School of Humanities, Art and Social Science (SHASS) 50th Anniversary Colloquium, “Asking the Right Questions” (Session 3) 10/7/2000

[MUSIC PLAYING]

WILLIAMS: I'm Rosalind Williams, and I want to welcome you to the third colloquium session, "How do history and memory shape each other?" Here it is a beautiful Saturday morning, and yet we're starting off on a serious, if not at almost a somber theme. But this is an anniversary celebration. And this session is a reflection upon the meaning of such remembrances.

And in discussing this session ahead of time, which I had the pleasure of doing with John and Pauline-- Jillian was, alas, unavailable, but the three of us talked quite a bit. And we thought about the meaning of 50th anniversaries, and came to realize that 50th celebrations are very special, because that's the moment when personal biography begins to be come transformed into the public record. With awareness of our own mortality comes awareness that there is a larger collective story.

So what is that story, and who is going to tell that story? Every year at commencement we see this here at MIT when the students who are graduating-- and I'm speaking here especially the undergraduate students-- are all lined up and filing into Killian Court. Before they get to the court, there's always a moment, and exactly how the moment happens depends upon the logistics of commencement that year, but there's a moment where the graduates confront the 50th reunion class.

And it's a moment of great poignancy, because the 50th year alumni are looking at the students, and they're seeing themselves. And the students are looking at the alumni, and they're seeing themselves. And that's a moment when history almost becomes visible, becomes palpable. It's as they say a very poignant moment.

And I think we here today are engaged in a similar moment. In modern times, and by this I mean particularly in the 19th century, the composition of the personal past, personal memory, got more and more attention. Freud is the obvious person, but Proust, many other artists, were giving a lot of attention to the personal past. But the historical past began to lose much of its authority. So by the beginning of the 20th century, at many levels of culture there was a prevailing assumption that societies could and should shed what was often called the burden of the past.

And I can't recollect the details of the Futurist Manifesto right now, but I remember this line of Marinetti's about a racing car being more beautiful than the Parthenon, and one of his co-futurists saying that the most essential artist of our times is fire. They wanted to get rid of the past. At mid-century, however, the mid 20th century, when this school was founded, the burden of the past never seemed heavier.

Because in the preceding decades there had been human losses that were incomprehensible. There had been much too much fire. MIT, of course, was deeply engaged in both of the wars. And in that whole history of loss in the early 20th century, efforts to come to terms with those losses, both individually and collectively, led to conflicting responses in the post-war period-- a determination never to forget, but also a desire not to remember. And what one society wanted to forget and remember was often different from what another society wanted to.

And I think we are still living with this cultural ambivalence. We're surrounded by historical amnesia on the one hand, and on the other by an obsession with oversimplified historical myths. We're also subjected increasingly to-- somewhat in parallel to what Steve Pinker was talking about yesterday-- is an implicit theory of human nature. I think we're surrounded by an implicit theory of history, which is this rhetoric of change management that equates history with technology, and change with the latest software upgrade.

We're exchanging the burden of the past for a burden of this perpetual change, the burden of the future. Real change, real change, historical change, is far more difficult, far more upsetting than a technological upgrade. It's closer to what Louise Gluck was describing in her poem yesterday about the cotton mouth. It's more like rebirth, having to start a new life. And it's a hard thing.

But that's historical change. The panelists here today are going to reflect upon the complex relationships between myth and history and between remembering and forgetting. And they're going to speak in roughly chronological order. Pauline Maier is based in the 18th century, Dame Gillian Beer in the 19th, and John Dower in the 20th.

[LAUGHTER]

But by the end of the session, we will discover that this is a very simplistic way of describing any of them. By the way, the discussion that follows we hope to have a note of what-- I think it was Pauline-- called substantive informality. And so please keep that in mind while you're listening to them for your part in the discussion. I would call your attention to the bibliographical summaries in the program, because I will not be repeating them, but I really want to make sure you do read them.

And then I'll just add a few words about each of the speakers. In introducing Pauline, well, I've been discussing this session at home with my family, because it's been fun to get ready for it. And so last week my son came home, and he's a junior at Newton North High School. And he said he had seen Pauline in class on TV. It was the PBS show, one of their series on the American Revolution.

And this is a reminder to me and to you both how much of Pauline's work has involved-- well, I was trying to find the words, because if we call it public outreach it just sounds a little banal. I'd like to think of what Pauline has done as acts of citizenship in the spirit of the formative years of our republic, that she has herself studied. And it's also a reminder, it's not just physics at MIT that has influenced national education in history.

