Progress as Remembering: Our Human Call to Shared Lament
We all inhabit an age that has long prided itself on progress and yet has no concept of what progress really means or of how to seek and find it. The advancement that we love so much is real and good but also puffed up by flashy illusions that erase our consciousness of all that has vanished from human experience. Within fallen time, the capacity to remember our losses is the greatest guarantor of real progress. For hundreds of years now, we have increasingly come to mistake the extinction of one powerful human capacity after another for the evolution of human consciousness and civilization. We can stream ten thousand channels on our screens but no longer recite ten thousand lines of epic poetry around our tables. We can point our app at a leaf and get a scientific name but no longer know the name used by our grandfather that recognized countless wonders, laughs, threats, and helps in each plant and animal surrounding us. Losses like these blind us in ways that elude even our awareness of the missing capacity because, in just one generation, there is no one left to describe what it was like to see the world in that way. Poetry and the names of folk taxonomies give us shared words that open up our world, but these treasure-houses of shared names and associations can simply evaporate. While our cosmic imaginary has expanded in some wonderful ways during our modern era, it has atrophied and collapsed in even more ways than it has grown.
David Rubin describes how oral traditions preserved hundreds of thousands of lines of poetry across generations through networks of transmission. In addition to lost cultures from whom we have a few works written down, his book Memory in Oral Traditions (Oxford 1995) examines the South Slavic epic tradition where living examples could still be found. Rubin documented an output of 78,000 lines from one performer and estimated that 500,000 lines (about 600 hours of epic poetry) was the repertoire capacity for a master. The full communal tradition was even larger because no individual singer knew every story and formula that was in steady circulation. Rubin showed that a durable oral tradition required a community of practice—not just one person with an exceptional memory. Such communities required repeated exposure and networked transmission with learners hearing several performers and passing the material to multiple disciples rather than relying on a single chain of transmission. Knowledgeable audiences were also critical with listeners helping to preserve the tradition by recognizing omissions, responding to performances, and sometimes correcting or assisting performers. Participatory and layered apprenticeships within these networks handed on not only verbatim words but shared traditional forms, phrases, plots, and conventional scenes that supported memory. These forms within a living community preserved specific stories and poetic conventions while allowing for words, length, and detail to vary within accepted limits from one performance to another. Critically, none of this oral tradition existed in a vacuum but was part of a living wholeness in life that extended across patterns of feasting, fasting, working, and worshiping together.
My contention here is not that we could or should go back to such times or worlds of human experience. Instead, it is that we are here in this world to reconcile ourselves to shared losses and to unmet potentials. We are here together for the purpose of lament and vigil so that we can learn to receive a world and each other despite the fragmentations and separations that continually attend our efforts to sustain ourselves and to make beautiful lives together. In such a situation, there is no progress without the hard work of remembering and of lamenting together our continual losses. In our human situation together in this life, our greatest enemy is the false pretense—or simply the ignorant illusion—of progress without any loss to morn. We are incapable of real progress under the burden of such ignorance and self-delusion. Our modern age has much to learn from the ancient Sethite story of a righteous line that kept vigil over Adam’s body in his grave on the mountainside of Eden for several generations after their expulsion from the high and heavenly garden.1
