You may want to agree that 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.
I am puzzled by the apparent lack of effect of such a vital accumulation and millenary transmission of human experience along the generations of History; the chronicle of facts of life, ways of the world, narrations of errors, victories, situations, events - all those precious and meaningful patterns seem hardly used.
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 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? Are not the pages of History one of the main treasuries of practical wisdom offered to us?
*
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 from history; like our known inability to count with things out of sight, to far away or too long ago.
I only consider here one important cause, because we could do something about it to improve our lives:
We do not learn from History because we are not educated from History.
We would learn more from accounts meaningful for our life, presented in compelling forms, to understand and to follow.
Maybe the historians and the teachers do not know anymore how to speak with each other or, if the teachers don't want to listen, the historians do not find the words and the ways to speak to common people. Something clips the wings of the historians.
*
Maybe that which clips the wings of historians as educators is, paradoxically, the idea of progress[3]. Some may feel that it is not worth learning from history because the world moves forward and upwards, irreversibly and what was, will never come again.* The future is forever new. Accordingly, we let the sleeping wisdom of History sleep in peace.
I imagine Professor Strawman ridiculing me: “Don’t you see Ioan, you silly man that progress is as objective, inevitable and irreversible as evolution – from amoebas to our brains, from cut stone to computers, from knee-jerk to thinking, from superstition to reason? Are you blind to the proven obvious? Can’t you see how well, how healthy, how comfortable, how much more we live compared with the French Kings?”
Why learn from the past when you know, following Darwin and Marx that Matter and its Energy evolves by itself? Progress advances inexorably, of course: by trial, error, selection of the fittest offspring of chance, determination of economic forces and dialectic succession of contraries. Just join the stream of progress, work, sacrifice what you have to sacrifice for the sake of the future generations, go to war for the future of peace. You are certain, we speak to you in truth, in the name of Reason and of Science, that a future world will come where everything will be better.
Be free by submitting to the necessity of the natural laws, to the objective laws of material, scientific, technological, economic and social progress and lo, History grows by itself, like grass, from less to more, simple to complex, bad to better, ignorance to science. To represent this huge force, the historians offers mainly fable, stories, detail and wishful interpretation, no laws; What's the use of stories that are not even true? [4] Since humanity does not move by the dreams and the deeds of great people, there is no use for us to learn from history recounted."
If Prof. Strawman is right, if progress is a one-way upwards, blind force of infinite perfectibility, History may be just wild goose chase, a fool’s errand or, as a colourful Romanian proverb puts it, "amassing dead-horse-shoes."
Interesting! I feel like I just stumbled upon an axiom; progress is "obviously" given, of course, a law of nature! Hmm! Is it?
Some other fatalist worshipers - of deity - know that whatever will happen is written, we cannot change it: Inshallah , Deo Volente, Be’Ezrat Hashem, God-willing. "There is nothing new in the world but we can do nothing about it."
Fatalism may be also a feature of many a loser’s victim-character: Everything that happens is because of somebody else, forces outside of us, beyond our reach.
Let me assume, as a working hypothesis that the believers in any universal and necessary causality - natural or supernatural - have no use of wisdom from the past; at least no voluntary use of it. History cannot help much such citizens of the land where everything that is not forbidden is mandatory. [5]
For all these straw people history is school-chore, book-worm stuff, hobby, literature, hours wasted, time better used in a laboratory or a church.
*
For the modest rest of us, not hindered by fatalism, the question remains: 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 mirabilia than we learn today from the huge, sound treatises?
History developed so much the last century; the archaeologist dug deeper and deeper into the well of the past, the historians found and checked flurries of documents, methods are more and more reliable. 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**.
Maybe there is another cause of shyness; perhaps the serious historians found in their inner chambers that the thin traces of written history left to us are imprecise, biased, mostly fable, cosmetic, self-serving apology by leaders who dreamt their image into posterity. Maybe there is too much pressure on history to be politically correct. Perhaps its interpretation changes too often. Indeed, I remember my Mother, a researcher in history saying years ago in a totalitarian country; “The past is most difficult to foresee nowadays, as the line of the party changes perpetually.”
Because of such imprecision and fantasy righteous Plutarch will cry that the king is naked: “Herodotus is a father of lies!”[6] and for millennia everybody will nod approvingly, forgetting that unscientific Herodotus created the very word History, and its aim, the occupation of writing down the memories of the past for future generations to learn.
