Is Memorizing Passé?
Jul 7th, 2008 • Posted in: Commentaryby Rushworth M. Kidder
The other day someone asked me how good people could come to such different judgments on the major ethical issues of the world. Before I could stop myself, I was quoting a nifty little apothegm penned by the eighteenth-century English poet Alexander Pope in his “Essay on Criticism”:
‘Tis with our judgments as our watches, none
Go just alike, yet each believes his own.
That was in the age of wind-up pocket watches — before the Greenwich Mean Time beeper on the BBC, or atomic clocks synchronized by satellites, or www.time.gov. Yet Pope’s metaphor is timeless: Given our different rhythms and singular experiences, we each think our judgments are right. When his couplet crossed my mind, it so exactly answered my friend’s question (or so I fancied) that I had no choice but to blurt it out.
Or blurt it out almost. I think I turned around the first sentence, putting “watches” before “judgments.” And I know I said “goes,” silently bringing Pope’s grammar into line with niggling twenty-first-century standards. Only later did I search out a copy of Pope’s poem on the Web in preparation for writing this column.
But why did this couplet cross my mind in the first place? Because somewhere in my high-school English classes we committed it to memory. I can’t recall whether we were required to or thought it would be an amusing challenge. Either way, there it was — and decades later, here it still is.
The question is, Will it be there in the minds of today’s children when they grow up? Or will the constant immersion in the Web, with its dazzling glut of information on every conceivable topic, have dulled their mnemonic capacities? Will they laugh off memorizing as some outmoded form of mental gymnastics? After all, if every scrap of public information and every verbal artifact of our culture is there for the Googling, why memorize anything? Why develop something our ancestors revered — a well-stocked mind — if you have instant, searchable access to the Web? Why bother to know stuff when you can look it up?
One answer lies in an object that provides a telling metaphor for our age: random access memory, or RAM. As a set of integrated circuits in your computer, RAM lets you access information in any order. It’s not like a videotape, which you must tediously rewind to the precise place you want. With RAM, you get any bit of data as quickly as any other bit, regardless of its relationship to other bits and despite its location. Hence the word random.
Like RAM, the Web treats every bit of information as equivalent to every other. It passes no judgments nor creates any priorities unless you direct it to. Only when you ask to know, say, the year that Pope published his “Essay” will it pluck his name from millions of others, link it to publish rather than hundreds of other possible verbs, and deliver the answer (1711). It never comes back to you with a pop-up to say, “Yo, nobody reads Pope anymore. Everybody’s asking for Harry Potter or the latest Botox book. May I redirect your search toward these more timely bits?”
That kind of prioritizing would strike us as ludicrous, yet we’re doing exactly that when we memorize. If you say, “That’s an amazing poem — I think I’ll memorize it,” you’ve imposed a radical hierarchy on your information. You’ve said, “This matters more than nearly every other poem in the world.” When something triggers the memory of its lines, as the question about matters of conscience did for me, the relevant passage swims into view.
Just because it came into view, of course, doesn’t mean I had to blurt it out. I probably struck my friend as a walking bit of arcana or a traveler from an antique land. She was gracious enough not to stare. Perhaps she’s right: Maybe tomorrow’s adults won’t trot out accumulated knowledge in this way, but will be much quicker than we are to find it on the Web.
But the question is, How will they know what to look for? Where will they form the taste for words, the relish for deftly expressed ideas and pithy epitomes of wisdom that help shape thought? And if they find such treasures, will the insistent bleating of the email grant them enough leisure, combined with enough concentration, to memorize anything?
This is not a diatribe against the modern: As I said, I couldn’t have written this column (or not nearly as efficiently) without help from Google. It’s more an observation about a right-versus-right matter of conscience, which is that our access to the world’s RAM is, morally, both a blessing and a curse. It either holds open the possibility of a fundamental change in the way we use our minds, or it foretells the greatest degradation our culture has ever had in its collective memory.
Which is it? That depends. “‘Tis with our judgments as our watches….”
©2008 Institute for Global Ethics
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