Also, just to take what Pauline has done. She's involved with other TV programs on the History Channel and with PBS. She has written a textbook in American history for the junior high level. She is co-authoring another textbook, funded by the Sloan Foundation, that is going to give a prominent place to the history of science and technology. And Roe Smith, another MIT faculty member, is also a collaborator in that project.

And when Pauline's book, American Scripture was published on July 4, 1997, you were hot. MIT was hot. It was wonderful.

[LAUGHTER]

Every day there was news, and the publicity was just great. And we all felt such shared pride in that event. In that book, and elsewhere, Pauline is examining not only the making of the Declaration of Independence, but what it is meant to subsequent generations, how this revolutionary manifesto became a guide to established governments. And in terms of governance, I also want to conclude by mentioning that Pauline has had a leading role in the governance of this school, and a leading role in the history of this school.

When she arrived here the next year, she became head of the history department, was head for nine years, and also during the mid 1980s chaired the committee that reformed the teaching of the humanities here at MIT. That's when I first encountered Pauline. She came in with these committee meetings, ran the meetings, she knew everything, she was so knowledgeable, and so thoughtful. And I was in awe of her, and I still am. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

MAIER: Thank you, Roz. After an introduction like that, I think what I should do is just leave. It's only downhill from here. And I should also explain I haven't been around very much, because I have my own private experience of the passage of time. I have been attending my 40th college reunion of Harvard Radcliffe, which will explain any lapses of coherence in this talk, and the bags under my eyes, et cetera.

Our assignment here, as I understand it, is to reflect on the complex relationship of memory, myth, and history. Many of you are aware that there is now a vast literature that focuses on this topic-- some of it produced by another member of my household. As I understand it-- and I don't pretend to be an expert. We have a division of labor in my household-- is that that literature focuses to a large extent on collective memory. That is, on how groups assume an identity by defining, constructing as the preferred verb seems to be, a view of the past, several decades after the events that are described occurred.

My own reflections are for better or for worse somewhat different. I do have some interest in collective memory, as you'll see, but I'm going to focus much more on individual memory. And my comments are much more, I think, personal than theoretical. What insights I have to offer come from an event I witnessed and another that I studied. At Harvard's commencement in June, 1947, Secretary of State George Marshall announced what became the Marshall Plan, a program of massive economic aid to war-torn Europe designed to reestablish, in his words, political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of that momentous event, Harvard organized a colloquium in the spring of 1997. It invited 10 or 12 men who in one capacity or another had participated in the plan, along with a handful of historians who'd studied the Marshall Plan and its impact. From my perspective in one of the back rows at the Harvard Science Center, the event soon came to seem less like a colloquium than a revival, as one old timer after another rose to testify, confident that, perhaps because he was after all at Harvard, and what he said would become part of the historical record, and indeed, would set the record straight.

They spoke to particular specialized points that often were to someone like me, who does not closely follow the debates over postwar history, more bewildering than informative. Speakers were, however, obviously antagonistic toward one of the participating historians, Alan Milward, who I later learned had questioned the Marshall Plan's impact. That explained the emotional character of the proceedings.

These veterans of more glorious days were reaffirming the significance of their service. They were reclaiming their place in history from the professionals who were taking it away. As I witnessed the drama, it crossed my mind that I was about to publish American Scripture, which offered the history of a far simpler event, the drafting of the Declaration of Independence. And a good deal of the testimony upon the evolution of the Declaration of Independence, a testimony upon which historians have relied, was given almost 50 years after the drafting had been done.

And in the course of my research, I discovered that on point after point that testimony was incorrect. So I wondered, was it worth even trying to get the message of those septo- and octogenarians waiting patiently or impatiently for their turn at the microphone? And the story I studied myth was also a component. After the War of 1812, a new generation of Americans had risen to power, and it was anxious to keep the memory of its revolutionary fathers from being lost. They made it their mission to preserve and print the documentary record of the revolutionary era, many of which remained in private hands, and were becoming scattered and lost.

Meanwhile, guns, buttons, and other mementos of the revolution were suddenly being honored like religious objects. And the revolutionaries themselves assumed a superhuman character. To be sure, that tendency was apparent earlier in books such as Mason Weems's Life of Washington, which was first published in 1804 and gave us the cherry tree story, and more to the point here, a Washington who had a remarkable resemblance to both Moses and Christ, depending on what passages you looked at.

