Remembering as a Moral Act

Dr. Samuel Johnson once said: "People need to be reminded more than they need to be instructed." To the extent that Dr. Johnson was right, teaching is the art of stimulating the memory, not filling the mind with new material. It has a lot to do with education's original meaning of drawing forth what is already within. For those of you who want to delve deeper into the sources of this point of view, you might want to consult Plato's great dialogue "The Meno," which is perhaps the most famous example of a teacher drawing forth what is already known.

For me, however, this conception of the mind and how it works works best with respect to the moral realm, that area of knowing and acting which has to do with our obligations to one another and the world we inhabit together. We acquire or simply have (!) a lot of knowledge about the good, about how we should behave in order to build a better world. Often we don't follow through on what we know, but when our memories are stimulated, when the right thing to do is brought to our attention, it is startling how often people see the light of what is right. Which is why I think virtually any ethics course is as much an aid to memory as anything else. We can do a lot of ethical analysis about what philosophers have learned about what the right thing to do is, but a simple story, which acts as a reminder, will do the trick again and again.

On a related note, this point about the importance of remembering came up again for me the other day when I was attending a workshop on race. As a white, heterosexual male who is highly educated and enjoys enormous freedom to do what I want as a full professor in an institution of higher education, I have tremendous privilege that relatively few others enjoy. I know this and I am very sensitive to the freedom allowed by my privilege when I remember it. But you see because I'm white, I don't have to remember it; I am not confronted by it on a daily basis. Only people of color in a racist society are constantly reminded of their racial position. For white folks, race matters only when they are prompted to think about,  only when they are reminded of it.  So if you're white and you care about undoing racism, you have to remain mindful. You really have to force yourself to think about it. Thus, in a very real sense, disciplining ourselves to remember often helps us to act on those obligations that matter most.