A popular aphorism is “Those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it”. But do people (nations, states, communities, whatever) really have a choice, or are there other forces that dictate our actions and steer us towards a direction?
I am not talking about metaphysical stuff here, I simply believe that the history is always repeating itself because it is in the human nature to always do certain things.
Do you agree/disagree?
This chap wrote this about historicism.
It’s very good.
Disagree in an absolute sense. (One might perhaps glean a few general principles which are broadly true, I guess, but they may me so vague as to be pretty much useless in any *predictive[/]i capacity).
Isn’t this just an application of the principle that smart people learn from their errors?
Predicting the future isn’t at issue here IMO. Using hard-won experience to avoid repeating past mistakes is.
For example, one lesson of history is that everyone thinks they are the good guys. Including the bad guys. There are no predictions to be made from this, but it is an useful thing to consider when asked to fight for the righteous cause.
Useful? Tautological, surely?
And even smarter people learn from others’ errors before they make their own.
People are apt to make the same errors as other have in the past unless they take pains to study those errors. I think this is the import of the aphorism, and I agree with it.
Well I learned from the lessons of 1929 enough to profit greatly in 1987. The stock market crash was clear as crystal due to the analogies to that time.
I agree more-or-less with what has been said so far, but I’d like to give some examples.
We are aware about Roman times, where the populace was reduced to enjoying cheap shows in the arenas, while not caring about important things such as politics.
We see the same thing happening today. Substitute the Coliseum with TV, or events like the Superbowl and the rest is the same.
My question is: can we learn from history, or are our actions determined by the way our brains are wired?
If you go around taking every folk saying literally, you’ll have a very hard time in life.
Reminds me of last night. I went to see Troy with my mother, and we were waiting for my sister and her SO to get there. She whipped out her cell phone and called my sister, and I heard her say, “there’s no one here.” As a joke, I made a quick count, took the phone, and said, “no, there are six people here.”
OK, it was a lame joke, but the point is the same. When someone says “there is no one here,” they obviously don’t necessarily mean that there is NO ONE there. Like the post I wrote not 2 minutes ago on morality tails goes, it doesn’t matter if it is literally true, what matters is what you can learn from it.
In this case, yes, you can look at mistakes made in the past to avoid mistakes in the future. In an extreme sense, science is based on this. 
Ah, the irony is that the Communists (among other groups) thought that human nature was a blank page–since their political system was right, it must also be possible.
Their system failed. And we can learn from that too.
It may well be that we end up with a future like in the movie Rollerball: those in power have a great deal of self control and know how to accomodate human nature (with trifles like TV and violent sports). Human nature is included within the algorithm that subdues us.
Personally, I think there are deep contradictions within our nature that can never fully be harmonized. But these contradictions also give us our great art and desire to explore the universe.
twitch
Sorry, I get a nervous tick every time someone starts talking about the Soviets without understanding Russia’s communal heritage. They knew it was possible - they had been operating on what were basically communes for centuries - they didn’t have the means to make it large scale (which is where Communism as a political theory runs into problems). They also didn’t pay attention to human nature - one of the great differences between the Soviet Union and America is that the American government was set up specifically to minimize the power of any one person (and it still suffers from corruption!). The Bolsheviks… well, they didn’t think things out very well, now did they? They suffered from not knowing (or rather, accepting) human nature in such systems.
We can learn from history. I think the better question is whether we should. I am hard pressed to think of many examples where history, and history alone, could have predicted what would happen that leaders ignored or were ignorant of.
History is not the best teacher, IMO, because underlying facts are hard to seperate from pure context. If we learned from history, we’d never accept a single scientific truth, because after all, the trend has always been that theories get replaced and replaced and replaced… is this a good argument that we never know anything?
[QUOTE=ZagadkaThe Bolsheviks… well, they didn’t think things out very well, now did they? They suffered from not knowing (or rather, accepting) human nature in such systems.[/QUOTE]
Yep, that’s what I said.