[LAUGHTER]

I'd like to give you an example, because it's rather characteristic of the tendencies of the time when Americans' collective memory was being defined. I want to quote Weems's version of Washington's death, and his-- shall we say-- ascent into heaven. "Breathing out, Father of mercies, take me to thyself. He fell asleep. Swift on angels' wings, the brightening saint ascended. While voices more than human were heard in Fancy's ear warbling through the happy regions, and hymning the great procession toward the gates of Heaven.

His glorious coming was seen far off, and myriads of mighty angels hastened forth with golden harps to welcome the honored stranger. High in front of the hosts were seeing the beauty forms of Franklin--

[LAUGHTER]

Warren, Mercer, Scammel, with all the virtuous patriots who on this side of Colombia toiled or bled for liberty and truth. But oh, how changed from what they were when in the days of flesh bathed in sweat and blood they fell at the parent feet of their weeping country." It's over top, right?

[LAUGHTER]

Not all authors went that far. But this was part of our response, of sort of the way the Americans were coming to remember and to honor their revolution. Of course, occasionally the record didn't somehow fit the objectives of the writers of the history, and the editors of documents in this era. But they could fix that.

Jared Sparks, one of the leading writers and editors of this period, spent a good deal of time suppressing or rewriting passage that seemed too racy, or colloquial, or in a word, human. Even John Adams's grandson, Charles Francis Adams, who I think was one of the most skilled editors of that generation, and conformed more closely to modern editorial standards than many of his contemporaries, refused to let his cantankerous ancestor, John Adams, say things such as "he don't," or "you wasn't," or "he eats strawberries," or "she ain't obliged."

[LAUGHTER]

So what I'm saying, here almost literally, the act of remembering changed not just the past, but the record of the past. We can fix the record of the past. I mean, modern editorial projects very nicely restore the original language. But we still have those religious overtones that were expressed in almost grotesque detail by Mason Weems. And if you doubt this, visit the National Archives, where our precious national documents, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights are displayed on what can only be described as an altar with a declaration up where the tabernacle should have been.

This is the period, in fact, where the Declaration of Independence became a national icon. It had been saved from obscurity in the 1790s by members of the Republican Party, who were very pleased their leader had written it, they said. But in this period, after the War of 1812, say the late teens and '20s, it became a national icon. It's honored, for one thing, in that famous painting by Jonathan Trumbull, which is now in the rotunda, I think, of the capital, of the Declaration of Independence that shows the committee essentially presenting its draft to the Congress.

It's often called the signing. It's not the signing. There's a lot of confusion about that painting. In any case, it's first printed. Now it was printed, of course, for distribution in 1776. But now you get copies of the written version that was signed. And then in 1823, you had a facsimile edition published. I brought my book along. It gives me confidence.

But the cover has in the background the written version of the Declaration of Independence. We know what it looks like. But nobody, aside from a few who could pull it out of the drawers in the Department of State, knew what the handwritten version looked like before 1823 when the facsimile was published. What had been distributed was, of course, a printed version earlier on.

And it becomes a national icon, as I say, as it had never been before. And we are very beholden, actually, as historians to the Americans of that era who were very anxious that no more revolutionaries would go to their grave with unrecorded memories. So they went out and they asked questions that-- what is surprising to us, I think-- no one had bothered to ask before, such as, how was this document written?

As it happens, however, of course, far fewer persons were involved in drafting, editing, and adopting the Declaration of Independence than in creating and administering the Marshall Plan. And life was shorter in the 1820s than in the late 20th century. As a result of the five people who had been on the committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence, only two remained to tell the story-- John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

Neither of these men had to face an Alan Milward, that is, a historian who questioned the significance of what they did. That doesn't mean they liked the histories being written in their time. John Adams, cantankerous as I said, hated them. [CHUCKLES] He said they distorted the people he had known in life beyond all recognition. This is the point where you're getting all these sort of filial, patristic biographies coming out. Weems's tendencies replicated in the biography of one revolutionary after another.

He said the idolization of Washington and other revolutionaries reminded him of the canonization of Catholic saints. And John Adams was a good old Puritan to the very end, so that wasn't something he was going to accept. The country needed, he said, a second Protestant Reformation.

[LAUGHTER]

These heroic histories, he feared, would traumatize the young by giving them impossible models to imitate. In 1811, Adams confessed a very great secret to a younger American. And you have to love him for this. As far as I am capable of comparing the merits of different periods, he said, I have no reason to believe we were better than you are.

