what some memory researchers now suspect, that memories are altered every time they’re recalled, that memories in the brain are made up of emotions but get reconstituted in the retelling as actions or events. Our brains might — hell, probably do — deceive us and it’s probably all for the evolutionary good anyway. Recognizing that memory is imperfect, and that perfect memory makes us stupid, we’d do well to treat it less reverentially, in life, but also in political prognostication (the latter mostly because it annoys me).