Selective relevance can corrupt history more than outright neglect can.

Evidence

But there is another danger even greater than that of irrelevance, and that is the danger of relevance. The word relevant has acquired new and menacing overtones and undertones of meaning in our time. History, according to this view, is admissible, even useful, provided it is limited to “relevant history.” Here we confront something worse than neglect. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1808

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion — that paying attention to the past only when it is ‘relevant’ is more dangerous than ignoring it — is a genuinely counterintuitive framework worth sitting with.
• SEED: An essay on how ‘relevance’ as a selection criterion for studying the past is itself a form of censorship, more insidious than neglect.