And on top of all these problems, the histories of the late 1810s and 1820s emphasized the wrong events. Can you believe they gave great impact to the announcement of independence and not to independence itself? And as a result, they were giving honor to the wrong people. The record clearly needed to be corrected. And Adams was ready.

In August 1822, when Timothy Pickering wrote him asking for a minute detail of facts concerning the Declaration of Independence, which for Pickering and so many others had become the most important act of the Second Continental Congress, a detailed history would be not merely an interesting curiosity, Pickering said, but would do substantial justice to the abilities and energies of the leaders in that great measure. Eddie told Adams, you alone can give a full statement of them.

Now, Adams was a few months short of his 87th birthday at the time, and he said, I'm utterly incapable of complying with your request. And then he promptly wrote several pages in reply, giving to anybody's standard a very long letter. He had just received a chance, like those veterans of the Marshall Plan at Harvard, to set the record straight. I was incessantly employed, he wrote, through the whole fall, winter, and spring of 1775 and 1776 in Congress during their sittings, and on committees, on mornings, and evenings, and unquestionably did more business than any other member of the House.

[LAUGHTER]

Actually, I think that's right, going through the records. And actually, Thomas Jefferson affirmed that. Not that Jefferson was there to witness it. That's another story. No one had argued and worked for independence longer or more strenuously than Adams. Thomas Jefferson, who by the summer of 1776 had been about a year a member of Congress, but had attended his duty in the House but a very small part of the time, and when there had never spoken in public. Nonetheless, as Adams complained in an earlier letter, Jefferson had run off with all the glory. It was even more annoying Thomas Paine was saying he was exclusively responsible for independence.

Adams execrated Paine. But Jefferson was a friend. They had resumed their friendship, as you know. There are a wonderful set of correspondence between Adams and Jefferson in their old age. And that made him sensitive. He wasn't really unkind to his friend, Thomas Jefferson. Despite his sporadic congressional service Jefferson had, Adams volunteered a happy talent of composition. As a result, Adams had urged his appointment to the drafting committee. Indeed, he claimed, the committee actually asked both Adams and Jefferson to prepare a draft declaration, but then he, Adams, had persuaded Jefferson to write it up.

And his account is often cited. And I won't fight off the temptation. "'You should do it,' I said. 'Oh no.' 'Why will you not?' 'Reasons enough.'" Oh, I guess it was Jefferson telling Adams you should do it. "'Why shouldn't Adams do it?' 'First, you are a Virginian, and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. Reason second, I am obnoxious'"-- this is Adams-- "'I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular. You are very much otherwise. Reason third, you can write 10 times better than I can.' 'Well,' said Jefferson, 'if you are decided, I will do as well as I can.'"

Much of what Adams said also appeared in his autobiography, which he wrote 15 or so years earlier. But the notion that the drafting committee had appointed both Adams and Jefferson as draftsmen was new and very suspect. Was Adams trying to run off with at least some of the glory? Now it turned to Jefferson. Jefferson had a very different attitude toward the histories being written in his time.

This always was surprising to me. You think of him as such a secular enlightenment figure. He loved all this religious glop. In fact, Trumbull had made his first painting of the Declaration of Independence in the late 1780s on Jefferson's suggestion. He had actually sketched for Trumbull the hall where the Second Continental Congress had met. It's almost emblematic, because later Trumbull discovered that Jefferson's sketch was wrong. He'd remembered it incorrectly.

Our first clue that memory is very flawed, as Jefferson himself understood as you'll see in a minute. And but sort of the religious business, he gave to his great grandson-in-law, I guess, Joseph Coolidge, the desk on which he'd written the Declaration of Independence. Which he said he'd written the Declaration, and he predicted that in another 50 years it will be carried in processions like the relics of saints. He had no reservations about everything that Adams so execrated.

So he didn't object to the histories, but he did object to Adams's account, which Pickering had used in a 4th of July oration that was subsequently printed and came to Jefferson's attention. In several details, Jefferson wrote James Madison an often quoted letter of August 30, 1823. Adams's memory was mistaken. He gave Adams full credit for his role in getting independence through the Congress. Still, at the age of 88, here he was off a little bit too. And 47 years after the transactions of independence, Jefferson said that Adams should remember some things, and exactly did not seem altogether surprising.

