REMEMBERING THE PAST

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

         This very famous and often repeated quotation is generally attributed to George Santayana, the Spanish-born, American-educated author, philosopher and essayist whose work is highly acclaimed throughout the Western world. Since his original quotation, several variations have appeared by different authors, all of which leading to the same conclusion. They all echo the somewhat more cynical original version, written more than 50 years earlier by the great Irish social critic, playwright and philosopher George Bernard Shaw which stated:

“The only thing man learns from history is that man learns nothing from history.”

  Regardless of the language used, the sentiment is clear and unambiguous; that all the great lessons that ought to be learnt from past experiences are not being learnt, and as a result we continue to make the same bad choices and repeat the past mistakes.

          It is very difficult to disagree with, or challenge these sentiments. For as long as history records have been available, there is overwhelming confirmation that man has not learnt any lessons from the mistakes of the past, and unfortunately, continues to repeat them over and over. Even more disappointingly, this situation occurs equally among those who are fully informed, as it is with those who are not aware of them. It seems that knowing about the events and the results of the past, appears to have no impact in the present activity.

         Clearly people who do not learn from their mistakes do not mature, and as a result the incidence of anti-social behavior, drug abuse, disruptive family dynamics and crime continues to rise in parallel. Instead of learning from the past and trying to find causes and correcting them, there is the tendency to shift blame on other factors, to create unrest and conflict within communities and between races and religions. All of which can be directly attributed to a lack of understanding of the lessons of the past, or the unwillingness to actually learn them.     

         History is a record of people’s behavior. In its pages can be found how people lived, thought and interacted to the prevailing circumstances. In it, can be traced the story of human development and behavior going back for many centuries. In fact, it is the most reliable tool available to man for understanding how the world evolved and why events took place. It tells us about the changing circumstances and how we reacted to them. The story is ongoing and contains a mixture of good and evil, of heroes and villains, of successes and failures, and everything in between. All of which is available to us, to learn from its mistakes, and to improve on its successes, and as a result benefit from the information and build on its achievements. But unfortunately this never happens!

         The world is presently undergoing catastrophic turmoil affecting all the nations in one way or another. But the underlying causes are not fundamentally different than they have been throughout the ages and unfortunately like our ancestors, we have yet to spend the time to learn the lessons from the past experiences that are clearly recorded in the pages of history. Throughout the millennia of man’s existence on earth, it has been plagued by the same recurring problems of war, disease and hunger. Man has yet to learn this glaring lesson from history; it is a fundamental flaw in human nature that stands in the way of peace, absence of want and freedom from disease. It is human nature, guided by a desire for greed, domination and control that is the root cause of humanity’s problems. It comes under an endless combination of excuses that include race, appearance, religion and ethnicity, among so many others, but all can be traced back to human ignorance of history and an unwillingness to learn from it.

         Therein lays the root causes of all the conflicts, deprivation and suffering that have washed over the world like so many disease epidemics. Despite being counseled by history itself, man has chosen to disregard the lessons that must be learnt in order to correct the negative forces that drive humanity to hold on to everything rather than sharing without anger and resentment. Abraham Lincoln, while speaking after the end of the disastrous American Civil War in 1865, described in brilliantly prophetic words, the action that must be taken following the concluded war:

“Human nature will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak and as strong, as silly and as wise, as bad and as good. Let us therefore study the incidents in this as philosophy to learn wisdom from them, and none of them as wrongs to be avenged.”

Until we have learnt the wisdom of these words and put into place the actions necessary, we, like our predecessors before us, and those who will follow us, are doomed to live out our lives in a world of unrelenting strife and conflict.

-This is the price we pay for not learning the lessons from the pages of history.

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