You may want to agree with the common place that the knowledge of History is a priceless treasury of sleeping wisdom, waiting to be resurrected and understood - to improve our life - instead of slowly turning to dust, forgotten in tomes nobody reads or in confidential erudition nobody listens to.

Hegel, the philosopher of grand synthesis looks at history and concludes dryly: We learn from History that people learn nothing from History [1]. Then Santayana the unquiet humanist warns wisely that those who cannot remember the past are destined to relive it. [2] To this outrageous and joyfully ignored truth, an anonymous saying appends: Wise people learn from other people’s errors; intelligent people learn from their own; fools never learn.

Are we all such hopeless fools? Is humanity so stupid? Can’t we learn from the experience of the past generations? Why?*

                                                                *

We do not learn from History because we are not educated from History; our schooling is abstract, bygone and irrelevant, full of artificial century yardsticks and pompous dates of battles and opportunistic monumental events with no connection with our life, understanding and concerns. The human face is missing.

Were we to draw wisdom from the past, we would be all more seasoned than Methuselah. Therefore I am puzzled by the apparent neglect in the history books of that concrete human experience which constitutes practical wisdom.

Besides the events on record, where is the way people lived the events? What did people do to cope with them? The facts of life learned, the ways of the world, the narrations of why and how errors and successes came to be, do not get to us. The savoir-faire of the key situations and deeds - all those precious and meaningful patterns that made lives and cost lives in other times do not seem worth to recall.

Wisdom extracted from the past is not considered a part of the historical record. How individuals carved their path into their times seems of no concern for the writers of history. We did not learn what I would call life histories in our school years. Should we count on the television series and the big-budget films to become wiser? Is this an entertaining-task to be relegated to popular literature?

We could draw hints of former experience meaningful for our life now, from dramatic, concrete accounts, faithful to the spirit of what actually happened but presented in compelling forms. To understand and to follow we need to see and to hear and feel. Is being vivid incompatible with history? Must history be a grave?

The words of Herodotus, who invented history some two thousands five hundred years ago, lost their echo:
“WHAT Herodotus the Halicarnassian has learnt by inquiry is here set forth : in order that so the memory of the past may not be blotted out from among men by time,  and that great and marvellous deeds done by Greeks and foreigners and especially the reason why they warred against each other may not lack renown.”[3]

The Father of history did not seem to ambition creating a new domain of academic excellence.

Because of Herodotus’ flirting with myth, marvel and imprecision, righteous Plutarch will cry out that the king is naked and the data false: “Herodotus is a father of lies!”[4] So, for millennia, everybody will nod approvingly, forgetting that unscientific Herodotus introduced the very word History, and its aim, the occupation of writing down the memories of the past for future generations to learn.

This purpose was simple and revolutionary: to make us different from all the other animals by giving us a past to own; to let us learn – unlike animals – from the generations no more present, from former people’s mistakes. The task of the histories was clearly to avoid oblivion and to recount memories in such a way as to educate the living.

There are of course some wonderful pragmatic books drawing conclusions from the past for the living person of today but I just don’t know about them except say, some big tomes reserved to the knowing amateurs: Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Durant’s Story of Civilisation, Toynbee’s Study of History or Spengler’s Decline of the West. In fact, I learned more about past wisdom from Thomas Mann’s Joseph and his Brothers than from the history books. I can hardly imagine those tomes as an accessible public source of present-day wisdom for the common people or even for their elected governments.

                                                                    *

Maybe the historians, tired of repetition, do not believe anymore that their role is to help the new generations avoid the notorious disastrous mistakes done and paid many times before, nor to profit from the understanding of the past; maybe they believe that it is more important to contemplate the little pure truth left with a dispassionate eye.

Maybe the historians do not believe that it is their vocation to touch and change the future, to talk to individual people, to spare individuals and nations struggling again from zero with things faced many times before by their ancestors. Are they satisfied to inquire and to explain causes and conditions?

Maybe the historians and the teachers conveying their work to us do not know anymore how to speak with each other or, if the teachers do not want to listen, the historians do not find the subjects and the rhetoric to move common people. Something clips the wings of the knowing.

                                                                    *

Maybe that which clips the wings of our great historians is, paradoxically, the idea of progress [5]. If progress is a necessary, upwards, one-way, if the future is forever new and what was will never come again, then it is not worth learning from the past. Moreover, if humanity does not move by the dreams and the deeds of people, but through necessary processes there is no value for us to learn from personal histories recounted. Such history would be just wild goose chase, a fool’s errand or, as a colourful Romanian proverb puts it, "amassing dead-horse-shoes." Accordingly, they let the sleeping wisdom of History sleep in peace.

It may also be that historians became shy to teach the old uncertain stories, si non e vero e ben trovato,** because of their urge to be honourable scientists. They seek only certain and high-level facts of “historic” significance. They can only represent true universal beliefs, justified by fact, based on necessary causes in objective environments, deduced through impeccable methods and logical processes. Perhaps these learned people, cannot care for the practical old people-level recipes remembered from history, since that truth is not scientific, not pure enough, not precise enough. Obviously, you cannot reproduce the narratives of history in a laboratory to test them.

