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To believe that an idea is more important than your own life can be noble, stupid or some combination of the two. But I find it hard to imagine a situation in which believing that an idea is more important than somebody else's life is ever anything better than arrogance and inhumanity.

Thinking 'Bout History

The reality is that we are never alone. It is not necessary that other people who differ materially from us are there, because we always bring with us and always bear in us a lot of people. - Maurice Halbwachs, La mémoire collective


It sometimes makes me sad to think that so much of that which has passed remains mute because nobody deemed it important enough to preserve. Mostly this occurs on the level of the individual. The ripples just die out, unless we've really made a splash. I realise that it is important that things are forgotten, and that some things are more important to remember than others. The things that are most well documented are those that effect or implicate the largest number of people. As we scale down, the effort that goes into documenting groups and collectives also scales down, and different groups have different ways of preserving the past, many of which will not be understood by outsiders. The things in life that cut to the core of our collective identity (family, society and humanity) are the things we need to hold on to, so that we remember who we are, and don't forget that we're in this together. And our sense of self as individuals is grounded upon the identity of those with whom we belong, whether we were born into that group or found it later on. In that regard, they are more important than the life of any individual, and it is understandable that we document them most thoroughly.

Maybe the Internet is changing things. Preserving everything at the expense of understanding why anything is all that important in the first place. Which is a worrying thought. Only time will tell, I suppose. They probably said the same thing about the printing press.

Forgetting is important. But it would be a shame if we were to trivialise the forgotten individual. They were important too, even if only to a much smaller and more exclusive group (we can keep scaling down until we reach the lives lived by two individuals together, or so the Romantic in me believes). So even if we can't remember them, and that peculiar to them which is lost, I think I should probably do my best to remember what they represent and try to appreciate that aspect of my own life. Whilst I'm still splashing about.