Dementia is a devastating disease. It reduces man to an object of pity, an adult with a child’s experience of the world. Memory is the first casualty of ageing, even if its degradation is not as severe as that induced by disease. You begin to be dismissed as being ‘past it’ when you start looking for the glasses perched on your nose.
In a world without writing, thousands of years ago, passing on tribal memories by means of story-telling in a memorable way (was this the birth of poetry?) to younger generations was a most-respected – and necessary – occupation. The young were told about their origins, the struggles, miseries, defeats and victories of their group, and this united them by giving them a sense of identity and togetherness. Nations were forged out of this.
Today we call it history, or national culture. For a nation to be a nation, it has to have a collective memory. What would we be without our La Valette, our Dun Mikiel Scerri, our Sette Giugno? Would we be who we are if the traditions of our religious feasts were not passed on from father to son? Even our bread-loaf involves a memory of techniques, and makes it distinct.
Memory-loss produces confusion and disorientation, and this is why memory is so important. It is our bulwark against chaos. Chaos is a concept which is as old as man, and man has always struggled against it (the Germans call it chaoskampf), and he has always regarded it with dread.
The ancient Greeks do not seem to have thought of the Gods as ‘creators’, but as ‘organisers’, who brought together various elements out of a primordial soup to form leaves, valleys, men, cats and oceans, in other words, the world as we know it. According to the poet Hesiod, “Chaos first came to be”, and man has struggled to defeat it by retaining order and, in the image of the Gods, refine it.
The children will grow without their parents’ way of life or their environment
Look at Libya. The disorder there is generated by the lack of a cohesive, geographically-encompassing collective and an integrative memory. In simpler words, Libya seems to lack a sense of being a unified entity. Before, the only thing cementing Libya was Gaddafi. The people of Gaddafi were Gaddafians, not Libyans. But IS is there, an agent of chaos.
Some people benefit from someone else’s memory-loss. Old people are exploited by scoundrels for their property and money. But countries, too, fall foul of fiends who not only exploit their memory-loss but actually cause it.
This is a major strategy employed by IS. This is why they destroy anything ancient, whether it is a custom, a mosque or a library. They want a complete break with the past in whole nations so that they remain nations no more, and are reduced to loose aggregates of confused individuals who cannot rebel because nothing binds them with a common heritage, or a common cause.
As I write, they have just blown the ancient wall of Nineveh to smithereens. They assaulted the museums and erased the Assyrian heritage and memory by reducing all artefacts to dust. There is method in their apparent madness. They are not only evaporating the history of Assyria but also liquidating the collective memory of the world.
They displace people through terror, so that their house, their street, their town or village become just fading memories. The children will grow without their parents’ way of life, or their environment. They become nationless, stateless, in time. They will just belong to something amorphous called ‘The Islamic State’.
But I am sure that humanity will fight this chaos and win. Let me be clear: I think THIS is Armageddon. We have been called to struggle once again to retain order and defeat chaos, and it is a do-or-die affair.
Political bickering among parties and nations only serves to further dull our sense of danger. If IS wins, we shall have the end of the world as we know it. Personally, I am already starting to feel a stranger.