It is undoubtedly true that some people who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. But some people who can’t remember the past aren’t. More disturbingly, many of those who can remember the past are condemned to repeat it anyway. Plenty of people who remembered the past were sent to die in the extermination camps. Their knowledge availed them to nothing, because events were out of their control. One of the unfortunate side-effects of studying German culture up to 1933, and the even richer Austrian culture up to 1938, is the depression induced by the gradual discovery of just how cultivated the two main German-speaking countries were. It didn’t help a bit. The idea that the widespread study of history among its intellectual élite will make a nation-state behave better is a pious wish. Whether in the household or in the school playground, ethics are transmitted at a far more basic level than that of learning, which must be pursued for its own sake: learning is not utilitarian, even when – especially when – we most fervently want it to be.
We should face the possibility that written learning, even in the unusually affecting form of an essay like [Primo Levi’s]
The Drowned and the Saved, can be transmitted intact only between members of an intelligentsia already in possession of the salient facts. Clearly, the quality of written speculative discussion will influence the quality of artistic treatments of the subject, in whatever form they may be expressed. Here again, however, we should face the possibility that it might not necessarily be the artistic work of highest quality which influences the public.
Last will and testament [fragment]
uit:
The dreaming swimmer : non-fiction 1987-1992 - Clive James
