Photo by Ante Hamersmit
[Lowry] Pressly’s book is a probing critique of a modern public sphere that overwhelms the private realm, but it goes further than that. He argues for privacy, or what he more accurately terms “oblivion,” as not just freedom from surveillance but a positive, albeit essentially unknowable value—a place where true human depth and personality reside. –John Kaag, “The Virtue of Being Forgotten,” The Atlantic, Oct. 29, 2024
In Lowry Pressly’s new book, The Right to Oblivion, he explores the notion of privacy. Although it’s common now to define privacy in digital terms, Kaag writes that Pressly advises caution and consideration:
Today, when people think of privacy, they are likely to think of the protection of one’s personal data and information. But according to Pressly, that definition makes a dangerous assumption, namely that humans could be wholly reduced to a set of descriptions or records. As he explains, this notion is an outgrowth of the “ideology of information,” a worldview that holds that who a person is can be fully articulated, comprehended, and stored in data or other representations of them—whether in images, texts, or other accounts. This error has encouraged people to neglect aspects of their subjective interior lives that could never be captured by such data points. As a result, it has made our private lives shallower, and our public lives, in turn, less meaningful and trusting.
Carefully curating our public lives, attempting to be seen and remembered through posts, photos, and videos, has become a familiar practice in the age of social media. Pressly makes an interesting–and perhaps damning–remark that, in doing so, we neglect our interior lives and make our private lives shallower. To promote our public selves, we often focus on the exterior at the expense of the interior.
And this promotion may also come at the expense of our safety. Hence, we’ve become fearful of how our public identity is managed–or mismanaged. In our desire to promote our public selves, we may open ourselves up to comments that shame and frighten us. We may also open ourselves up to hackers and extortionists. An online presence comes with risks, some more dangerous than others.
In his book, Pressly offers a remedy to this fear by “inviting readers to slip into oblivion: to recognize the freedom of being temporarily forgotten, and resist the forces that reduce them to what can be gleaned on the internet.” To slip into oblivion? To gain freedom by being temporarily forgotten? Really? In the age of social media, this advice seems countercultural. Yet, Pressly argues it’s sound advice and notes that prescriptions of online abstinence aren’t new. Nearly 20 years ago, I recall reading an article that featured individuals who actually paid to attend technology-free weekend retreats. They lauded the benefits of leaving their computers, tablets, and phones behind and spending a few days free from the compulsion to check emails or text messages. As I was reading this article, I remember thinking how silly it seemed that some would actually pay for a technology-free weekend. What might have seemed foolish 20 years ago, however, might not seem so foolish today. We’ve all heard the warnings about how dependence on digital technologies re-wires our brains. We’ve read research regarding the addictive nature of our digital devices, and we’ve witnessed the anxiety that separation from these devices often provokes. Today, online abstinence may be just what the doctor ordered.
And what the philosopher ordered. Pressly contends that the call to oblivion isn’t new and cites several 19th-century philosophers who extolled the virtues of interior life. Philosopher Friedrich Schelling called this the Abgrund or the “groundless ground,” an experience of the Romantic “sublime” that can’t rationally be explained. Likewise, Søren Kierkegaard advocated “inwardness,” a state of personal and absolute belief that can’t be directly explained. Pressly also cites Edwardian feminists such as Ella Lyman Cabot who referred to the “reserve, those psychic regions of individuality—both private thoughts and partially conscious dreams—that refuse to ever go public.”
We may not be able to live in our current age without leaving some sort of public, digital footprint, but Pressly argues that, at the very least, we should consider protecting and nurturing our “most personal feelings and experiences.” To support his argument, he offers these words from French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault:
The game of life depends on remembering that each person lives partially in shadow. That it is necessary, at times, to access, and embrace, our deepest parts, the ones that can’t be plumbed by anyone—or anything—else.
