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What is the value of memory in human culture? More specifically, what role should remembering—and forgetting—play in our daily lives? These are the central questions that David Gross addresses in this original and thought-provoking book. 

For centuries, Gross points out, remembering was considered essential not only to the perpetuation of society but to the maintenance of individual existence. Survival often depended on the memory of how to perform specific tasks, what values to honor, and what personal or collective identity to assume. Remembering, in short, put one in touch with the things that mattered, engendering wholeness and wisdom. Forgetting, on the other hand, led to emptiness, ignorance, and death. 

With the advent of modernity, however, doubts about the value of memory grew while the negative implications of forgetting were reevaluated. In many quarters, forgetting came to be defended for the way it frees us from the past, opening the door to new perceptions, new possibilities, and new beginnings. 

Now, in late modernity, Gross argues, we find ourselves in an unprecedented situation. For the first time in history, we are able to decide, without the pressure of social or cultural constraints, whether we want to remember or forget and to live our lives accordingly. But which is the better choice? Should we build our lives upon the meanings and values of a faded past? If so, what ought we to remember, and for what purpose? Or should we instead opt to forget what has come before and focus our attention on the present and future, thereby perpetually reinventing ourselves and the world we inhabit? According to Gross, our answers to these questions will determine not only who we are but what we will become as we pass from late modernity into the terra incognita of the “postmodern” age.

What is the fate of tradition in the modern world? Once a viral source of social cohesion and continuity, many traditions in the West today seem to have been undermined or to have disappeared altogether. Some observers regard this erosion of past values and practices as a disaster, the root cause of contemporary spiritual and social decay. Others see the same phenomenon as emancipatory, making possible new ways of living and new modes of cultural expression. 

The Past in Ruins engages and extends this debate beyond these two perspectives. Neither a nostalgic lament for a “world we have lost” nor a celebration of the decline of tradition, the book offers a description of what has disappeared and why, an appraisal of what has survived and how, and a discussion of what to do with tradition now that it no longer serves the integrative function it once did. 

In David Gross’s view, the collapse of tradition, though real, can easily be exaggerated. Many traditions have survived at the margins of social life; others have been reconstituted in new forms, or have persisted as “fragments” or “residues.” Yet, though vestiges of tradition remain, they have come to represent something strange or “other.” According to Gross, it is precisely this quality of otherness that makes tradition especially valuable, for today tradition can do what it has rarely done before. It can disturb and unsettle, it can force us to rethink the “givens” of modern life, and it can reconnect us with many of the past’s “lost” or undeveloped possibilities.