The Recovery of Memory

Rushdoony argues that memory personal and cultural is essential to being fully human: when memory collapses (as in senility), a person can remain socially polished yet be stripped of identity, continuity, and direction. He extends that to cultures: history is “social memory,” and when a society becomes present-obsessed and contemptuous of the past, it heads toward cultural senility barbarism because “people who have no past have no future.”

He warns that modern humanistic education and media intentionally warp or replace historical memory. Marxists (and “neo-Marxists”) understood that to create a “new man,” you must rewrite the past; and he claims the broader humanistic project does something similar by swapping history for “social science” a naturalistic, God-purged framework that treats society as an experiment shaped by experts. The result isn’t a higher civilization but a population of “barbarians” people detached from inheritance, meaning, and responsibility made easier to mold into whatever elite rulers want (echoing Orwell’s themes).

His proposed recovery is explicitly theological: history must be approached as a theological science because God not man is Creator and Determiner; therefore genuine cultural memory begins with conversion, Scripture, and seeing man’s story (creation, fall, redemption) rightly. Only Christ restores true freedom and human wholeness (“If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed,” John 8:36), whereas amnesia leaves societies vulnerable to manipulation, “newspeak,” and decline.