Methinks, some good people from the teachers of today, tired of life, lost faith in the practical value of old recipes from history, since their truth is literary truth not scientific, not pure enough, not precise enough. Obviously, the narratives of history cannot be reproduced in laboratory in order to be tested. I feel sad that the words of Herodotus, some two thousands five hundred years ago, about the task of the historian 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 marvelous deeds done by Greeks and foreigners and especially the reason why they warred against each other may not lack renown.”[7]
Frankly, for me, as a layman, learning something meaningful from past critical situations, errors and ways to do better is the only public benefit of history – and a vital benefit too, to do better next time we meet something similar.
Most probably there are such wonderful pragmatic books drawing learning 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, with all their bias. I can hardly imagine those tomes as a compelling source of wisdom for the common people or even for their elected governments. We did not learn history in this way in our school years. Or should we count on the television series and the big-budget films to become wiser?
*
So, let me summarise my heretic argument valid, I am aware, only within the limited sample of my own superficially informed mind;
I do see that there is much visible progress in tools, technology, comfort, knowledge, and understanding, in the refinement of civilisation; but there is any time a seemingly ignored potential of regress, decline, collapse, of falling back into barbarianism, from humanity into animality, from affluence into destruction and mere survival; anytime! A cultivated nation can turn beastly in a few years, or even faster. Imagine turning off electricity for a while. See war at work and judge what a "civilised" nation can do in wartime.
Civilisation is nurtured in good family for long years to mature while savagery is born every day anew, in one instant, with each cuddly newborn. A slip, a disaster and everything tips... or it just declines, too slow for us to see.
I believe that progress in knowledge, technology and in competence did not produce equivalent evolution in the human nature; civilisation knows refinement in each favourable age but the slump and the relapse are always barbarian; tempers, characters, instincts, feelings like love and hate, crisis, stress, are the same; if you do read literature and history, if you travel, if you look around you in moments of truth and emergency you meet today the same passions, dilemmas and dramas as in Antiquity and probably they are not so far today from what they were at the door of the pre-historic caves.
Nothing irreversible progressed in the life-stories of human beings.
*
We can learn from history, elusive as it is; I am not shocked by history being most probably 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, Gestalt, metaphor, comparison, striking narratives from which we can learn to live better, not precise accounts but essence, typical of real life that was.
I need all the 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 understand that they can do more for regress not to happen to end our proud "unique" civilisation of the day.
If Humanity saw all that before, let Humanity tell me what it means for me! I do believe that some of the critical situations of history are typical and forever repeated “mutatis mutandis”, worth learning from... I am avid to know what those events meant, what they mean for me and what they mean for people today and tomorrow.
Let's do at least as much as Herodotus!
I am puzzled by the apparent lack of effect of such a vital accumulation and millenary transmission of human experience along the generations of History; the chronicle of facts of life, ways of the world, narrations of errors, victories, situations, events - all those precious and meaningful patterns seem hardly used.
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 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? Are not the pages of History one of the main treasuries of practical wisdom offered to us?
*
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 from history; like our known inability to count with things out of sight, to far away or too long ago.
I only consider here one important cause, because we could do something about it to improve our lives:
We do not learn from History because we are not educated from History.
We would learn more from accounts meaningful for our life, presented in compelling forms, to understand and to follow.
Maybe the historians and the teachers do not know anymore how to speak with each other or, if the teachers don't want to listen, the historians do not find the words and the ways to speak to common people. Something clips the wings of the historians.
*
Maybe that which clips the wings of historians as educators is, paradoxically, the idea of progress[3]. Some may feel that it is not worth learning from history because the world moves forward and upwards, irreversibly and what was, will never come again.* The future is forever new. Accordingly, we let the sleeping wisdom of History sleep in peace.
I imagine Professor Strawman ridiculing me: “Don’t you see Ioan, you silly man that progress is as objective, inevitable and irreversible as evolution – from amoebas to our brains, from cut stone to computers, from knee-jerk to thinking, from superstition to reason? Are you blind to the proven obvious? Can’t you see how well, how healthy, how comfortable, how much more we live compared with the French Kings?”
Why learn from the past when you know, following Darwin and Marx that Matter and its Energy evolves by itself? Progress advances inexorably, of course: by trial, error, selection of the fittest offspring of chance, determination of economic forces and dialectic succession of contraries. Just join the stream of progress, work, sacrifice what you have to sacrifice for the sake of the future generations, go to war for the future of peace. You are certain, we speak to you in truth, in the name of Reason and of Science, that a future world will come where everything will be better.
Be free by submitting to the necessity of the natural laws, to the objective laws of material, scientific, technological, economic and social progress and lo, History grows by itself, like grass, from less to more, simple to complex, bad to better, ignorance to science. To represent this huge force, the historians offers mainly fable, stories, detail and wishful interpretation, no laws; What's the use of stories that are not even true? [4] Since humanity does not move by the dreams and the deeds of great people, there is no use for us to learn from history recounted."
