There’s likely no such thing as the right to be forgotten. So why are we talking about it?
In the sixth grade, I opportunistically backstabbed one of my friends; the story reads like an appendix to a middle-school The Prince. I’d had a crush on a girl for three long weeks (give or take), and one of my two best friends, we’ll call him Phil, started ‘going out’ with her almost at random, I think after one of those weekend field trips which always seemed to break apart cliques, form new ones, and breathe fresh life into the daily math-science-history routine. The world doesn’t always work justly, and all the time, energy, and thought I’d expended quickly became nothing; like a bad poker player with a losing hand but too much in the pot to fold, I redoubled my efforts. I went behind Phil’s back, first to our other friend, asking for his allegiance should I move against Phil. In morning break, he masked his indignation and told me it was a terrible idea: in the last minutes of lunch break, I’m hearing a cornered girl awkwardly explaining why she won’t break up with Phil for me.
Despite the frivolity, I feel a sharp pang of shame whenever I remember that story. I know people who, when similarly in the wrong, can easily convince themselves the episode never happened; often, I envy them. Because who doesn’t want to be forgotten at times? Often, though, even when we forget, other people’s memories bear witness against us, like a time capsule preserving, in a shroud of indifference, their own record of what happened. Years later, we relive some episode with a spouse or child or sibling, and our version of things, corrupted by bias and self-interest over the years, looks pathetic next to the other’s immaculate memory. The record of our wrongdoings we can gradually wear away in our memory for years; it’s the external record which pins us down: no exit.
In courthouse archives or at the local credit firm, you could find out how much money Bill owes, and to whom; you could research criminal convictions and civil liabilities, liens, judgments, acquittals. The town gossip mill kept more personal histories intact, and the worst offenses would merit that look of surprise, thin lips and furrowed brows, for years or decades as you slipped into the pew in the back Sunday morning. Still, some time in AA and the convictions are gradually forgiven by prospective employers; still, move on to another town in another state, and while you may not be accepted (what drove her away?), at least there’ll be some measure of peace in a clean slate.
What happens when the record of our wrongs becomes depersonalized, utterly objective, and easily accessible to the world? Really, this time, no exit. Because if the facts are objective and depersonalized, then mitigating circumstances don’t follow the offense onto the page; doubt doesn’t follow them onto the page; a changed demeanor doesn’t follow, either.
This brings us to the case of Mario Costeja González, a man who had been forced to sell his property as a result of tax debt, and who doesn’t want us to remember that. Wanting Google to eliminate search results (query: Mario Costeja González) which linked to the debt episode, he petitioned the European Court of Justice, the EU’s highest court, and won. Much of the subsequent discussion has centered on the ‘right to be forgotten’, admittedly a concept dear to the human heart. Privacy advocates have seen the ruling as confirmation of this right, and free-speech advocates see it as the beginning of a dangerous slide into censorship.
Regardless of whether the ruling was appropriate, if there is a ‘right to be forgotten’, it’s an artificial convention at best, and at worst, it’s non-existent. How can we prove there’s such a thing as the right to be forgotten? What’s it grounded on? Can science demonstrate the existence of such a right, can some universal philosophy show a legitimate basis for it, can political theory prove it? In terms of some natural, inalienable human entitlement, the answer to all these questions is no. In terms of an artificial, contingent convention guaranteed by social contract or constitution or legislation, the answer is being debated, and different countries have developed different answers.
For Christianity, a right to be forgotten should probably be viewed with skepticism. ‘Right’ implies something owed to an individual, something we possess unconditionally. In the case of being forgotten, the word ‘right’ risks rooting the erasure of the record against us in ourselves. In the economy of salvation, it upsets the balance between humanity and God, implying that humankind in its natural state, without incarnation or atonement, can lay some kind of claim to absolution of its own resources. ‘Vertically’ – that is, in the relationship between ourselves and God – such a right must be rejected for the newness and undeservedness of the “love that covers a multitude of sins” to be preserved.
