Ever wonder about the lost arts? You know what I mean, right? Those things that humans used to be capable of, but have somehow collectively forgotten how to accomplish. Like, who lost the formula for Greek Fire? What happened to the recipe for making Damascus steel? Why do we still have standing Roman concrete structures but the pothole out front can’t stay filled for more than a month? These are the things that keep me up at night wondering about.
How does a group of people just forget how to do something? I mean, I’m currently 51 years old, but I can still remember how to dial a rotary phone, to drive a stick shift (barely), and rewind a cassette tape with nothing but a pencil. Bear in mind, I’m not living in some 70s throwback house, hanging out in my bell-bottoms and sipping Tab Cola. No, I probably live like most of you and haven’t seen a rotary phone, slowly depressed a clutch, or hit ‘play’ on a Sony Walkman in at least 20 years. Yet—stay with me here—I haven’t forgotten how to do any of those things.
And those are just ordinary, low-threat, no-negative-consequences-if-I-fail kinds of things. That doesn’t even count the skill sets that institutions like the Army painfully beat into me. I’m pretty sure I’ll go to my grave still knowing how to polish a pair of leather combat boots till I can shave in the reflection. I guarantee I can still put an M-16 back together with my eyes closed. And don’t even get me started on my Powerpoint skills. Seventh degree black belt with oak leaf clusters! Next slide!!
All joking aside, how long does humanity collectively have to go before we as a group completely forget how to do something? How many generations must pass without feeling a perceived need to exercise a given skill set before we lose it and no longer can? It’s an interesting question, I think, and hints at what really makes up our collective memory.
Herodotus tells us that in 401 B.C. when Xenophon and his retreating Greek mercenaries stumbled upon massive city ruins in what is now northern Iraq, the locals couldn’t even tell him who had built the structures. These were the once magnificent cities of the all-conquering Assyrian Empire, which rode roughshod over the Fertile Crescent for over a thousand years! Yet Assyria fell to the Medes and Scythians in 612 B.C., a mere 211 years prior to Xenophon’s arrival on the scene, and they were completely forgotten. So, using the scientific method (my deepest apologies to any and all scientists out there), collective human forgetfulness seems to happen somewhere between 20 and 200 years.
I’m not sure that’s terribly helpful. Maybe a test that’s more immediate and doesn’t require one of us to go into cryo-stasis in order to evaluate the results. How about we just take away a recent high school graduate’s iPhone, hand them a map, and require them to navigate their way across state driving a ‘78 Buick?
Too easy? Okay, let’s take a middle school student, sit them in front of a black and white TV the size of their parent’s electric car, and tell them to change the channel. Or better yet, hand them a set of rabbit ear antennae and a strip of aluminum foil and ask them to improve the reception. These are things I could do—and was by and large expected to do—by the time I was five. Heck, I remember watching an entire Packers game standing because I had to hold the antenna in a position half falling off the side of the TV in order for the family to see!
To bring this back to a more serious note, can our younger generations balance a checkbook? Write and send a letter? Check out a library book? Should the singular, magical pillar that holds up our modern lives—the internet—somehow ever crash down upon us, these are things that might become necessary again. To say nothing of taking that to the extreme of growing or hunting and preparing our own food? Where does a young man even FIND a chicken’s nuggets? A rhetorical question, I assure you, but the larger question is still worth asking. Is this how societies completely lose skill sets that they could previously count on as being second nature?
And to ratchet this up a notch, are personal values and human character subject to that same collective forgetfulness over time? Has modesty become passe? Can humility go extinct? Is self-discipline a dying art? I hope not. I’d like to think that the values imparted to me in my childhood had a good deal to do with making me the person I am today; responsible, self-sufficient, and willing to help those in need. I hate to consider that our youth might someday—if they’re not already—become incapable of setting aside personal desires in favor of protecting others and furthering the collective good. That President Kennedy’s admonition to “ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country” doesn’t become just a quaint byline to American history. Something memorized for a middle school civics test and just as quicky forgotten.
I do worry about these things. As I pass by large numbers of people every single day—not just kids mind you—who can’t be bothered to look up from those little two-inch by five-inch screens to notice the world around them, I find myself concerned for where we’re heading. Concerned that, when the next national or maybe even global crisis arises, we won’t as a people be able to rise to the challenge. Not that we won’t want to, I don’t doubt that aspect at all. But that we won’t be able to because we’ve neglected the skills and attributes that years ago might have carried the day. Stopped the North Koreans at the Naktong. Held at Bastogne. Seized the beaches of Normandy and Iwo Jima.
It’s worth considering, I think, exactly which arts we allow to die. It is a conscious act, you know. We aren’t forced to allow our children to rely upon that little plastic box for every life function. Just like it doesn’t cost us anything to model and enforce behaviors necessary to sustain a long-term, functioning, and free society. But it does require some self-discipline—however short the supply—every single day.
I’d ask you to consider which arts you’ve let die over the years. What skills did you once possess that you maybe shouldn’t have let slip away? What aspects of your character have you allowed to dissipate; to be scared or maybe even beaten away? Can you afford not to have them when real trouble comes to you, your family, or your community? Better to have them and not need them, I think, than the opposite.
M. G. Haynes