Memory, he said, was unreliable. Now, at the time Jefferson was himself 80, but he said he wasn't depending on memory. He had written notes on Congress's proceedings, taken by myself at the moment on the spot, and reduced to a final form on the conclusion. He also had the original rough draft of the Declaration, an extraordinarily valuable text now at the Library of Congress. They chose the draft as Jefferson first presented it to other members of the drafting committee, and all subsequent changes.

In fact, Jefferson was so confident that he had the sources on the history that interested people that he kept getting inquiries from people. And he wrote back. Even if he needed to go through his documents, he wrote some 1,200 letters in 1820 by his own account. Now, think of the labor of this-- handwritten letters, many of which dealt with historical events. He felt great responsibility for getting the record straight.

But, in fact, he was relying on memory much more than he understood. But I want to focus just on this one event of how Jefferson-- the account he gave of the drafting of the Declaration. "The drafting committee asked Jefferson alone to prepare the Declaration," he said. "I consented. I drew it. Before I reported it to the committee, I communicated it separately to Dr. Franklin and Mr. Adams." "And," he reminded Madison, "you have seen the original paper now in my hands with the corrections of Dr. Franklin and Mr. Adams interlined in their own handwritings. Their alterations were two or three only, and merely verbal. I then wrote a fair copy, reported it to the committee, and from then unaltered to Congress."

Well, fortunately, he gave contrary evidence himself in a letter that I discovered. I can't say it was very hard. It was printed in a couple versions, but nobody had used it. A letter he wrote to Franklin. And note, they were sending the draft to Franklin, who had gout, to look at it and send it back. He never attended the drafting committee or was a member of the drafting committee.

And basically he said, I've just shown this to the committee. They asked me to change a sentiment or two. I have done it. I hope you can look at it and get it back to me the next morning. I have to show it to the committee again. The committee wasn't a rubber stamp, as he thought 50 years later. It was active, and also, I think I understand why he thought he was exclusively responsible-- honestly thought, almost 50 years afterwards-- the original rough draft is a very complicated document to interpret.

He looked at it, and he saw not only the draft, but all the changes, with the exception of a few that were clearly by Adams or Franklin, were in his handwriting. I presume he then assumed that he was responsible for them. What he forgot was that some of them had been mandated by the committee. And there are other reasons. I mean, that's one of many pieces of evidence that indicate that although Jefferson was obviously the primary writer of the Declaration, many hands fed into its composition, that he wasn't exclusively responsible for it.

In fact, it's very curious that he was so anxious to emphasize that he had been, as he put on his tomb, author of the Declaration of Independence. You know that he put three things on his tomb-- author of the Declaration of Independence, father of the University of Virginia, and author of the Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty. It's surprising, because at the time the document was an enormous humiliation to him.

Congress took up the draft that the committee presented and slashed it to bits. They it, they took out a quarter to a third of the text, they changed phrases, they threw out the parts that Jefferson was most proud of, they changed the whole last paragraph-- although, the final version is on the Jefferson Memorial, and Jefferson gets the glory for it. He didn't even write most of what's on the Jefferson Memorial.

But he was so humiliated by what Congress did to his work that he sent several copies of the committee draft to friends to see how Congress had mucked it up. And now, near the end of his life, he goes back to this. It's the first thing that he emphasizes. What we don't understand is how much, I think, by the 1820s, Jefferson feared for his place in history. He had no idea he was going to become, take a deep breath, Thomas Jefferson, you know, the most adored member of the founding generation.

He looked over his life, there was reason to be fearful. Now, we might say he could say governor of Virginia, American minister to France, first Secretary of State, vice president of the United States, and president. Maybe that'd be enough. To us, that's kind of an honor. He mentioned none of his administrative career. Because, in fact, he had great reservations about it.

His governorship of Virginia was a disaster. He left the capital of Virginia with the British on his heels and was later accused of cowardice. Nothing much happened when he was in France. His Secretary of State was-- he didn't do anything. He finally left because Hamilton was running the state of foreign affairs. He didn't do anything as vice president, particularly. He went home.

His presidency began gloriously and ended in disaster, with the midst of the shambles of the embargo. He couldn't wait to get home to the quiet pleasures of science, as he put it. And none of that-- even though we think of things like the Louisiana Purchase. He couldn't put on his gravestone, because that was a wonderful thing. My god, he doubled the size of the United States. He did it despite the fact that it contradicted his constitutional principles. Nothing in the Constitution said you could buy that much of the continent.