We live in world in which Christianity’s moral code and promise of regeneration have outlived its core doctrine, at least in cultural discourse. I think of Georgia legislator Lynn Westmoreland, who waxed eloquent about the importance of the ten commandments, sponsored a bill requiring their display in both chambers of Congress, and struggled to name three when asked to list them in an interview. We like the Judeo-Christian set of commands, which help point us toward righteousness; we’re often less eager to hear the part about our inability to save ourselves. When the rules linger past the means of fulfilling them, despair or deluded self-righteousness ensues. And not only have we had to reinvent sanctification – often-hollow religious form for conservatives, smug enlightened humanism for dems, self-improvement and upward mobility for all – but now we also, unsurprisingly, find ourselves having to reinvent forgiveness.
On the one hand, this turn toward forgiveness is a welcome one. Many of those who might’ve judged González as a wastrel on the basis of a common mistake years ago, probably do so unwarrantedly. In a world where one DUI charge can ruin a bright college graduate’s career prospects, or one drug possession charge can bar a homeless person from public housing for life, where one scandal can shame a politician for decades… in such a climate, we need forgetting; we need erasure. And so we need a secular concept of forgiveness and forgetting.
Don’t expect it to be perfect, though. The legal artifice currently receiving so much media attention has, in its very terms, a contradiction: a right to be forgotten, passive voice. How can we be entitled to something which depends wholly on others? Within Christianity’s ethical framework, others, to be sure, certainly have an ethical responsibility to forgive, and perhaps even to forget, our sins. But the concept of ‘right’ roots something in us which can only come from outside: Luther’s term, verbum externum, holds.
A right to be forgotten will never work perfectly for another reason, one Google and its allies have cited: people need information. And though we may resist it, it’s best for others to have information about us; better for them to know the real us than some edited avatar whose manifold achievements litter a LinkedIn profile, but whose failures have been expunged. People who need information will just exert more effort, spend more money, and dig deeper than page 1 of Google search results.
On what basis should anyone be forgotten? Back to sixth grade: if I’d told Phil, whom I’d unsuccessfully backstabbed, that my scheme that day had a right to be forgotten, it certainly would’ve precluded any immediate forgiveness. When people do wrong, we don’t want them to invoke their right to forgiveness; we want an unqualified apology. After conferring for a couple hours, Phil and our other friend told me they’d decided not to mention it ever again, and pretend the day never happened. On what basis? Our friendship, to them, outweighed the demands of justice.
Perhaps we need, until we come up with something better, a right to be forgotten. A better basis for forgetting would forgiveness: it is not right which hides our sins, but instead “love covers a multitude of sins” (1 Peter 4:8). Weakness forgotten may be a stronger desire, but love amidst weakness is the more fundamental one. It is because love outweighs justice, and he no longer desires to remember them, that God forgets our sins.
COMMENTS
6 responses to “Forgetting the Right to Be Forgotten”
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Unforgettable, Will, as per usual. Thank you.
Hi Will,
Kudos to you and to everyone at Mbird for a great Web site. I have cited it so much in class that my tendency to do so has become something of a joke among my students.
I’m behind you regarding the theological context of your piece, and I agree with a significant portion of your argument. But I have some reservations about one paragraph near the bottom of your essay. For sake of reference, I’ve quoted a portion of it below. It’s taken out of context, sadly, but hopefully any reader of the excerpt has already read your piece in its entirety:
. . . people need information. And though we may resist it, it’s best for others to have information about us; better for them to know the real us than some edited avatar whose manifold achievements litter a LinkedIn profile, but whose failures have been expunged. People who need information will just exert more effort, spend more money, and dig deeper than page 1 of Google search results.
Given the larger context of your piece, I’m not sure I am interpreting you correctly here. Could you clarify? What others benefit from online information about us, and to whom are we granting the power to collect, manage and distribute this “information”?
