Kamala’s seductive amnesia We are all turning into a group of Lotus-Eaters

If all that sounds attractive, consider that Harris’s candidacy involves a deep memory-wipe. Politically speaking, she has sprung into being as a fully formed adult with no discernible past or historical recall. Her plan to control food prices repeats a common, famine-inducing error of communist regimes. Her tough-on-crime and border-securing persona rests not just on amnesia, but on media-driven amnesty. And yet, propelled forward by the cheerful drone of the “KHive ” and the good vibrations of “Brat summer”, Harris may surf all the way to the Oval Office.

However, she won’t get there without the votes of one crucial constituency: the Lotus-Eaters, a mythical tribe now found right here in America.

In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus and his crew encounter the Lotus-Eaters at a moment of great vulnerability. After 10 years of grinding war, the Greeks had finally defeated the Trojans and sacked their city. Pushing off for home with Trojan women and loot, Odysseus’s 12 ships were driven off course by strong winds to the land of the Cicones, an actual historical tribe, where they sustained heavy losses in a pitched battle. Then they narrowly avoided total destruction amid “a howling, demonic gale”. Making for the western isle of Ithaca after the weather cleared, they sailed south to Cape Malea, where the fingers of the Peloponnesus extend into the Mediterranean.

But they were far from home. After a tantalising glimpse of native soil, they were torn out to sea by high winds and a ripping tide. Nine days later they arrived, “bent with pain and bone-tired”, in the Never-Never Land of the Lotus-Eaters. By then, they must have wanted only to lay their heads on the sand and sleep. Mental and physical exhaustion had prepared them to ingest the Lotus, a “honey-sweet fruit” that left the body intact but wiped away the mind.

The Lotus-Eaters didn’t attempt to kill the men Odysseus sent to scout the land. They don’t seem even to have spoken with them: they “simply gave them the Lotus to taste”. The fruit induced profound forgetfulness. Those who ate it “no longer wished to report back or return” to their shipmates. They ceased to care about anything or anyone. They desired only “to remain with the Lotus-Eaters, feeding on lotus, and to forget about their homeward journey [nostos]”.

Nostos is the root of “nostalgia”, the pain associated with the thought of home. Odysseus’s men must have felt that pain intensely. The Lotus was for them a powerful analgesic, precisely because it induced a kind of total amnesia. For home is not just one thing among others. To forget about home, to cease to feel its deep tug, is to forget about everything: spouse and children, farmhouse and fields; the city of one’s birth and the graves of one’s ancestors; “the ashes of one’s fathers and the temples of one’s gods” — all that, held in memory, inwardly nourishes involuntary exiles by giving hope and meaning to their struggle and suffering.

This amnesia is not just personal. It wipes away all patriotic feeling, all care for the polity that gave one life and liberty. It annihilates cultural and historical memory, the rich topsoil of the past from which all future growths spring. All that remains for those who ingest the Lotus is a sterile present. More than that, its effect is metaphysical: it obliterates the pith and ground of our individual and collective being. Nostos and nous, “intellect”, both derive from an Indo-European root meaning “return to light and life”. The Lotus kills all spiritual and intellectual effort to uncover transcendent, humanly essential truth and to rescue it from oblivion.  

This is not to say that some degree of filtering — forgetting or ignoring things better left in the dark — isn’t essential to life. Every living thing, Nietzsche observes, “can become healthy, fruitful, and strong only within a horizon”. But when our horizons contract to the infinitesimal dimensions of the vanishing present, we are condemned to idiocy. This is the work of the Lotus, a potent symbol of the forces that today militate against memory: censorship, identity politics, ideological litmus-tests, the erosion of free speech, the replacement of education with indoctrination, and the noise of our digitally-distracted age, which drowns out whatever authentic and prophetic voices might otherwise still be heard. 

Today, the Harris campaign has cleverly repackaged oblivion as a panacea. Forget about the spirit of Tennyson’s Ulysses, who urged his men “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”.  The way forward, we are told, is to lay down our citizenly oars — to forget where we’ve been or where we thought we were going, and submit to being carried along in a joyful stupor by the ship of state. Never mind that it’s unclear who is steering that ship, or the destination they have in mind. 

In Homer’s epic, Odysseus dragged his scouts away from the Lotus, lashed them under the rowing benches, and once again took to the heaving seas. Ours, though, is an age not of heroes, but of know-nothings and buffoons who wish only to take us for a ride. This is more the stuff of comedy than of epic. Many would agree, of course, that it would be tragic to succumb to the political equivalent of a lobotomy. Yet in the blank and leaden eyes of those who have traded their human past and future for a zombie-like narcosis, such an exchange would not rise even to the dignity of error.