[LAUGHTER]

And here I think he really worried about his place in history. And I think this is relevant to the way we use these memories that are committed on paper so long after the time. For one thing, they have errors. That's true. But I think they're best not treated as statements full of falsehoods. I like to think of them, actually, as expressing complex truths.

They tell us something about the distant past, but they also tell us a tremendous amount about the time in which those memories are recorded, and about the personal circumstances of the individual who is offering this testimony. They are very rich sources. And that's the way I tried to use them.

But we go back to the fact that these early versions had been absorbed without an awful lot of reflection. I mean, historians have used Jefferson's account of the drafting as if it was perfectly unproblematical. But try contesting notions that have been so deeply ingrained in our national myth. When I published American Scripture, people looked at it as an attack on Thomas Jefferson, which it wasn't. I was accused of saying he was a liar.

Well, he wasn't consistent. But--

[LAUGHTER]

--I never called him a liar. The other great thing was I actually had the chutzpah to say that not everybody thought the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence was the most important part of the document at all times in our past, that in the founding generations they actually prefer the last paragraph, which declares independence. I mean, this was my not too surprising argument, I guess, that the point of the Declaration of Independence was to declare independence, and that the second paragraph came to the fore later. And I looked at the historical context in which this happened.

Forget it. There are people that read that paragraph and say, that's really so beautiful. It must have been beautiful at all times. To say people had other-- you just couldn't get through to that. In fact, there was a point where I looked at some of the reviews, and reviews are often very sensitive. I was just talking to other members of the panel.

But those that were negative, I started to realize I could distance myself from them. They weren't really about me or about my book. They were documents of the way Americans had received their historical tradition, and how resistant they were to any questioning of the myths that they had received.

And I suppose of the book tour I had, there was a sense that that lingers in my mind, some woman in Philadelphia said to me, don't we need these myths? And maybe we do, and I suppose historians are always going to be against them in some way. We question them. We go back, we try to compare the documents to get a more accurate version of what really happened. And it doesn't always lend itself to mythologizing.

So we are always in some sense going to be antagonistic. But, you know, I ultimately came to the conclusion that truth was more tonic than myth, that, in fact, if you look at the drafting of the Declaration, you understood the extent to which so many different people had contributed to its creation. Not just one great man, but large numbers. Those who produced the drafts-- well, hey, George Mason wrote a Virginia Declaration of Rights that, in fact, Jefferson had used in drafting the second paragraph. Members of the committee who outlined the document before it appointed a draftsman, the changes the committee suggest, the editings of Congress, and then subsequent generations of Americans who reinterpreted the document so that it served their needs.

This was really Adams's message, that the creators of this document were the American people. And in some ways I thought that was more politically useful an idea, certainly, in a country where the greater part of the qualified adults don't see fit to vote. The example of a mobilized people could be extraordinarily healthy. But that was very hard to sell.

I mean, we'll hold to the myths, and be very interesting to see if the new display in National Archives still has an altar. Keep your eyes open.

[APPLAUSE]

WILLIAMS: Thank you, Pauline. I know a lot of us were thinking about the historical record in the age of word processing. And it does change things. I now have the pleasure of introducing Dame Gillian Beer, our visitor from England. And I have to say, after this discussion of American democracy, our fascination with titles endures. And you should also note that she is King Edward VII, professor of English literature. And as Jillian remarked offhandedly yesterday, it's sometimes hard to be Edward VII.

[LAUGHTER]

But I want you to know that the full title of her dame title is Dame Commander of the British Empire, awarded in 1998 as part of the Queen's birthday honors list for-- and this is the best part-- for services to English literature. And that's an important phrase. The idea of serving English literature, I think, is something that resonates with any of us in the humanities. It also, though, reminds us that what Dame Gillian has done is to broaden significantly the definition of English literature.

Her 1983 book, Darwin's Plots, which is subtitled Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and 19th Century Fiction is that redefinition. She took Darwin as a writer, as a writer who told stories, who had a structure, who had a style, and at the same time took people we usually think of as writers, like Eliot and Hardy, and saw how they were drawing upon Darwin, or using Darwin, if you will, to tell their stories. This intertwining of natural history and human history is one of the defining characteristics of our age, of the modern age, the postmodern age. I think both.

And Dame Gillian Beer is really a pioneer for doing this analysis that shows us how this has worked in our culture. I want to add a few notes to the notes about her in the program. She is a trustee of the British Museum. You should also know she's been a Booker Prize judge and chair of the panel. This is power.