Golly day, this is a complex topic. To address my concern, I’ll look at the World Wide Web as a sort of community in which some have far more de facto power than others. For instance, Google me if you wish, and assuming you find the right Paul Yandle you can find all sorts of “information” about me broadcasted for anyone with Internet access to see: for example, details about my professional life and activities, the town in which I currently live and every town in which I have lived since 1979. You can also find a wide variety of statements that students have posted about me on various teacher-rating sites under the cloak of anonymity. Their comments are there for supervisors, colleagues, students, friends, you…the whole world to see. Some of those ratings suggest I’m the greatest thing since sliced bread; some of them plainly and in vindictive terms dismiss me as the worst teacher since the dawn of Creation. I suspect that the ratings, good or bad, have little to do with the quality with which I perform my job. Maybe a student liked the high grade he or she got. Maybe a student really thought I was that good. Maybe a student was upset at a grade he or she got. Maybe I really was the incompetent jerk some students proclaimed me to be.
My point is that despite my obscurity, I am the subject of a fair amount of factual and editorial “information” that is posted — published really — without my consent. And this “information” can have professional and personal consequences. Does everyone really need to know where I have lived for the past 35 years?
In my case, the exposure isn’t that big a deal. In the cases of thousands of others, the exposure is. The fact that we fool ourselves about our identities, the fact that the good of our souls depends upon an assessment of our depravity that requires the work of the Holy Spirit– these facts do not give Google or any public or privately held corporation the right to allow our entire closets to be flung open and their entire contents to be exposed ad infinitum [sp?] for the whole world — friends, families, strangers, stalkers — to see.
I’ll put it at the micro level. The Puritans ran into a similar dilemma: The City of God and the City of Man are not synonymous. According to a historian I would cite if I could recall the source, the conservators of the “New England Way” attempted to discern the difference between a statutory crime and a sin against God. Are all crimes sins? Are all sins crimes? Who needs to know what for the good of the community? Because of the fluidity between sins and crimes, communities became subjected to shame and fear by those in power because any and everything about any resident could become known to everyone on the premise that “people need information” for the good of the community and the redemptive good of the powerless people who were the subjects of said “information.”
The result, of course, was that sins real or imagined went underground because people could not deal with the consequences of being exposed to the entire community. They lost the freedom to be open that Mbird — and you personally — so wonderfully seek to restore to people. Who knows how many Godly people suffered in silence lest they be subjected to gossipers, back-stabbers and, eventually, witch-hunters? We only know about the ones who were either honest enough to speak up or outed, banished or killed. Meanwhile, the people with the power to enforce penalties or offer advice to the enforcers based upon “information” often escaped punishment for, well, who knows what? The negative impact of their actions left some leaders quite troubled — but I doubt many of them faced legal retribution. They and other people in their communities were buried under toxicity.
As the past several months have shown us, similar — and in some cases more toxic — enclaves of fear and shame stretch far and wide across the American evangelical landscape. Victims are silenced or shunned while leaders seem to show a disturbing tendency toward covering for each other. In some cases, the abuse is endemic to the enclaves and has been for generations. The Internet has been a highly valuable tool allowing people who previously had no outlet to speak to voice their pain and expose duplicity and abuse.
Of course, this type of behavior isn’t unique to the church. I don’t want to compromise free speech, and in general, I think that the more information people have about the world around them, the better. But I also don’t like the fact that at the personal level, people and businesses both secular and spiritual can misuse and manipulate information to create toxic enclaves.
The statement of yours I quoted implies to me that you are saying it’s better for everyone that Google or anyone with a server or an IP address can “out” us at their discretion because that allows us to be transparent before the world and, well . . . people are going to track us down anyway. Given the larger context of your piece, I seriously doubt that that is what you mean, but I suspect that’s what a lot of readers would naturally infer from the text.
This concerns me because I don’t want to enable Internet activity that produces yet another culture of fear, secrecy and shame similar to the cultures that it has been used recently to expose. The “information” distributed over it is largely controlled, collected and made accessible by entities that have far more money and power than you or I do — and much of the info they control is, in my opinion, none of their business — let alone the business of the entire world. The premise that “people need information” sure does give Google, Facebook, Twitter — and even individual bloggers’ sites — an awful lot of power. I suspect that many kids and adults who wish to live in privacy, whose very safety depends upon “being forgotten,” have been bullied and scarlet lettered by outlets that survive on the the premise that “people need information.” The ubiquity of “information” available on private citizens real, false or imagined probably leads to an online culture of fear and shame in which people are subjected to the “law of the Internet,” as they use its all-seeing statutes and mores to “curate” the false selves they present to the world on Facebook or other social-media outlets.