If Prof. Strawman is right, if progress is a one-way upwards, blind force of infinite perfectibility, History may be just wild goose chase, a fool’s errand or, as a colourful Romanian proverb puts it, "amassing dead-horse-shoes."
Interesting! I feel like I just stumbled upon an axiom; progress is "obviously" given, of course, a law of nature! Hmm! Is it?
Some other fatalist worshipers - of deity - know that whatever will happen is written, we cannot change it: Inshallah , Deo Volente, Be’Ezrat Hashem, God-willing. "There is nothing new in the world but we can do nothing about it."
Fatalism may be also a feature of many a loser’s victim-character: Everything that happens is because of somebody else, forces outside of us, beyond our reach.
Let me assume, as a working hypothesis that the believers in any universal and necessary causality - natural or supernatural - have no use of wisdom from the past; at least no voluntary use of it. History cannot help much such citizens of the land where everything that is not forbidden is mandatory. [5]
For all these straw people history is school-chore, book-worm stuff, hobby, literature, hours wasted, time better used in a laboratory or a church.
*
For the modest rest of us, not hindered by fatalism, the question remains: 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 mirabilia than we learn today from the huge, sound treatises?
History developed so much the last century; the archaeologist dug deeper and deeper into the well of the past, the historians found and checked flurries of documents, methods are more and more reliable. 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**.
Maybe there is another cause of shyness; perhaps the serious historians found in their inner chambers that the thin traces of written history left to us are imprecise, biased, mostly fable, cosmetic, self-serving apology by leaders who dreamt their image into posterity. Maybe there is too much pressure on history to be politically correct. Perhaps its interpretation changes too often. Indeed, I remember my Mother, a researcher in history saying years ago in a totalitarian country; “The past is most difficult to foresee nowadays, as the line of the party changes perpetually.”
Because of such imprecision and fantasy righteous Plutarch will cry that the king is naked: “Herodotus is a father of lies!”[6] and for millennia everybody will nod approvingly, forgetting that unscientific Herodotus created the very word History, and its aim, the occupation of writing down the memories of the past for future generations to learn.
Methinks, some good people from the teachers of today, tired of life, lost faith in the practical value of old recipes from history, since their truth is literary truth not scientific, not pure enough, not precise enough. Obviously, the narratives of history cannot be reproduced in laboratory in order to be tested. I feel sad that the words of Herodotus, some two thousands five hundred years ago, about the task of the historian 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 marvelous deeds done by Greeks and foreigners and especially the reason why they warred against each other may not lack renown.”[7]
Frankly, for me, as a layman, learning something meaningful from past critical situations, errors and ways to do better is the only public benefit of history – and a vital benefit too, to do better next time we meet something similar.
Most probably there are such wonderful pragmatic books drawing learning 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, with all their bias. I can hardly imagine those tomes as a compelling source of wisdom for the common people or even for their elected governments. We did not learn history in this way in our school years. Or should we count on the television series and the big-budget films to become wiser?
*
So, let me summarise my heretic argument valid, I am aware, only within the limited sample of my own superficially informed mind;
I do see that there is much visible progress in tools, technology, comfort, knowledge, and understanding, in the refinement of civilisation; but there is any time a seemingly ignored potential of regress, decline, collapse, of falling back into barbarianism, from humanity into animality, from affluence into destruction and mere survival; anytime! A cultivated nation can turn beastly in a few years, or even faster. Imagine turning off electricity for a while. See war at work and judge what a "civilised" nation can do in wartime.
Civilisation is nurtured in good family for long years to mature while savagery is born every day anew, in one instant, with each cuddly newborn. A slip, a disaster and everything tips... or it just declines, too slow for us to see.
I believe that progress in knowledge, technology and in competence did not produce equivalent evolution in the human nature; civilisation knows refinement in each favourable age but the slump and the relapse are always barbarian; tempers, characters, instincts, feelings like love and hate, crisis, stress, are the same; if you do read literature and history, if you travel, if you look around you in moments of truth and emergency you meet today the same passions, dilemmas and dramas as in Antiquity and probably they are not so far today from what they were at the door of the pre-historic caves.
Nothing irreversible progressed in the life-stories of human beings.
*
We can learn from history, elusive as it is; I am not shocked by history being most probably 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, Gestalt, metaphor, comparison, striking narratives from which we can learn to live better, not precise accounts but essence, typical of real life that was.
I need all the 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 understand that they can do more for regress not to happen to end our proud "unique" civilisation of the day.
