Richard Fernandez:
“The right to be forgotten,” according to Wikipedia [1], “is a concept … discussed and put into practice in the European Union (EU) and Argentina … from the desires of some individuals to ‘determine the development of his life in an autonomous way, without being perpetually or periodically stigmatized as a consequence of a specific action performed in the past’ … to the status of an international human right in respect to access to information.”
It asserts we have a right not to be inconvenienced by the past. Classifying the “right to be forgotten” as “access to information” is somewhat misleading, though. Unlike privacy which is an ‘access denied’ message the right to be truly forgotten is an edit of the past. It’s conceptually a delete operation.
After a video clip showing economist Jonathan Gruber describing the passage of Obamacare as based intentional deceit went viral, the University of Pennsylvania deleted it. The Daily Caller [2] writes,
Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber had said at the University of Pennsylvania’s 24th Annual Health Economics Conference that it was a good thing that Americans never realized what was in the Affordable Care Act, because “the stupidity of the American voter” would have otherwise killed the law.
But for unexplained reasons, the University of Pennsylvania has pulled its video of the event, which took place in October of 2013. ”This video has been removed by the user,” a message now reads. “Sorry about that.” The video is still embedded on the conference page, but playing the video gives a similar error message.
One person who was angry to hear of the apparent cover-up was Bloomberg columnist Megan McArdle. “This is pretty shocking behavior by my alma mater,” she tweeted, “Why would @Penn pull down a public video that has political implications?”
Gruber’s message was unflattering. Avik Roy at Forbes [3] writes: “Gruber made an argument that many of Obamacare’s critics have long made, including me. It’s that the law’s complex system of insurance regulation is a way of concealing from voters what Obamacare really is: a huge redistribution of wealth from the young and healthy to the old and unhealthy. In the video, Gruber points out that if Democrats had been honest about these facts, and that the law’s individual mandate is in effect a major tax hike, Obamacare would never have passed Congress.”
But since Obamacare is ‘progressive’ can’t we make the ugly past go away? Obamacare’s proponents believe it was intended in virtue, however much it was conceived in sin. Or as Gruber put it: “Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.” To argue we have no right to know what Gruber said in Penn State seminars is to assert privacy. But that is not the same as asserting Gruber said nothing. When Sheryl Attkisson [4]says that “CBS News bosses purposely hid a clip of President Obama refusing to call the Benghazi attacks an act of terrorism in order to help him get re-elected” that’s not protecting classified information; that’s a delete operation.
How can we be free of the past? One line of thought says that we can’t. For example, at Smith College [5], prominent alumna “Wendy Kaminer—an author, lawyer, social critic, feminist, First Amendment near-absolutist and former board member of the American Civil Liberties Union” was invited to discourse on free speech. While discoursing she said something which offended some listeners.
The panel started innocuously enough with Ms. Kaminer criticizing the proliferation of campus speech codes that restrict supposedly offensive language. She urged the audience to defend the free exchange of ideas over parochial notions of “civility.” In response to a question about teaching materials that contain “hate speech,” she raised the example of Mark Twain ’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” arguing that students should take it as a whole. The student member of the panel, Jaime Estrada, resisted that notion, saying, “But it has the n-word, and some people are sensitive to that.”
Ms. Kaminer responded: “Well let’s talk about n-words. Let’s talk about the growing lexicon of words that can only be known by their initials. I mean, when I say, ‘n-word’ or when Jaime says ‘n-word,’ what word do you all hear in your head? You hear the word . . . ”
And then Ms. Kaminer crossed the Rubicon of political correctness and uttered the forbidden word, observing that having uttered it, “nothing horrible happened.”
“Nothing horrible happened,” except that someone taped her saying the deplorable word, which was then posted with this “trigger warning”.
Trigger/Content Warnings: Racism/racial slurs, abelist slurs, anti-Semitic language, anti-Muslim/Islamophobic language, anti-immigrant language, sexist/misogynistic slurs, references to race-based violence.
So here’s the problem: does Gruber have the “right to be forgotten”? If so, does Kaminer have the same right? Or would we rather remember the truth, however unpleasant it might be?
My own thinking has been influenced by Ray Bradbury’s Sound of Thunder [6]. He argued that it’s dangerous to tamper with the past. In his story travelers go back to hunt a T-rex 65 million years ago. They are strictly enjoined not to touch anything but the target animal, who must be shot at the exact moment when some mischance had ordained its death.