I suspect that in the end, regardless of Gonzalez’s case, the virtual world will mirror the “real” world. Those with money and power will be able to cover for each other and expunge their virtual pasts, while everyone else will either be outed and shamed, punished for being honest or left burdened by the law, trying to salvage what’s left of their “real virtual selves” [?!?] with the best resources they have.
OK.. I’m done. Forgive my verbosity, and — yes — thank you for yet another thoughtful piece.
Any thoughts? I’m not bashing, I seriously want to understand what you meant.
Peace,
Paul Yandle
Paul –
Thanks so much for your thoughtful response! I think I’d agree with everything you said above; the ideal of being “known and loved” (1) can never perfectly happen on earth, because some people use that knowledge as an instrument of manipulation or exploitation; and (2) works best when people choose to reveal themselves rather than having Google do it for them.
I probably could’ve hedged the information part more; I was thinking, mainly, that information is practical here in the saeculum, in a sort of first use of the law sense. I don’t so much support Google’s exposure as think that the usefulness of that exposure is one reason why the “right to be forgotten” may not gain as much traction as its proponents would hope. There’s a crucial criterion (cited by the ecj) of relevance; personal information on John Profumo may be less protected from Web retention than, say, info about Gonzalez. But I think your scenario,
“I suspect that in the end, regardless of Gonzalez’s case, the virtual world will mirror the “real” world. Those with money and power will be able to cover for each other and expunge their virtual pasts, while everyone else will either be outed and shamed, punished for being honest or left burdened by the law, trying to salvage what’s left of their “real virtual selves” [?!?] with the best resources they have”,
seems discouragingly plausible. And perhaps that’s one reason why such a “right”, however theoretically dubious, may be pragmatic; otherwise, those with money and power may be hiring big firms for this sort of thing. Of course, there’s always the potential for more expensive lawyers to confer an advantage if it’s settled in court, etc.
To address your question more directly, I could’ve equivocated more to avoid suggesting a virtual city on a hill in which the fear-culture you perceive pervades. To me, it seems the problem isn’t so much the forgetting as the unfounded assertion of “right” pertaining to it. I meant there to suggest one possible beneficial side effect of information availability: but I think you’re right to question that. Being known beyond an edited profile seems more properly (or pragmatically) a relational ideal than a public-image one.
Does that address your question? It’ll be interesting to watch things unfold; the Internet privacy discussion is still very young, and I’ll be curious to see what the next big conceptual approach to “forgetting” or to “Internet free speech” will be.
Peace,
Will
Holy c*&&! I just saw the length of the posting! Yikes, sorry.
Hi Will
This one will be a bit shorter. Thanks for your thoughtful response to my response! It did clarify things for me, and I was able to go back and reread your piece with a fresh interpretation.
I see what you mean; a right defined in the passive voice is somewhat problematic. I guess the impracticality of the notion is not limited to the Internet. Does Emily Dickinson have the right for us not to read her poetry she wanted destroyed? Do long-dead people with family secrets lying in letters in archival collections have the right not to be exposed?
Regardless of the answers to those questions, I see one aspect of your main point more clearly now. At the existential level, being forgotten may be the biggest horror we can face. Our attempts to mask our crimes or to “make up for them” (Profumo), and our failure to see the nature from which they spring — all so useless and tiring. Facing the truth — and ourselves — can drive us toward salvation. God’s willingness NOT to leave us alone is quite amazing. I THINK I’m reading you correctly. Thank goodness we have a Savior who provides atonement and propitiation, who forgives and who imputes us with His righteousness!
Thanks
Paul
P.S.: Can I get royalties for “the law of the Internet?” Probably not; I imagine y’all came up with that one years ago.