The Dangers of Forgetting

Ben Wildsmith

A curious feature of humanity is our adaptability. We retool ourselves to suit new circumstances at dizzying speed, soon forgetting the way things were as we embrace change and become part of it.

As technology has accelerated the pace of change in our lives, forgetting has become as important a skill as remembering used to be. You need not recall phone numbers anymore, but you need to erase the muscle memory of the previous operating system on your computer if you are to use the new one efficiently.

We are wiped clean and reprogrammed with hastening regularity, so as not to become obsolete along with the iPods, Blackberries, and MySpaces of recent history.

If adaptability has swept us along on an extraordinary journey, it’s also left us, like Dorothy, a long way from Kansas: the circumstances and values that made us who we are become so obscured by perpetual recasting that we have no common memory of them.

Toxic nostalgia 

We feel the call of history, though, more than we interrogate it. It sits in us as an absence; a yearning that makes us vulnerable to the toxic nostalgia peddled by populist politicians the world over.

At the end of an extraordinary year in politics, nationally and globally, there is an unsettling feeling that all the traditional participants in it are on the cusp of obsolescence.

In the UK, the trauma zone between the Brexit campaign of ten years ago and this year’s General Election has clearly broken the paradigm of two-party politics.

The Conservatives changed leader so frequently during that period that its identity became defined by instability. The party of grey suits like Willie Whitelaw or Geoffrey Howe has been entirely erased from the national consciousness, to be replaced by a hyped-up spivery that exemplifies not the entrepreneurial ambitions of Margaret Thatcher but the dishonest exploitation of them by inside-trading wide boys and toffs.

They have become the Ratners of UK politics.

Parlour game

Yesterday, though, at PMQs, Kemi Badenoch stood opposite Sir Keir Starmer as the official opposition in what has become a parlour game divorced from the concerns of the nation.

Both were in full retreat from their recent past.

Badenoch attempted to project what she imagines empathy must look like on the subject of the pensioners’ heating allowance despite having, herself, called for them to be means-tested as recently as 2022.

The Labour front bench, meanwhile, was living to regret posing for all those grinning selfies with WASPI women whose votes they once needed.

It was a confrontation between the ghosts of politics past, with each side trying to put forward positions they had explicitly opposed so recently that it looked more like insanity than hypocrisy: a desperate charade of exhausted politics.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk hovers over the spectacle like a hologram, insinuating that he could bring it to an end with a click of his fingers.

As dissatisfaction with Labour reaches record levels for a new government, the weekly confrontation with the corpse of the Tory Party serves to highlight Labour’s similarity to its predecessor rather than demonstrate any meaningful break with the past.

Smirking

Nigel Farage’s smirking enjoyment of the spectacle should worry anyone who sees parliamentary government as a concrete expression of national values.

As Starmer and Badenoch witter away at the despatch boxes, the real opposition is from supranational interests that can bypass it all with a tweet or the injection of funds into insurgent candidates.

The human note of yesterday’s session came from Diane Abbott, sounding frail as she tried to express the hurt that WASPI women felt in the way they had been used and cast aside by Labour.

It was striking that Abbott, that divisive, radical standard-bearer of modernity, now stands out for her gentle demeanour and insistence on voicing the concerns of ordinary people.

She represents what we will lose if we forget ourselves and are swept away by the cyclonic demands of billionaires who seek to buy us like toys.