Forgetting

Forgetting is better for us than we think.  All our energy is pointed toward remembering – we furrow our brow, ask others for clues to the word or person that we cannot bring into focus. We admire good memory, we are ashamed of things we have forgotten.  Yet wouldn’t it be better if we didn’t remember things done against us?  There are major rivers in psychology dedicated to remembering things in order to reconstruct them and make sense out of them, to the point of seeking to recover lost memories.  These methods have been disastrous.  If you were fortunate enough to forget some trauma or bad experience, be grateful.  Do not seek for it now.  There may be times when it is best to forget things we have done ourselves, good or evil.  If I had murdered someone, it would not be good to forget that the thing had happened, but wouldn’t it be best to turn the mind from all pictures and sounds of the event as they occurred to us?  We might not erase it, but we could make it fuzzy over time.  Our memories are inaccurate anyway, reassemblings of previous material each time.  Why preserve paintings that are only copies of copies?

On a tribal level, wouldn’t it be better if a group did not continue to hold resentments of things that happened to “them” 50 years ago, or 500? Aren’t we better off that Americans, Germans, and Japanese people speak easily and comfortably with each other now, with no thought of warfare, even though there are a few who still hold it in living memory? I think Americans in general have shown it is possible to remember heroism and some military and cultural lessons while still leaving that past and going on to fresh business.  Our group identities can change rapidly, though we still hold to names that meant something entirely different even a few decades ago.  To be a doctor a hundred years ago is not the same thing now, to be a New Hampshireman is not the same, to be a Lutheran or homemaker or grandfather. Even labels that have considerable persistence, such as “Christian,” “mother,” or “American” change over time.  If our individual memories are faulty, how much more are our group memories. The one quote of George Santayana’s that people remember* is “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” What if the opposite that is true, that it is those who insist on remembering for years or even centuries who keep repeating the same mistakes?

It may seem cruel or insensitive to tell individuals that they would be better off forgetting some evil.  It has an air of “Get over it,” which is sibling to “It doesn’t really matter,” and first cousin to “It wasn’t really wrong.” It doesn’t have to mean that, however. It might be advised to others in true concern and kindness, with no thought of excusing the sin whatever. In sports it is an advantage to forget a misplay and keep going. From that we can also imagine mistakes in other realms it is better to forget.  Move on. We might also advise people to forget successes – again, as coaches in sports sometimes do.  At work it might not be best to remember too clearly that you got promoted so young or earned a big bonus.  That you remember how you got there is valuable.  Remembering the awards and the adulation, not so much.

Groups should not rest on their laurels too much either, for similar reasons of arrogance.  Also, we as individuals may have had very little to do with even the current successes of our group, never mind the great deeds of our forerunners, to which we contributed nothing.

I think very highly of preserving history. I have quoted CS Lewis “On The Reading of Old Books” many times.  Perhaps I am wrong.  Not that nothing should be preserved, but that preservation is overvalued.  It may not contribute what we pretend neither to individuals nor the common good. It is good to have points of comparison, a sense of continuity, some hint of direction, yes. Do we have too much? Or more likely, do we have the wrong sort of remembering, letting the grain fall to the ground while we clutch the husks?

*George deserves better.  He is the actual originator of this common quote: “Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.”