Can Memory Institutions Transcend Schizoid Reality?

As a former curator and (still) a theorist of heritage, I have written many things outside that safe curatorial and professorial refuge, struggling - of course, at my own risk and often to my own detriment - against their social autism and their fatal misunderstanding of the world.

This struggle has led me to various, kindred, and often superior spirits: some of them while being a member of different award juries, others at the conferences and events and some, indeed, in literature. That is why I am surprised that until now I had not “encountered” a brilliant emigrant from his own limited discipline (biology, in his case), Edward O. Wilson.

His brilliant diagnosis of the contemporary world, perhaps already familiar to you, deserves to be stated once again:

“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Palaeolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.”

This is a schizophrenic state. It is not realistic to expect that memory institutions - except in the circle of exceptional and creative ones - will be able to master or transcend this harsh truth about the world.

Such institutions do exist, as demonstrated by the global conference The Best in Heritage and by similar reviews of excellence. 

This is exceedingly difficult in a world which, in the name of the medieval nature of its institutions, is in fact destroying all professions.

And professions are, ideally, the only force of morality and responsibility capable of preventing threats and enabling the counter-action that leads to balance and progress.

The real problem arises with the realisation that professions, in the present total capitalism (see writings in the Vault of this site), are being devalued, dismantled, obstructed, and annihilated. Modern society invented them to ensure that no political system obstructs the logic of a humanist response to the threats to which society is exposed.

Autonomous free professions should exist to guarantee that "godlike technology" is used by us, through the power of institutions, to improve the human condition - or, simply, to make the world a better place. But total capitalism, or until recently velvet totalitarianism, requires power - all of it. The world can then be disguised as a grand conjuring game, as is the case with modern democracy: a media merry-go-round in the planetary hall of mirrors.

Freedom and equality are interpreted as the right of the innocent mob to cede to corporations and their political servants all authority to lead society. Given that this is the case, all institutions are likely to be merely tolerated, remaining "medieval," while professions must be either corrupted or eliminated. They are thus effectively prevented from fulfilling their sole mission: to adapt to, counteract, or effect change in response to threats facing their society, drawing on their deep knowledge, insight, and public responsibility.

The loss of connection to reality is a medical diagnosis, and if memory institutions — to name just one profession, though one sadly fragmented into mere occupations - cannot offer us the security of knowing, or rather understanding, our reality, we find ourselves in still deeper trouble. Seemingly, museums are about the past. In fact, they are about the present using the past to understand it or influence it.