Again, all this seems to fly in the face of current trends which encourage individuals to be seen, to live in light and not in shadow. We’re supposed to be our own agents, promoting our best selves in hopes of gaining “likes” and “followers.” As we plumb our deepest parts, we’re encouraged (expected?) to make our journeys public. If you don’t believe me, just watch reality TV where participants are urged to “be vulnerable,” so viewing audiences may have full access to their interior lives. Or browse through an assortment of social media posts that publicize individuals’ lives with everything from photos of their evening meals to political, philosophical, and social treatises. Plumbing our deepest parts is now celebrated as a group activity.
A few years ago, I read several books by Henri Nouwen, ordained priest, professor, and public speaker. At the height of his professional career as educator and public speaker, he left academia to reside in a L’Arche community in Trosly-Brueil, France and then in L’Arche Daybreak in Richmond Hill, Ontario. Both of these communities are for people with intellectual disabilities. I recall reading The Road to Daybreak, Nouwen’s diary of a year he spent in Trosly. In his article for Christianity Today, “What Henri Nouwen Found at Daybreak,” Arthur Boers writes that Nouwen confessed he left his Harvard teaching position and popularity as a public speaker because “[s]omething inside was telling me that my success was putting my own soul in danger.” He abandoned a very public life to lead a private one among disabled adults. In doing so, he risked being forgotten as the celebrated priest, professor, and speaker the world had known. At L’Arche, however, not only was Nouwen able to live a richer interior life–intellectually and spiritually–but he was able to minister intimately to the “least of these.” For Nouwen, there was freedom and blessing in slipping into oblivion. In the presence of a handicapped resident, his former public self mattered little; he was seen and known simply for the kind hands and heart he happily offered.
Since retirement, I’ve thought a lot about the tension between wanting to be seen and known and recognizing the freedom in being temporarily forgotten and in slipping into oblivion. Although I am an introvert by nature, for decades I lived a very public life in classrooms all over the Midwest. And I admit that when things were going well, it was a heady feeling to stand before a classroom of young adults, a work of classic literature in hand. For most of my life, I positioned my public self behind a podium and taught as though my life depended upon it. And then after 41 years, it was over. I moved quicky from the public realm into the private one. I had a closet of professional clothes I took to Goodwill. When once I would have been teaching 1st period American Lit, I now sipped coffee from my complimentary retirement mug in the quiet of my home. Thrust into what Lowry Pressly calls oblivion, I stood, trembling, at the door of that place where true human depth and personality reside.
What if I opened the door to a private realm where no one was home? What if I’d been so busy cultivating my public self that my private self had become shallow from years of neglect? What if I didn’t know how to plumb my inwardness or to call upon my reserve? As Pressly points out, I’m certainly not the first nor the last person to ask such questions. But now, perhaps we should be asking what we’re doing to prepare ourselves for occasions when we lose our public selves? Perhaps we should be asking how to cultivate richer interior lives that can never be never be measured by data points. In an age of influencers, what are we doing to prepare a sanctuary for those whose fickle followers change teams, casting them into involuntary oblivion? What are we doing to prepare a interior space for those whose public selves collapse in the void when the internet fails, when cell phones are lost, broken, or confiscated? As we fill our children’s lives with activities and entertain them with technology, what are we doing to grow their interior lives? And do we even give their interior lives a second thought?
Pressly and others believe that we should. I was fortunate that my parents and many of my teachers believed that we should. They modeled the riches of cultivating interior lives in which, as Foucault maintains, we might access, and embrace, our deepest parts, the ones that can’t be plumbed by anyone—or anything—else. In the years since my retirement, I’ve come to see how their examples helped prepare me for a more contemplative life, a life beyond the busyness of my former public one.
Granted, we all have public lives, and these public lives matter deeply. And undoubtedly, we all use digital technologies that offer benefits ranging from access to family photos to breaking news. Pressly’s argument is that we balance our public lives which are increasingly promoted through digital technologies with a sincere interest in our interior lives which are cultivated through privacy and reflection.
As I’m typing these final words, a red-headed woodpecker and a host of nuthatches are ravaging the bird feeders outside my window. For a time, I’ll sit alone, watching them and moving gratefully into oblivion.