If Humanity saw all that before, let Humanity tell me what it means for me! I do believe that some of the critical situations of history are typical and forever repeated “mutatis mutandis”, worth learning from... I am avid to know what those events meant, what they mean for me and what they mean for people today and tomorrow.
Let's do at least as much as Herodotus!
___________
[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.”
*(With all this talk about progress I imagine Socrates saying with his ironic smile: “So, if progress is so obvious for you, as you all speak so firmly about it, you will certainly know what it is and what it means. Explain to me, Sir, what it is, since I am totally confused...”) In fact, I proceeded to study the matter and I discovered how naive I was. This "solid" notion is for the least suspect. The seemingly innocent word, presented as an axiom, a proven principle, is not neutral, nor scientific; it hides ethical beliefs of necessary and uni-directional evolution from bad or evil towards the good and a promise of a better future life very much like the one of the best religions. It is a notion of hope. Amen!
[3] 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.
Read this long quote, from Becker, it is worth considering:
“WE ARE all familiar with the word "progress." Like any other word it has a primary meaning, which my dictionary informs me is "to move forward." In this sense it is merely a convenient term of reference which one may use without becoming involved in any metaphysical imbroglio. But, like many another innocent word, the word "progress" has taken on secondary meanings. Raised to the dignity of a noun and charged with philosophical implications, it has long been permitted to associate, perhaps not quite on equal terms, with such eminent scientific words as "process," "development," and "evolution." In this austere company it is not to be approached lightly, or without precautions. It is not, like "process," an entirely neutral term, or, like "development" and "evolution," one from which it is easy to eliminate all but the faintest vestiges of ethical significance. On the contrary, it is so heavily loaded with moral and teleological overtones that no scientist with any sense of decency will use it. It implies that there are values in the world. It implies, not only that the world moves forward, but that it moves forward to some good purpose, to some more felicitous state. In short, the word Progress, like the Cross or the Crescent, is a symbol that stands for a social doctrine, a philosophy of human destiny. “
Read also the eye-opening analysis of the notion by J. B. Bury in Bury, J. B., The Idea of Progress, Macmillan and Co., London, 1920
[4] Rushdie, Salman, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Penguin, 1990
[5] T.H.White, The Once and Future King
** I wander 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”
[6] Plutarch, On the Malignity of Herodotus, Moralia XI (Loeb Classical Library 426).
[7] Herodotus, Book I, Loeb Classical Library 1920 p. 3
[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.”
*(With all this talk about progress I imagine Socrates saying with his ironic smile: “So, if progress is so obvious for you, as you all speak so firmly about it, you will certainly know what it is and what it means. Explain to me, Sir, what it is, since I am totally confused...”) In fact, I proceeded to study the matter and I discovered how naive I was. This "solid" notion is for the least suspect. The seemingly innocent word, presented as an axiom, a proven principle, is not neutral, nor scientific; it hides ethical beliefs of necessary and uni-directional evolution from bad or evil towards the good and a promise of a better future life very much like the one of the best religions. It is a notion of hope. Amen!
[3] 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.
Read this long quote, from Becker, it is worth considering:
“WE ARE all familiar with the word "progress." Like any other word it has a primary meaning, which my dictionary informs me is "to move forward." In this sense it is merely a convenient term of reference which one may use without becoming involved in any metaphysical imbroglio. But, like many another innocent word, the word "progress" has taken on secondary meanings. Raised to the dignity of a noun and charged with philosophical implications, it has long been permitted to associate, perhaps not quite on equal terms, with such eminent scientific words as "process," "development," and "evolution." In this austere company it is not to be approached lightly, or without precautions. It is not, like "process," an entirely neutral term, or, like "development" and "evolution," one from which it is easy to eliminate all but the faintest vestiges of ethical significance. On the contrary, it is so heavily loaded with moral and teleological overtones that no scientist with any sense of decency will use it. It implies that there are values in the world. It implies, not only that the world moves forward, but that it moves forward to some good purpose, to some more felicitous state. In short, the word Progress, like the Cross or the Crescent, is a symbol that stands for a social doctrine, a philosophy of human destiny. “
Read also the eye-opening analysis of the notion by J. B. Bury in Bury, J. B., The Idea of Progress, Macmillan and Co., London, 1920
[4] Rushdie, Salman, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Penguin, 1990
[5] T.H.White, The Once and Future King
** I wander 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”
[6] Plutarch, On the Malignity of Herodotus, Moralia XI (Loeb Classical Library 426).
[7] Herodotus, Book I, Loeb Classical Library 1920 p. 3
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