[LAUGHTER]

And has served as vice president--

BEER: [INAUDIBLE]

[LAUGHTER]

WILLIAMS: --and has served as vice president of the British Academy. But most notably, I think, in the context here, she has participated fully in the life of her university. Our-- well, I don't want to call it sister university, Cambridge, but maybe cousin. I'm looking at Larry Bacow to see if I have the right words. And she has held a succession of offices within Cambridge dating back to the 1970s, including one in the 1980s with the absolutely delicious title of vice mistress of Girton College.

[LAUGHTER]

Oh, these titles are just great.

[LAUGHTER]

Now, somewhat in a more pedestrian way, she is president of Claire Hall, which is a graduate college at Cambridge. And she tells me it was begun in the 1960s as a sort of counter-cultural, new style college. And I will just note in passing, how many educational experiments, including ones at MIT, were started in the later '60s and have lasted. And somebody should write a book about the educational results of the '60s. But that's for another day.

Anyway, from what she tells me, it sounds delightful and quite contrary to our expectations of a Cambridge college that there's no high table, she eats with the students, three quarters of the students are from overseas, and there's a daycare center right on campus, so kids are always running around. So Dame you may be, but you're very much at home here, and we welcome you.

[APPLAUSE]

BEER: Yes, when I was given this title, I asked my friends whether I could be called the Dame of British empiricism, because it seemed to me rather preferable to the form of the Dame commander of the British empire. But I was assured that was not quite possible.

[LAUGHTER]

Titles are very odd things. And one of the things I want to look at this morning is the ways in which our, if you like, mythological understanding of Charles Darwin has ignored, perhaps needed to ignore, some aspects of his work, and to ask whether those same aspects of his work that have gone underground, may be more disturbing to us, even than some of the things that we think we know frightened the Victorians.

I think we're all used to the idea that evolutionary theory threatened consciousness in the Victorian period, and, of course, has continued to be threatening to a good many people since, because it emphasized human kinship with other life forms, what Ruskin called the filthy heraldries which record the relation of the human to the ascidian and the crocodile."

[LAUGHTER]

We're used, too, to reading natural selection as a theory of competition. Even in Herbert Spencer's phrase as "the survival of the fittest." And these are our simplifications of Darwin, whose writing also offers a thoroughly ecological extent. "Let it be borne in mind," he says, "how infinitely complex and close fitting are the mutual relations of all organic beings to each other and to their physical conditions of life." One couldn't have a more ecological statement than that.

Nevertheless, it's clear that for Darwin there were a number of contrary energies at work in his theory, which could never quite accommodate themselves to each other. And I want this morning to explore particularly that voiding of human memory from the explanatory system that he was working out. It seems to me that this might be a subtler and longer provocation yet than all those other provocations, and certainly one that has resounded throughout the last 150 years.

In the writing, variously, of Proust and of Freud, the attempt is made to reach a total recuperation of the individual's memory traces. And for Freud, at least, in civilization and its discontents, and Moses and monotheism, those traces, he felt, drew on the assumed long buried histories of early humankind and the pre-human. The problem of how to make a history without invoking human eyewitness seems to have troubled Darwin and to have provoked a recoil in his later writing.

Issues of organization, habit, awareness, and memory fascinate him from the start of his career to its ending. "I like this question," he puts to himself in 1837. "Can insects live with no more consciousness than our intestines have?" It's a typically provocative question from the young Darwin to himself, raising as it does not only the question of insect intelligence, but the question of intestinal consciousness.

[LAUGHTER]

His preoccupation with these issues of habit, awareness, and memory surely must be the more acute, because his most famous work, The Origin of Species in 1859, seeks to make a history that both outgoes and foregoes human memory as a shaping presence. That is, his here writing history that goes before and does without human memory, a world with no human memory in it-- not yours, not mine, not theirs. Indeed, a world perhaps without any memory in it at all, inhabited by instinctual creatures, possibly without what we would call consciousness.

At the time that Darwin started to write, and when he was on the voyage of the Beagle, the whole issue of Natural History and whether it could encompass the human was a very fraught topic. Ethnography and anthropology were just discovering themselves. And the assumption was that if the human could enter natural history, it would be the human of the tribes most distant from the writer and his kin.

So there was already a sort of badinage around the question of, is the human part of a more general history? But he's wanting also to describe something further, two further things. He is wanting to describe processes arrayed across enormous intervals of time, processes that will leave shallow and fragmented records of what he calls the mutations of life, life before, beyond, oblivious of the human.