The serious historians must have found in their inner chambers that the traces of written history left to us are thin, imprecise, biased, mostly fable, cosmetic, self-serving apology by leaders who dreamt their image into posterity. Maybe they found that the most interesting memories transmitted to us from the past offer mainly lies, fantasies, personal detail and wishful interpretation, no laws; What's the use of stories that are not even true? [6]

Maybe there is too much pressure on the historian to be politically correct, which history is not. Perhaps the present meaning of the past changes too often. Indeed, I remember my late Mother, a researcher in history saying years ago under a totalitarian regime; “The past is most difficult to foresee nowadays, as the line of the Party changes all the time.”

History developed so much the last century; the archaeologist dug deeper and deeper into the well of the past, the researchers found and checked flurries of documents, concepts and methods are more and more precise. What a shame that these bright learned minds give us so little! Forgive me the time-worn jest, perhaps they specialize so much that each learns more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing or nothing about everything [7].

                                                                    *

For the rest of us end-users of history the question lingers: why do so many excellent historians so little to educate us wiser? Why is it that schoolboy Montaigne found more wisdom in Herodotus and Erasmus’s gossipy Apopthegmes [7a] than we could learn today from the huge, sound treatises (not to speak about the boring school-lessons)?

I confess that for me, the only public benefit of history – and a vital benefit too - is Herodotus’ initial intention, to teach something meaningful from past in order for us to do better next time we meet something similar.

                                                                     *

We can learn wisdom from history, elusive as it is; I am not shocked by memories being most often a mixture of interpreted reality and of fable. So are some of the great works of literature and of art, fabricated to be full of human and historic truth and to generate civilisation. What I seek in the history text, for myself and for the ones I want to educate with wisdom is some coherent and understandable form, meaningful at my own level; gestalt, metaphor, comparison, striking narratives from which we can learn to live better, accounts of essence, typical of real life that was. I imagine a concept of “historic truth” akin to literary truth - a narration that caries historic meaning - the deep human truth that the honest historian understood from the many lacunar and uncertain witnessing and documents studied.

We need mental treasuries that would furnish minds well made, able to judge well and exclaim “But this happened before!” instead of doing the same mistakes again as if newborn in a squirrel-cage of ever turning Samsara. People who do learn from the past may be able to cause progress instead of suffering it. They may also do more to avoid the decline of our "culminant" civilisation of the day.

If Humanity saw all that before, let Humanity tell me what it means for me! ... I am avid to know what how past life was lived, and its advice for people today and tomorrow.

                                                                *

Maybe the best historians of today would care to create – the same way some courageous scholars write of private [8] and intimate [9] life across the centuries – a basic level of “life experience” historiography. They would share with us, even without Method, what they learned personally about human nature, about life events and situations, to explain us what they understood from their research that what we should know to live better. We would trust them, on their word.

Can’t we do for people at least as much as Herodotus?

___________
* To put some water in my wine, I must concede that there may be many reasons for which we - and our governments - don't learn wisdom from history; like our mind’s inability to count with things out of sight, too far away or too long ago. Indeed, we hardly learn from our parents; why would we listen to people dead ages before? I only consider here one important cause, the work of the historians, as something could be done about it.
 
[1]Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, The Philosophy of History, Batoche Books, Kitchener, Ontario, 2001, p.19 : "Rulers, Statesmen, Nations, are wont to be emphatically commended to the teaching which experience offers in history. But what experience and history teach is this — that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it."

[2] George Santayana The Life of Reason, NEW YORK, CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, 1917, p. 284:”Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
 
[3] Herodotus, Book I, Loeb Classical Library 1920 p. 3

[4] Plutarch, On the Malignity of Herodotus, Moralia XI (Loeb Classical Library 426).

[5] Becker Carl L., Progress and Power: Three Lectures Delivered at Stanford University, on the Raymond Fred West Memorial Foundation, April 1935. Contributors: Carl L. Becker - author. Publisher: Stanford University Press. Place of Publication: Stanford, CA. Publication Year: 1936.

** It may not be true, but it is well conceived

[6] Rushdie, Salman, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Penguin, 1990

[7] I wonder who said this: A physicist learns more and more about less and less, until he knows everything about nothing; whereas a philosopher learns less and less about more and more, until he knows nothing about everything.  The Routledge Dictionary of Quotation (Robert Andrews)  quotes Nicholas Murray Buttler 1862-1948 to have sais at the Columbia University that “ An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less”

[7a] Erasmus The Apopthegmesof Erasmus, Printed by Robert Roberts, Boston Lincolnshire, 1877
 
[8] Ariès, P., Duby, G., Veyne, P., Goldhammer, A., History of Private Life, Vol. I-V, Belknap Press, 1992-1998

[9] Zeldin Theodore, An Intimate History of Humanity, Vintage, 1995