I’m a socialist. A pragmatic socialist. I don’t care what Marx or Keynes or GWB says (not that any of these guys would agree, and not that 2/3 of them have some worth to what they say), if it doesn’t work, toss it out.
So many times someone comes along and thinks he (or she, in the case of a certain Ayn) have found “the answer.” No, there is no one answer that, once we “get it” (ie, est) is going to work for everyone and all times. The progress of the species and the individual is fought year by inch, hour by mile.
“The only thing we can learn from history is that we have nothing to learn from history”.
-Quote I heard somewhere but can’t remember the source
America is not Rome. Iraq is not Vietnam. Afghanistan 2000’s is not Afghanistan 1980’s. There are lessons to be learned from each event but they should not be used as a roadmap to predict the outcome of current events.
I agree with the saying.
My best example is the Libertarians, who seem to have learned nothing from the industrial conflicts of the late 19th and early 20th century and (if they had their way) would doom the rest of us to repeat that history by undoing the regulations and laws that were put in place then to protect the citizenry from unrestrained capitalism.
No cite, but I once read that, when French President Louis Napoleon Bonaparte staged the coup that elevated him to Emperor Napoleon III, Karl Marx commented, “When history repeats itself, it does so the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”
If Vietnam was the tragedy . . .
I would add the cynical corrolary: “No one ever learns from history.”
In our language the term History,” hegel observes, “unites the objective with the subjective side…It comprehends not less what has happened than the narration of what has happened.
Montaigne, makes reading of history and biography the window through which a man looks out upon the world. “This great world,” he writes, “is the mirror wherein we are to behold ourselves, to be able to know ourselves as we ought to do in the true bias.” Only against the large scene history reveals and amidst the variety of human nature it exhibits can a man truly know himself and his own time. IN a similar vein, Gibbon declares, “the experience of history exalts and enlarges the horizon of our intellectual view.” Hegel, on the other hand insists “what experience and history teach is that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
On the practical side, political writers like Machiavelli, Montesquieu, and the Federalists use history to exemplify or confirm their generalizations. They agree with Thucydides that “an exact knowledge of the past is an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it.” Most men, says Tacitus, “learn wisdom from the fortunes of others.”
Well, yes, moreso than any other educational field, history can be boiled down to propaganda. Whatever you teach as history usually sticks, and it takes great effort to change (and then, usually slowly, over time). Again, like any tool, it is neutral - it can be used for good or for ill.
Personally, I always thought that our best chance at peace in the ME was building up their education systems and making them more objective. Now, all the kids will know is America as an attacker. Another generation, right down the shitter.
While there is a kernel of truth in the old adage, it’s not very useful in real life. One big question it begs is, WHICH lessons are we supposed to remember from history? And WHICH of the lessons we learn are we supposed to apply to real-word situations?
When facing a foreign policy crisis, for instance, one that might lead to war, WHICH lesson from history should be foremost in our minds: should we remember Viet Nam, and resolve never to get involved in a potentially intractable war? Or should we remember Munich and Neville Chamberlain, and resolve never to give our enemies the impression that we lack the stomach for a fight?
Whichever choice a leader makes, he can point to a historical precedent that he’s “learned” from and which seems to prove him right!
IMHO, the whole X had the following features, Y had the following features, it should have been obvious Y was going to turn out like X approach to learning from history is flawed. You can draw analogies from nearly any historical situation to any current one. The wrong predictions are conveniently forgotten while the right ones are trumpeted as failing to see the obvious. I remember when the BBC was gleefully pointing out how the US was “bogged down in Basra” and pundits were drawing analogies from everything from Chechnya to Rome but they all conveniently fell silent once the tanks rolled into Baghdad a week or so later.
What I DO think the use of history is is that it provides a vast set of data from which hypothesises about human nature can be made. Humans are fundamentally the same for the last 100,000 years. Looking at history, the same patterns arise over and over again because people keep finding the same solutions to similar problems. Once you understand how humans work, the world becomes a lot simpler and comprehensibe and THIS is why we should be learning from history.