And for his argument to prevail, he's got to emphasize the absence of the human from the most of the history of the Earth, and also the difficulty that the human imagination has in encompassing the vast evidences of the past, and the sickness of the present. He writes, "We continually forget how large the world is. We forget that groups of species may elsewhere have long existed. We do not make due allowance for the enormous intervals of time which have probably elapsed between our consecutive formations. Longer, perhaps, in most cases, than the time required for the accumulation of each formation."

Darwin here proposes our forgetting. We continually forget how large the world is, as if we had previously known the largeness of the world, the enormous intervals of time. But, of course, at the same time he's making it clear that we know these only as constructed argument, as interpreted mementos. And that is the nub of his own particular drive of argument.

He says, "We falsely infer because certain genera or families have not been found beneath a certain stage, that they did not exist before that stage." Reasoning, it seems, produces a form of meta memory that may be deeply unreliable, because starved of the beyond human, a human materials that are needed for true inquiry, materials that are always already lost forever. Human memory has not inhabited these vast tracts of former times, nor-- and this is crucial-- nor can human memory help or hinder the processes of natural selection.

Within The Origin, Darwin has to elaborate a history apparently void of consciousness, and certainly void of the power to change the future of the natural world by any acts of remembering. And, of course, this is important to him, because he is insisting on the distance between what he's describing and what Lamarck a little earlier had described-- the possibility, as Lamarck saw it, of inheriting acquired characteristics, learning within the lifespan of the creature, the life form, in such a way that those acquired characteristics are then passed on to the next generation.

There are times when Darwin vacillates on that question. But in the main, the drive of what he is arguing is that natural selection is "the [? accumination ?] of numerous successive slight modifications," I quote there. I think it's no wonder then that at the same time he is fascinated by the science of choice making among plants and simpler organisms.

Darwin's career after the publication of The Origin shows him engaging with issues of conscious or semi-conscious selection-- sexual selection, the motions of climbing plants, the expression of the emotions in man and the animals, and in his last work, the formation of vegetable mold through the action of worms and observations on their habits. He tells the history of the world now through these lowly inhabitants. The mental powers and the consciousness of worms become the focus of his attention, though his topic is the formation of vegetable mold through their action.

He says at one point, "As I was led to keep in my study during many months worms in pots filled with earth, I became interested in them, and wished to learn how far they acted consciously, and how much mental power they displayed." As usual, he empathizes with his subjects. He engages them in his domestic life. He observes them with a kind of courtesy, in a manner both delicate and zealous.

And at the start, he has this desire somewhere between intellect and affection. I became interested in them. Worms, he discovers, are sensitive to vibrations. But-- and we can imagine the experiments that led to this formulation-- they're indifferent to shrill whistles, to profound bassoons, or to shouts, as long as care is taken that the breath does not strike them. But if you put them on the piano--

[LAUGHTER]

--one worm dashed into its burrow on a very high note being struck only once, and the other worm, when C in the treble clef was struck.

[LAUGHTER]

These simple creatures, as he says, poorly provided his sense organs, yet seem, to the observing Darwin to be capable of discrimination. Choice, and thus, perhaps, even of memory. He writes, it is far more surprising that they should apparently exhibit some degree of intelligence instead of a mere blind, instinctive impulse in their manner of plugging up the mouths of their burrows. They act in nearly the same way as would a man.

There's an area of uncertainty, you see, here, that has to do with both consciousness and memory. The two, of course, are not the same. But nevertheless, without consciousness, it is, I think, reasonable to assume that there cannot be memory.

He is fascinated also by instinct, what he had earlier called knowledge without experience, a very good summary, way of putting instinct, I think, knowledge without experience. And in The Origin, he is always struggling with this question of consciousness, memory, instinct, a kind of triangle of possibility. For instance, in his discussion of bees as "alarmingly perfect architects, perfect for a purpose, a single purpose," as he puts it, "economizing wax."

For bees, no surplus knowledge can be active, and no memory surfaces in these generations of activity. He writes, "The bees, of course, no more knowing that they swept their spheres at one particular distance from each other than they know what are the several angles of the hexagonal prisms and of the basal rhombic plates." He deliberately introduces a discourse from geometry to suggest the infinite distance between the activity of the bees and the fact that the bees don't have the language. They can not describe their own activity, but they've come to have the actions.