There was an argument years ago at First Things* about a youth sports team that had run up the score on a smaller school (also, perhaps significantly, a special school that was an alternative placement for boys with emotional difficulties) and whether that was acceptable. My son Ben was on a junior-high basketball team that regularly lost by scores of 86-12, and once even 104-4, so I have some experience with the concept. But I did not enter the discussion until there was a shift to the idea that such things might inspire the boys who lost to work harder, and specifically to men reminiscing how losses in sports at considerably older ages and in different circumstances had been deeply formative for them, so there was nothing wrong with running up the score. There's a lot to discuss about the issue in general, and you can have a go at that at any of these five posts from early 2011. There actually are reasons it would be okay - just not the ones put forward.
This may have been the height of my taking too long to get to the point and making sure I nailed down every corner. If you want to comment on any of those five I recommend you do it here, or no one will see it.
But the point from that discussion that I want to bring forward here is how often men asserted confidently that what they thought at seventeen - or believe they thought then - was applicable to themselves at twelve. I came back the next year prepared after working out all summer...I talk about how unlikely those memories are to be quite as accurate as we think. Nor is it only men. When the students at my son's very small Christian school were moving on to a larger one, one mother of a fifth grade girl asserted how happy she had been to go to a larger highschool and change classes frequently back in her day. It made her feel older and more competent. Well, sixth grade is not tenth grade, nor are all children identical. It can be a big deal, as it figures in to sexual age-of-consent law and abortion-choice legislation. And tattoos, and alcohol...Yes it is good for children to move out from under their parents' supervision. But what is our basis for thinking that twenty-eight is better than eighteen is better than eight? Numbers, please.
In the nostalgia tour I have several times encountered people remembering what they think they were like, erring always in the direction of applying what they thought or did at nineteen to their sixteen-year old selves. Retrospectives lie somewhat. I recall in my own past reading a letter or a song or a school paper I had written just two years earlier and being shocked at how young it sounded.
This is a general human tendency, not some unfortunate lack of clarity that affects us only in our worst moments. We perceive the continuity with our earlier selves because we are living in this head, and can also go back and visit it at will. If we were described as self-confident by outsiders when we were a senior, and can see evidence of that because of having belonged to the Outing Club and taking risks the last two years, we will apply that retroactively, that we entered school self-confident. After all, we thought about joining the Outing Club before we actually did it...it was just that we couldn't the semester before because of a heavy lab schedule...
We believe we had mastered parts of our job well before we actually had. "Whenever I had occasion to counsel someone about making a sideways move in a company..." Except that it never occurred until two-thirds of the way through your career. We err on the side of giving ourselves credit for more wisdom and maturity. Perhaps we would do better to give ourselves credit for how hard-won these lessons were.
I think it first requires suspicion about our need to fluff ourselves up in order to counteract the halo tendency, then specific grounding facts such as photographs, records (and frankly even unsupported assertions that sound more likely to be true than what we have been claiming), and finally, willingness to interact with others who might modify or even contradict our recollections. I admit, not everyone likes this as much as I do. My friend Sam correcting a couple of impressions, even though I had long since worked them into entertaining stories was one of the reunion highlights. People remember things you said that they have thought wise and clung to as advice over the years - and you now think it's not true. Gee, did I actually say that stupid thing?
Best to assume you have bent your narrative in the direction of something more complimentary to yourself, and made it a bit worse each time to recalled something and reconsolidated it. Reconsolidation is powerful. When we bring something to mind, it really is fluid and up for grabs, which is how both false memory and recovery from memory work.
Does it matter? Well no. Not unless you have an interest in understanding who you are and where you came from. Not everyone does.
*I think there was one at Volokh Conspiracy as well.
4 comments:
I was late to skating, I had been in England, while my compatriots in Canada skated and played Hockey from a young age. This is when I was 13 and my parents had returned to Canada. I was an army brat.
I loved Hockey so I taught myself to skate backwards and became quite good. I played defence, in a game that for me, is so good because of the contrast between the high skill players, mostly playing forward on offence, and we brutes playing defence.
My job, well as I saw it, was to make the forwards afraid of me. So I hit them if they came close and got good at this. You do it just right, and you rotate your victim, and they end up parallel to the ice at about 3' off it. Bang down they go and I get the puck, or not, but next time that guy came down the ice and saw me, he was afraid and taking the puck was much easier.
We were not at a high level, the people I played with, and we were either too old or not good enough to play in the real First and Second teams that played other schools. So we got our own weird classification as Senior League. We did not really play other schools, fought against is far more accurate, but our games were very well attended as they were so damn violent. We were not good, but we had fun.
My wife remembers incidents in context; I recall the general flow but the incidents may fit in any number of places/times. Foreshortening blurs things together, and naturally my current attitude and mood have pride of place.
Of course, one could hope that a dream's description applies:
"The good man's past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man's past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why, at the end of all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say, 'We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,' and the Lost, 'We were always in Hell.' And both will speak truly."
One constant for me is that whenever I have thought back on my past it has always seemed to me that I was an idiot then and know much more now. I'm not sure that I am wrong to think this. My raw cognitive ability has probably peaked but it's obvious that my judgement is better than it was and still improving. I now easily avoid poor decisions that I am certain I would have made in the past. Of course I also have less time in which to benefit from my improved judgement. Some of the sense of the tragic nature of life comes from the juxtaposition of this arithmetic increase in wisdom and the exponential decay of the time one has left.
Also, I have a good memory, and yet when I am confronted by photo or video evidence, or by someone's unexpected reminiscence, of events at which I was present, I realize that my memory isn't very good at all. I don't think anyone's is. Memory is selective and limited and gets changed by one's subsequent experiences.
James's quote from Lewis might be a better way to say some of this.
Excellent correctives/additions to what I wrote. I was writing entirely comparatively about memory. When we say we have an excellent memory we are grading on a curve, and are likely only the smart kid in the dumb row.
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