I can do it.
Mar. 5th, 2025 09:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
myleskYesterday, I tracked down Thom Hartmann's article, "The GOP's 60-Year Conspiracy to Kill Our Democracy". Some algorithm had pushed it to me the first time I read it. The article recapped my existing beliefs about the negative attitude and posture of the Reagan Administration towards the federal public service and introduced me to the deeper history of conservative thought in the 1950s and its opposition to the post-war "liberal consensus" on the purpose of government. The liberal consensus is an ideological package which I've only learned about in recent months from the writing of historian-journalist Heather Cox Richardson.
It took me a while to find the article. I certainly remembered the impression that it made on me but I could not recall the details to my satisfaction. I thought re-finding it would be easy; a brower history search, or Google, or scan of Substack or my email account. But surprisingly, I could not find a digital trace of it. My outsourced memory systems had all failed me.
There is a culture war on memory being fought right now. Computers and the internet, and now artificial intelligence, have created the impression that trying to remember anything is a wasted effort. My casual conversations regularly include having questions about matters of fact shut down with, "why don't you just Google it?"
"I will Google it," I say. "But let's at least try for a minute to remember it ourselves."
Is there any value to this cognitive effort?
Is there any value to the effort I'm going to to write this post?
...
I remembered that the article pegged Ronald Reagan's administration as the time when the American war on the middle class and the public service materially began. And I remembered that the intellectual foundation for this attitude was a book published in the 1950's. And I thought that I had read the article on Substack.
I searched Google for "Conservative books 1950's". One of the returns was an annotated list of the ten most influential conservative books of the 1950s. I scanned the list and the name Russell Kirk felt familiar. I can't say that I recognized the name. It didn't have that satisfying flash of recognition that I feel when the right cluster of neurons fire together and I remember something! It really was just a feeling.
I searched "Russell Kirk Ronald Reagan Substack", and there it was! "The GOP's 60-Year Conspiracy to Kill Our Democracy" by Thom Hartmann.
I can still use my brain.
It took me a while to find the article. I certainly remembered the impression that it made on me but I could not recall the details to my satisfaction. I thought re-finding it would be easy; a brower history search, or Google, or scan of Substack or my email account. But surprisingly, I could not find a digital trace of it. My outsourced memory systems had all failed me.
There is a culture war on memory being fought right now. Computers and the internet, and now artificial intelligence, have created the impression that trying to remember anything is a wasted effort. My casual conversations regularly include having questions about matters of fact shut down with, "why don't you just Google it?"
"I will Google it," I say. "But let's at least try for a minute to remember it ourselves."
Is there any value to this cognitive effort?
Is there any value to the effort I'm going to to write this post?
...
I remembered that the article pegged Ronald Reagan's administration as the time when the American war on the middle class and the public service materially began. And I remembered that the intellectual foundation for this attitude was a book published in the 1950's. And I thought that I had read the article on Substack.
I searched Google for "Conservative books 1950's". One of the returns was an annotated list of the ten most influential conservative books of the 1950s. I scanned the list and the name Russell Kirk felt familiar. I can't say that I recognized the name. It didn't have that satisfying flash of recognition that I feel when the right cluster of neurons fire together and I remember something! It really was just a feeling.
I searched "Russell Kirk Ronald Reagan Substack", and there it was! "The GOP's 60-Year Conspiracy to Kill Our Democracy" by Thom Hartmann.
I can still use my brain.
