A few years ago, the EU declared that in today’s digital search landscape, individuals have the right to be forgotten. Essentially, our full digital histories should expire and we should be able to remove ourselves from the record for reasons of privacy and crafting personal natives.
You might be surprised to learn that, as a historian, I agree. People deserve to be forgotten. As the study of history has increasingly engaged with ethical questions about whose history we learn and why we have more access to some people than others, we have dug into the ways in which knowing more is harmful. Perhaps the best example of this is indigenous history in America. From Native American remains held in decontextualized anonymity to finds that potentially challenge indigenous histories, Native Americans gain very little from allowing their pasts to be studied by outsiders. The history that is most useful right now is indigenous relations with Europeans and their descendants, which help illustrate repeated abuses and have a direct impact on indigenous rights today. While this political use of history might be unsavory or uncomfortable for some people, who are perhaps used to thinking of history as objective truth, acknowledging that history is always studied within the current frame of reference highlights the politics behind what we have otherwise chosen to remember.
Recently, I’ve been applying this in my own life outside of my work as a historian. If I recognize that a group of people might have valid reasons not to allow the study of their own past, I begin to understand that there is not objective value in every thought or every question – not even mine. I often struggle with a flood of ideas, and the experience of this can be emotionally overwhelming and even physically painful. When I was immersed in art as a teenager, I would experience this as an intense anxiety to commit visions to paper, or whatever surface was readily available, including the leg of my jeans or my left forearm. Having this kind of creative drive is applauded – look how many thoughts you have, you’re so insightful and inspired! No one ever said to me “maybe you should take a deep breath and forget some of them”.
The idea of forgetting anything filled me with panic. I protected my hoard of drawings and poems like a dragon. I pay for Dropbox so that I cannot possibly lose anything I’ve written, going back 20 years. And while it’s interesting to go back and see my own personal history, and sometimes I learn something about myself, these artifacts are not ultimately essential to my own narrative and I would be fine (though very disappointed) if they were gone.
I’ve started to see my brainstorms differently. What if I’m not struck by inspiration, but by a wave of anxiety? What if my panic isn’t a response to the idea that I might forget, but what is motivating it? What would happen if I let that thought just slide by?
Our culture discourages this way of thinking. We love hypotheticals about near-misses and paths not taken. We love the threat of a great achiever never getting their moment. We impose on ourselves the anxiety that if we don’t record it, we will never get credit for it, be able to use it as proof – perhaps it never even happened.
So what?
What if it never happened? There are so few events or ideas that are truly pivotal and one-off. My mom used to say to my brother, irritatingly but correctly, when he forgot what he was going to say: “if it was important, it will come back to you”. I would add “and if you relax”. Thoughts are like waves, and just because they go out doesn’t mean the ocean is gone. Allowing the thoughts to go by isn’t just for disturbing or negative ones, it’s for provocative ones of all kinds. If I sit with them, allow them to leave and come back, I can work through whether they are really worth pursuing at all, develop them through different iterations, and explore several futures. Once I stop being so precious about every thought, I start to realize how often I have similar ideas, I can see the commonalities, and I can get to the core concept that I’m really interested in.
I tell my students constantly that they have to take breaks while they are writing, so that they can forget what they wrote and who they were when they wrote it, come back, and criticize the person who used to be. Forgetting is an important aspect of self-criticism, not because we’re never going to remember again, but because we need the opportunity to choose rediscovery.