Alas, poor Santayana…
Please note this trenchant comment from zhombre:
Poor Santayana. Didn’t have a clue. Whether you remember the past or not, you will relive it, because some other SOB doesn’t.
George Santayana—for those of you who know your history—was the philosopher who declared, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (And by the way, according to Wiki, Santayana had a mother named Josefina Borré¡s, “better known as Jo Bo”—could this be someone having a little fun with history and Wiki at our expense?)
Santayana’s aphorism is famous because it’s not only elegantly expressed, but because it seems true as well as tragic. But, as zhombre points out, it takes more than remembering the past to be able to avoid a repetition of its worst themes.
In public matters, it’s the aggregate of the population—and/or the leaders—who must remember the past in order to prevent a recurrence. For the individual who remembers and even foresees but is relatively powerless, all he or she can do is protest, endure, emigrate, or in extreme cases try to stage a revolt.
Perhaps that’s why George Bernard Shaw was able to offer another pithy observation about history: “We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.”
What we don’t learn from history is saying, “It’s different this time.” is generally wrong.
The major lessons are usually known, or, once the issue comes up, previous examples are usually not argued as to whether they actually exist.
It’s just that “it’s different this time.”
Shaw also said that we should all stand before a council and justify out existence every 5 years.
For the individual who remembers and even foresees but is relatively powerless, all he or she can do is protest, endure, emigrate, or in extreme cases try to stage a revolt.
you left out suicide… i know more than one who has confided in me that if it does change, they will commit suicide to avoid their childhood again. (they are romanian).
and another you left out is what so many did. the read the writing on the wall, and changed sides, even if temporary… do you really think the majority of germans actually wanted what hitler was doing? read how many attempts on his life.
no… what will happen is what will happen, those like me will leave if they can (i cant), and the others will look for an opportunity to participate wholeheartedly…
tis better to be a guard in a camp than a resident. and thats what most people actually do.
its what i meant when i said that your strapped down into a bad acid trip on a rollercoaster in the rain…
all you can do is attempt to weather it in some way.. and that will include every way that fortune brings you. even if your job is to help exterminate others. remember weisels story? he was conscripted after the fact, but others joined up front to avoid the same end.
the point though is that you can join and live ok as you get through it, or you can oppose it, and live poorly or die early as you get through it. either way, you get through it or dont, you do better, or not.
If you know no history? My firm hires engineering interns in our European office (for cheap) and one of the perks is they come over to the US for a while to help on projects. We send US students the other way. After a year of mostly Anglo-Irish students (plus one German) I have found they are utterly ignorant of history. Not just of the USA but their own country as well. I’m not talking history geek stuff but basic things like the Magna Carta, WW II, Cold war etc.
They have no sense of the path their own country has taken to get where it is today, or the sacrifices their parents and grandparents made. This is great fodder for the left. If the next generation knows nothing of the efforts in building their society, then changing it seems effortless.
I was sitting in Jackson MS with one of the students on Election night and we were chatting with the waitress (a strong McCain supporter). My young associate noted that Obama had a lot of youth support. I responded that that’s because the young are stupid and easily swayed. Their support was wasted because it was not serious or thoughtful. Learning History is the only way to gain a measure of wisdom for the young.
An even more important problems is that people tend to learn the wrong lesson from history.
Those who CAN remember the past are condemned to live among idiots repeating it.
Steve Setzer
In public matters, it’s the aggregate of the population–and/or the leaders–who must remember the past in order to prevent a recurrence.
This is why it’s unfortunate that Obama knows so little history beyond the leftist Howard Zinn version.
Today’s WSJ has a splendid smackdown of Obama’s disarmament speech calling him out for his historical illiteracy:
“And I had an excellent meeting with President Medvedev of Russia to get started that process of reducing our nuclear stockpiles, which will then give us a greater moral authority to say to Iran, don’t develop a nuclear weapon; to say to North Korea, don’t proliferate nuclear weapons,” Mr. Obama said, implying that previous American Presidents had lacked such “authority.”
