I slept until well after eight this morning. As regular readers will be aware, this is an unusual event in my life. I am usually scanning the morning's news for ideas on posts to write by soon after six. I enjoy the early morning. I will happily sacrifice late evenings to partake of them. But today I slept in.
I feel slightly dazed and even disorientated by doing so. Maybe that's why I had to ask myself what day of the week this was. However, I suspect I am not alone in doing that. This, for me, was that glorious day in a holiday when you realise you have slightly lost track of time, and it does not really matter, most especially when in our case Covid has cancelled all immediate engagements.
That, though, led me to think about forgetfulness. Most of the time it is something we struggle with, and I do not think that has much to do with age. We all have annoying blind spots for things we have difficulty recalling.
That said, I now recognise that I may well have forgotten more than I can ever now learn in the time left to me.
But I also realise that this does not worry me. A lot of what has gone was stuff I no longer need. On subjects that interest me I seem to have almost no problem with recalling things I learned many years ago.
What is apparent in that case is that forgetfulness is selective. Without thinking about it, unless we are afflicted with a cognitive impairment what we forget is largely a choice.
This is unsurprising. To survive life we need to forget the worst bits and recall the best.
To retain useful information we need to work out what we do not need, and discard it (despite which I still remember the registration numbers of my father's early cars).
And, perhaps most importantly, we need to forget what was wrong, and those things that were just prejudice, or which were based on deliberate misinformation.
These last points are vital in politics. So much of what politics is still supposedly about is made up of those three things: that which is now wrong even if once it was not, prejudice or misinformation.
It is wrong to talk of left, right and centre politics now as if there is still a struggle between entrepreneurs and the labouring classes, when what we actually have is a fight between quasi-feudal monopolistic power and the human race on the issue of survival. Unless we categorise politics correctly we are stuck in a battle from which we need to move because the issues have totally changed.
It is wrong to use economics designed for an era when money was supposedly (albeit, artificially) in short supply, as was the case in the gold standard era, when we now know that money is never a constraint on our actions and that the capacity to achieve things is.
It is prejudice for those in countries like the UK to think of migrants as invaders of our space when for centuries people from this country claimed those migrant's space - and in too many cases, their ancestors - as our own, when that was simply untrue.
And we need to forget the claim that wealth indicates the ability to lead, when too often it just indicates the (literal) fortune of being born to those already privileged.
Unless we forget those three things - what is wrong, what is prejudice and that which is misinformation - we do not let ourselves think about what is, what is fair, and what is right.
Forgetfulness is supposedly a curse of older age. Actually, it's the precondition for building the future.
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Forgetfulness is a rather larger problem if you are trying to write history. Unfortunately, too often British history has been constructed on an intricately woven web of calculated forgetfulness; and if you forget your history, you may well find that, sooner or later, and with some intervening misadventures, you end somewhere very close to where we are now; and earnestly do not wish to be,
If you catch my drift.
I do
Reminding people of history and context, can make one unpopular. The Secretary-General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, condemned the events of 7th October but reminded the world that “It is important to also recognise the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum”. He cited the ‘suffocating occupation’ -which is somewhat of an understatement.
Most people would agree but Israel has criticised both the Secretary-General and the UNO since then. Guterres invoked a clause of the UN Charter to bring things to the attention of the Security Council.The Israeli response was, as
the Jewish Chronicle reports, an Israeli government spokesman as saying “I don’t think any UN secretary-general in history has gone so far to secure the survival of a terrorist organisation.”
The way news is presented , there is usually little context or history. As people like Jeremy Bowen can’t enter Gaza, they have been reporting from the West Bank and giving more background. Several usually well informed people have said to me they had been unaware of the history.
It does change the way people see the news.
Funnily I think about forgetfulness more as an older folk. Like you some older memories seem firm, like car registrations and early class mate names. But Richard I perceive two kinds: 1) Things you know you forgotten (recently can’t remember) and 2) those you don’t know you’ve forgotten. I’m well into stage one, seems you’re entering that stage too. Our Govt ministers are at stage 2 most of the time – “I don’t recall that” being a common response from Sunak et al.
And finally a happy New Year to The Murphys. I’ve enjoyed 2023 reading your blog.
I am not sure I an at stage 1 because of age. If I am it is because I am happy to have forgotten some things I simply do not need to know any more.
You probably haven’t forgotten those things, they’ll be lurking in your memory banks somewhere.
I got a job, managing a plant area in a garden centre, after a 7 year break from that industry. Struggled for about a fortnight, then all the previously accumulated knowledge came flooding back. One week I had to check some or all of: height; spread; flowering period; preferred conditions etc… for an item; the next week I could rattle it off.
If you were very familiar with the material, you’ll probably be able to recall all of it, if you had to; otherwise, it’ll continue to lurk.
Best of luck on a speedy recovery and avoidance of long covid.
Interesting point. The brain is a muscle. It has to be trained. It can be revived. Thanks.
I love your new Scottish accent, Richard – “fur me”. Welcome to the clan!
Edited!
Pity. I liked it.
🙂
Might it be accurately said of the British/“Western” main stream media that,
“They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” ? (Talleyrand)
Thank you Richard, so much to agree with in this post, and important. At 73, I now find I’m getting slow to recall stuff I do know and still need, though, but it could be much worse. so mustn’t grumble.
I have realised that cognitive training is an important part of what I need to do to keep doing this work in the long term. My wife is fascinated by the issue – which helps.
Just today I read a post on Mastodon referring to the period between Christmas and New Year as the “Merryneum”. Rather appropriate I thought.
Thanks for all you’ve done this year with this blog, you’ve completely opened my eyes.
A very happy New Year to you and yours and get well soon.
Thanks Steve
Suffering bra8n fog tonight without the assistance of any alcohol.
Hoping it will not last.
You seem to be advocating forgetting all the bad things we have learnt of the last 30-40 years which is worthwhile and desirable.
The trouble is though is that we only ended up taking the route we have taken because we had actually forgotten what we learnt previously – about laissez faire economics to fascism.
As Milan Kundera said:
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”.
Memory is something that may have to be tolerated because its lack is easily exploited by those who want to own the future at everyone else’s expense.
I am nit advocating forgetting as such, although we do naturally forget bad things. I am suggesting moving on from. That is more like peace and reconciliation rather than retaining anger.
I totally get your point – thanks for clarifying.
I really like the point of this article, Richard. Allowing your brain to let go of stuff that no longer matters is like having a clear-out in your house. It lets you move on, unencumbered by what used to be true (or what you thought was true) …but isn’t any more.
A friendly suggestion, though. Those useless numbers we all remember from childhood, back when our brains weren’t overstuffed with information? …like your father’s car registration number? They make great passwords! You won’t forget them. And nobody else is likely to guess them.
🙂
Anosognosia is the condition of not knowing you are ill.
Its what dementia sufferers get eventually.
But it can apply to whole societies.
As for class war. The class war of the future is between the 0.1% and the 10%.
AI is about to reduce the need for the 10% substantially and they wont like it.
But you are right the bigger battle to fight is over survival of the rest of us.
But we are struggling to get the message across.
A former student of mine, a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience, said to me that discarding useless info is the sign of efficient memory.
Quite often, recognution or recall does come but with a library tag ” that old bollix”.