Calling all historians! I’ve been thinking about the popular adage “if we forget history, we are doomed to repeat it”.
History wasn’t my best subject, but even I am aware of some of the historical disasters that we should avoid reliving. And I know “the squeaky wheel gets oiled” so there’s a natural mental tendency to focus on obvious problems.
But still, this sounds a little defeatist to me. It kind of gives the impression that history is just a series of disasters, and the best we can hope for is to avoid the old ones and have fresh new disasters instead.
But to be a historian some part of you must love history, right? So what’s the good stuff? What are the great successes? More importantly, what have we forgotten, that should be repeated? What would you bring back?
Also, is there or was there some strategy or philosophy or something, that went beyond mere prevention of the bad, into the cultivation of the good?
“If history teaches us anything, it’s that history teaches us nothing.”
–Henry Kissinger (I’m probably mangling the quote)
But to answer your question, I’d say the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution and the resulting Enlightenment qualify. They all led to unparalleled and permanent change in the world.
Modern music qualifies, as well. I’m thinking of the Jazz Age, in particular, but I know I must be missing something. Hell, even the 60s music scene was avant-garde and revolutionary.
Well, if we could answer that question, then it really doesn’t count as “forgotten,” does it?
Seriously, though, I’ve always been a bit skeptical about bringing back history or consciously trying to relive it. While I enjoy reading about old kings and ancient scholars and philosophers, the world has moved on. King Solomon might be a fascinating historical figure, for instance, but you wouldn’t want him running your bank, let alone your country. Compared to world leaders today, King Solomon actually had it pretty easy. No one who lived before the two world wars, the Cold War, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the rise of the Internet could possibly grasp the state of the world today at a visceral level, any more than we could truly understand what it would have been like to live in England during the Plantagenet empire.
Philosophical and government systems, values, finance, and education evolve as surely and as irrevocably as the humans they govern. Everything from the way we run a war to the way we cook food changes profoundly, sometimes over centuries, and sometimes within a generation. I think history is a fascinating and worthwhile subject, and I think it contains answers to worthwhile questions, but I doubt there’s any ancient wisdom out there that will change the course of the modern world if only we could discover it.
Well, while we will never be able to respond to volcanoes and earthquakes with no casualties, we have got better at dealing with them over time. Even the really terrible ones that have caused tsunamis over the last couple of decades would have been much more devastating without the measures we had in place. The inadequate protections were, nonetheless, better than no protection at all, which is what people had through most of human history.
The “big one”, like Yellowstone*, if it comes within our lifetimes, will probably be beyond our abilities to deal with. But even smallish volcanos used to cause much higher deaths per head of population than happen now.
*I always, always have to correct that mentally from Jellystone
I’m confused by your post, are you asking what positive things have happened in history, preferably positive things that we forgot but should relearn?
The enlightenment was nice, a rejection of religion in favor of science and reason. The rejection of monarchy in favor of representative government.
There were efforts in the south to create political movements that rejected racial hierarchies in favor of racially harmonious movements that unified and confronted the aristocracy. I can’t remember the names of them though.
The modern world does get better though. Generally the world is moving towards more wealth, more education, more freedom, better health. Even more intelligence (although this may have stalled with the Flynn effect dying off in the 90s, but will be picked up again with the machine intelligence revolution we are entering). The world as a whole is slowly improving with retreats here and there but the overall trendline seems to be in that direction.*
*At least I hope. The rise in fascism and stupid government all over the world is depressing but hopefully like other radical political movements, it’ll eventually die out.
Much of the time these days I’m thinking, ‘Four legs good, two legs bad!’ This idea that we can use science to solve the problem—some are rejecting that. You can interpret that as pockets of people who didn’t get the memo, but I’m thinking it’s more a distrust issue.
As a starting point, I’m skeptical of whether humanity could “bomb itself back to the Stone Age” without killing off all land animals bigger than a shrew, and I’m equally skeptical of whether we could slowly regress that far; I think a lot of the ideas people have about “regression” are fundamentally inspired by debunked notions about “The Fall of Rome” mixed with grumpy, content-free “kids these days” chuntering intelligent people ignore, if not outright racist Lothrop Stoddard idiocy.
In short: The Greeks lost a written language. Modern humans aren’t going to, or at least wouldn’t survive the process.
So we aren’t going to have the old conflicts about how the solar system works, or lose whole towns to disease as various places did in plagues through history, or lose masses to deficiency disorders without a clue about what’s going on, or be unable to even begin to fight a disease or disorder whatever the cause. There’s certain generally-applicable ideas, in biology and epidemiology, which ensure we will always be able to begin to proceed intelligently when a health disaster strikes.
Most of the good stuff, the stuff that helps people live healthy productive lives, stays. The negative stuff will never go away, either. There are fringe theories about societies where women and men were equal, bartering led to a pure and wonderful exchange economy, etc, but that’s it.
Since we ought to learn from our mistakes, I’ve stated the aphorism in the reverse: Those who can’t repeat history are doomed to only remember it
(Meaning that we should repeat the positive lessons, of course. Not screw up all over again)
