Selective Memory - The Past Is But A Fictitious Drama, A Confabulation, And We Still Demand The Truth?

Thanksgiving dinners at Aunt Tally's were always fun for us kids. Lots of ice cream and sarsaparilla and the usual fights between Tally's cousins and the Grillo brothers.  The two could never seem to agree on anything, argued over every detail, and seemed to be from different planets.  It wasn't a Ford but a Chevy.  It didn't happen on Route 15 but 72.  It wasn't Margaret Filcher driving but her retarded sister; and the poor fool died at Grace New Haven not New Britain General...and so on. 

It got so bad that Tally had to separate them, 'Now, now Harry', she said cutting him another piece of ham pie and refilling his Lambrusco, settling him down, returning the table to incidental talk about Angie's lasagna and the outrageous peonies in Mabel Schwartz's garden ('Most be hybrids' said Joey Panto. 'She could never grow them that big'). 

The point is not about the wreck that sent Margaret Filcher - or her sister - to the hospital, but the total inability of anyone to agree on anything. Was it just obstreperousness? Why would anyone dig their heels in and have a go over such an inconsequential event that may not have even happened? Harry Grillo told the same story every Easter an no version jibed. It was as though he had reworked the score, adding more trumpets and relegating the strings and revising the libretto until it soared with drama. 

Emil Panto had heard Harry's performances every Thanksgiving and had the same contentious objections.  Not this but that, not here but there, not her but him until the dinner was once again as messy as a doctrinal dispute. He should have known that when Harry saw or heard something, it got processed in his overheated brain, got modified, convoluted and produced according to his imagination; that facts never seemed to matter, the telling is what counted, and the more engaging, entertaining, and compelling the story was, the better. 

Besides, the old folks around the table had their own way with facts, and no one could agree on when the elms had come down, Zackin's Pharmacy closed, or when Mayor Gambino got ousted.  The confusion got worse when it came to family history.  It was as though Gibbon invented The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire or that Plutarch's Lives was pure invention.  Each and everyone of the guests around Tally's Easter table had their own version of the past, the true version, the one and only version; and they were as unmovable as the Rock of Gibraltar when it came to defending it. 

There was a recent case of a drive-by shooting in the New Haven Register that left two people dead on Whalley Avenue.  The paper declined to give details because the eyewitnesses interviewed different substantially on what happened.  In fact the lawyers in the case were forced to rely on tire marks, shell casings, trajectories, and firing angles in their prosecution and defense because the three bystanders who supposedly witnessed the shooting could not agree.  It was a Ford not a Chevy.  The shooter was black not white.  It was a handgun not a rifle. There were two men in the back seat or none, only shadows. A volley was fired not just two well-placed rounds. 

Perception is a very tricky business; and much has been made recently about the inability of eyewitnesses to agree on what they see.  There have been a number of scholarly articles recently on memory and how selective it is.  It is well known that eyewitness accounts are usually wrong or conflicting.  Despite the absolute conviction of witnesses that they saw a white male, large ears, and goatee point a gun out the window of a Buick LeSabre and shoot Robert Leggings, they saw no such thing.

Scott Fraser, a forensic psychologist, provided surprising evidence in a recent interview on NPR’s Ted Talks.

Fraser researches what's real and what's selective when it comes to human memory and crime. He focuses on the fallibility of human memory and encourages a more scientific approach to trial evidence. He has testified in criminal and civil cases throughout the U.S. in state and federal courts.

In 2011 Fraser was involved in the retrial of a 1992 murder case in which Francisco Carrillo was found guilty and sentenced to two life sentences in prison. Fraser and the team that hired him staged a re-enactment of the night in question, and they showed the testimonies that had put Carrillo in jail were unreliable. After 20 years in jail for a crime he didn't commit, Carrillo was free.

Not only were the testimonies of the eyewitnesses in question, what they said they saw had no bearing whatsoever on reality.

Literature is filled with stories of subjective eyewitness memory.  Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book is a recreation of an actual event:

The Ring and the Book tells the story of a murder trial in Rome in 1698, whereby an impoverished nobleman, Count Guido Franceschini, is found guilty of the murders of his young wife Pompilia Comparini and her parents, having suspected his wife was having an affair with a young cleric, Giuseppe Caponsacchi…. The poem comprises twelve books, nine of which are dramatic monologues spoken by a different narrator involved in the case… usually giving a different account of the same events, and two books (the first and the last) spoken by the author.

The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell is the story of an event told by four different people, all with different recollections of what actually happened; and of course Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all recounted the same the story of Jesus Christ quite differently.  

We all ‘fill in’ memories after the fact.  We may have stored some essential facts or impressions of a long-ago event, and we tend to fill in the blanks based on recollections of family and friends.  It may be that it wasn’t Uncle Fred who threw up on the Persian carpet, but Uncle Pasqual.  We had the scene right, just not the actors.

So Harry Grillo 'filled in' his recollections with both his own confabulations and the asides of others, and before long, the original story had become something entirely different. 

A famous psychological experiment had young children seated in a circle.  One child was given a simply, easy to remember story - 'Mrs. Harris's dog chased the neighbor's cat up the oak tree and the fire department had to be called' -  and told to repeat it to the classmate next to him, on and on until the circle was complete. 

By the time each child had been told the story and repeated it, the version told by the last student to the experimenter bore no relationship to the original version. 

So, the combination of personalized, selective memory, plus filling in and hearing what we want to hear assures that recollection of the past is a very tenuous, shaky proposition at best. 

Much is made of 'the truth' and 'fake news' these days - as though there were actual, universally agreed upon, objective reality.  Watching reportage of the same event on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC illustrates the issue.  Although all can agree that ICE personnel have been deployed to Detroit, the way such deployment is presented differs significantly. It is either a legitimate response to crime and illegality or it is an untoward use of federal authority to usurp the power of local government.  It is either a reasonable, trained, and disciplined force, or a racist phalanx of thugs with a brutal agenda. 

Why all the fuss and bother?  Of course there is no such thing as the truth and all news is fake; and for all the Sturm und Drang over morality, there is not nor never has has been a universal, absolute, unquestioned right rule of conduct. Relativity did not start with Einstein. Muslims and Christians radically disagree on the Crucifixion.  Allah would never have sacrificed one of his prophets and allowed him to be subjected to hideous torture.  There was no Resurrection, and Jesus was taken up into heaven with no imaginative, totally false assumptions. 

Progressives not only want their version of history - their particular selective memory - to be current. They want to expunge and remove all traces of alternate versions. Confederate statues must come down, army posts and streets must be renamed.  The antebellum South can no longer exist. Progressive history allows for no intrusion into their confected reality - their version of the past. 

Husbands tell their own versions of infidelity, admitting when forced their adultery, but easily shift the blame onto their hectoring, vixenish, shrewish wives. Sexual dalliance forced upon a husband is not a sin, a dereliction of duty, or an amoral act.  Uncle Joe was simply seeking love when his marriage provided nothing but dismalness and rancor.  His wandering was not only justified, it was right and proper. Did he commit adultery? It all depends. 

The truth? Fuhgeddaboudit...