In 2003, NBC correspondent Brian Williams was assigned to cover the invasion of Iraq. At one point he filed a startling report about riding in a helicopter while grenades were fired at it from the ground. His helicopter was hit and had to make an emergency landing. Sometime later Williams expanded on that story, saying that a helicopter in front of his was also hit. Years later he changed the story again; this time his helicopter and three others near his made an emergency landing and were stuck in the Iraqi desert for three days in a blinding sandstorm.
It sounded terrifying, until some soldiers who’d been in one of the helicopters that was hit by enemy fire spoke up. They said Williams had it wrong. The helicopter he was in was miles from where the shooting took place. Williams issued an apology, saying he had “embellished” some of the story. NBC suspended him. Then he issued a full apology for the numerous errors in his reports. After NBC investigated his reporting, it fired him.
Malcolm Gladwell, a respected author and speaker, talks about this story in his podcast “Revisionist History.” Given that title, you might think Gladwell was pleased that Williams apologized. But no. Quite the opposite! Memory is malleable, Gladwell insisted. And he pointed to research showing that when sudden, traumatic events occur our memories are extraordinarily inaccurate. “Williams was universally criticized,” Gladwell said. “Everyone assumed he deliberately lied. And that’s rubbish!”
Elizabeth Loftus, a leading memory researcher and a professor of law and cognitive science, agreed with Gladwell. “You’ve got all these people saying the guy [Williams] is a liar and convicting him of deliberate deception without considering an alternative hypothesis — that he developed a false memory.”
Our memories are, indeed, malleable, and that can have incredibly important consequences. One study showed that mistaken eyewitness identification is the leading cause of wrongful conviction – a contributing factor in 73 percent of cases in which the accused were later found innocent. In many instances, witnesses viewing people in a lineup are initially just mildly certain that they’ve identified the right person. Over time, however, they become increasingly convinced that they have the right one.
This confidence in our memories is striking. For instance: do you remember when you first learned of the space shuttle Challenger’s fatal mid-air disintegration on January 28, 1986? Researchers asked individuals on the day of the disaster to tell them when and how they had heard the report. The investigators then asked the same question of the same people two and three years later, and “found that by 1988 and 1989, not one of their 44 subjects remembered the Challenger’s explosion the same way they had in its immediate aftermath.” A New Yorker report of the study indicated that in terms of the individuals’ recollections for things like where they were and what they were doing, the average person scored less than three on a scale of one to seven. A quarter scored zero. But when asked about their confidence levels of their memories, they averaged 4.17 on a one to five scale.
In the Hebrew Bible, Moses seemed to have similar memory issues. In the book of Deuteronomy, during which Moses talks to the Israelites about many of the important events from the previous 40 years, he recalls history differently from what was written in the earlier books of the Bible. Not once or twice, but five times. In three of those instances, Moses puts himself in a more prominent or positive light than how the events were previously reported.
For instance: in Deuteronomy Moses tells the Israelites, “Because of you, God was incensed with me and said: You [Moses] shall not enter [the Promised Land].” But when this event is described earlier in the Torah, Moses is punished for an entirely different sin. When the people complained they lacked water, God tells Moses to speak to a rock and the rock will yield water. Instead, Moses strikes the rock twice, and God replies: “Because you did not trust Me enough to affirm My sanctity in the sight of the Israelite people, you shall not lead this congregation into the land that I have given them.”
How do we account for our memory problems (besides the obvious impact of aging)? A few possibilities:
1. We have a natural need to think well of ourselves.
The people who reported high confidence in their memory of where they were when the Challenger disaster occurred weren’t lying. They were convinced they had it right. And, perhaps, they didn’t want to appear uncertain of their reports; their self-concept required them to be confident.
2. Related to that, most of us want others to think well of us.
That’s one explanation why Moses re-wrote history several times in his final comments to the people. They were about to enter the Promised Land, and they were going without him. This was his last chance to influence them, so he needed to be seen as a credible leader. The Torah tells us Moses was the most modest of men. But he was also a human being with his own vulnerabilities. The people were continually complaining to Moses during the past four decades; some of them even rebelled against him and tried to take some of his power. As the noted Torah scholar Rabbi Art Green puts it, “I think it’s fair to say that Moses’ powers have diminished significantly. He feels like he is at his end. So now he makes a bold move. He retells it all, but tells it differently.”
3. There’s always more than one version of history.
The most respected historians select the facts they report because no book or series of books can contain all the known facts about complex situations. Historians need to decide what’s important, and what isn’t. As do we when recalling past events.
For instance, we’ve recently seen an uproar over one of Florida’s new textbook standards for middle school kids. It includes a statement that some slaves “developed skills that in some instances could be used for their personal benefit.” Did that happen to a few slaves who were ultimately freed? Let’s assume it did. Is this presumed fact something that should be in a textbook, given the enormous amount of information we have about the evils that affected all enslaved people? That’s what people are really arguing about: which facts about slavery are most relevant and should be in our textbooks, and which aren’t.
Likewise, when Moses tells the people in Deuteronomy that God wouldn’t let him enter the Promised Land because of something the people did, that doesn’t necessarily contradict what the text had earlier reported – that God’s anger at Moses was the cause. It’s possible God was angry at Moses, and also angry at the people, but it was only Moses’ misdeeds that are reported earlier. In other words, each version could be (partly) true. Moses, like all of us, was selective in reporting the facts.
Finally, here’s a story about a wonderful friend of mine. Bill Lucy was an excellent academic, and for a few years he was associate dean of the University of Virginia Architecture School. He was an able administrator. But one morning, Bill woke up with a start. “I missed the meeting with the dean,” he thought to himself. “It was an important one! And I was the one who requested the meeting!!” Bill quickly called the dean, apologized profusely, said that it wasn’t like him to miss a meeting; could they reschedule it? There was a long, uncomfortable silence. Then the dean replied, “But Bill! You were at the meeting!!”
Memory, as I said, is often malleable. If Moses forgot, or even deliberately changed, some of the past to help prepare the people for their next challenge, I think we can be forgiving about that. And when we revise parts of our past, as Brian Williams did, we may not be lying. We may simply be human.
Russ Linden 