"Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it"- George Santayana
This means that if you don't learn from past mistakes, the same mistakes will be made over and over; we must remember the lessons from previous mistakes to avoid them reoccuring.
So does having knowledge about history aid in avoiding the same mistakes of the past?
It seems in the present day we heed Santayana's warning. We remember Pearl Harbor, 9/11, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Holocaust etc...So is this remembering the prevention to any of it occuring again..is rememberance a safety net? Personally i believe that even those who remember the past are likely to repeat it, if in a slightly new way. Remembering the past is subjective; for example a lesson from WWII would be that it is stupid to allow a dangerous regime to grow; it should be fought with all power possible. So this logic/knowledge of the past could be applied to another situation; in the past it was wise to fight communism at all costs so does that mean that in the case of the Vietnam War, it would have been better to fight harder?
The past gives us hints about how to tackle modern situations but not a complete picture; those who remember may be just as condemned to repeat the past as those who don't.
how do you determine it is "wise to fight communism at all costs" though? Its a pretty subjective claim to be making, don't you think?
ReplyDeleteremembering the past is good for the individuals to help get through the past but it makes no difference to what will happen in the future. if remembering the past helped future conflicts then it can be argued the Iraq war would never have happened due to what happened in Vietnam. there is no relevance between past and present conflicts or any situation as the context is forever changing
ReplyDeleteRoss, that may be a bit too extreme. People do remember past situations and attempt to adjust their behavior in light of them. E.g., Solidarity in the 1980s learned from the coup that brought their attempts to negotiate with reform communists, so in 1989 they did things very differently (and hence made different mistakes).
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