The President went even further in Prague, noting that “as a nuclear power — as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon — the United States has a moral responsibility to act.” That barely concealed apology for Hiroshima is an insult to the memory of Harry Truman, who saved a million lives by ending World War II without a bloody invasion of Japan. As for the persuasive power of “moral authority,” we should have learned long ago that the concept has no meaning in Pyongyang or Tehran, much less in the rocky hideouts of al Qaeda.
The truth is that Mr. Obama’s nuclear vision has reality exactly backward. To the extent that the U.S. has maintained a large and credible nuclear arsenal, it has prevented war, defeated the Soviet Union, shored up our alliances and created an umbrella that persuaded other nations that they don’t need a bomb to defend themselves.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123905870471194735.html
This post reminds me how my father tried in vain to convince me not to buy the $400 car that came with jumper cables….And i tried in vain to convince my teenage son not to buy the $800 car that came with jumper cables.
My money is on my grandson continuing this great tradition one day.
Obama: “…which will then give us a greater moral authority to say to Iran, don’t develop a nuclear weapon; to say to North Korea, don’t proliferate nuclear weapons,”
General laughter all around.
Obama: “Thanks folks, I’ll be here all week. And don’t forget to tip your wait staff.”
Learning History is the only way to gain a measure of wisdom for the young.
And experiencing history, by repeating it, is often the fastest way to learn it.
I remember when a friend in the Bush 41 White House gave me Fukayama’s The End of History , I said, “You’ve got to be kidding.”
John Knowles: “That was my sarcastic summer. It was only long after that I recognized sarcasm as the protest of people who are weak.” In this case, too weak-minded to make an argument at all.
One of the few true things Marx said was that history repeats itself but “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”
And you people who are making light of Obama’s views on nuclear proliferation are mistaken, quite mistaken. If the Iranians go nuclear he has threatened them with a UN resolution and a very strong speech by the president himself. Can’t you see the mullahs quaking at the very prospect?
“Shaw also said that we should all stand before a council and justify out existence every 5 years.”
Which is an excellent illustration that the exponent of fascism Shaw himself “learned nothing from history.”
“they are utterly ignorant of history.”
That’s not a bug, that’s a feature!
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is…found dead, halfway up the mountain. HG Wells. People cannot know what they don’t wish to know.
DirtyJobsGuy has it right, BTW. Whenever you read those stories about how far US students are behind the rest of the world in various subjects, it is mostly crap. As miserable as the knowledge of American students might be, they are far ahead of other countries. The international model is to teach a collection of older facts, but spend the time teaching the 20th C in indoctrination. They work very hard at keeping uncomfortable information out of general circulation. Europeans do not simply not know important facts, they know an alternative history that is fantasy.
Artful, you will be saddened to know that when my sons came here from Romania as teenagers, neither of them had ever heard of Queen Marie. When I tested this on adults the next time I visited, I found that almost no one in Romania had even heard of her – including many schoolteachers! Sad – probably the only good modern ruler they had.
Oblio — Saved your Knowles quote to my file for such things. Thanks.
Elegantly put; elegantly expressed.
“And experiencing history, by repeating it, is often the fastest way to learn it.”
And then there’s this:
“Live and learn, they say…but the difficulty seems to lie in living while you learn.”
–from Needle by Hal Clement, quoted by Robert Conquest in the introduction to Reflections on a Ravaged Century.
The implied message of Conquest’s book is that all of humanity must struggle to live while waiting for progressives to abandon their infatuation with utopian fantasies.
In case any subsequent reader wonders why I started talking about sarcasm (8.13), my comment was made in response to the contribution of a wandering KosKid, who made a stupid and sarcastic remark with some sexual undertones. Neo dealt with him more effectively by sending him to oblivion without wasting any words about it.
Re history and Shaw, I seem to recall that Shaw was quoting Hegel. But I might not be remembering history correctly. 🙂
Perhaps Cassandra was just remembering a bit of history the others had forgotten?
I particularly like the saying, often attributed to Mark Twain, that history does not repeat, but it does rhyme.
Both this quote and the Santayana quote are two ways of saying the same thing — that human nature does not change. It took me to my mid-40s to come to the realization that this is actually a really important principle and that it’s the practical purpose of studying history. If you are considering a social experiment, look to the past. Some past culture has almost certainly given it at try, and we are no smarter, more highly evolved or clever than they are. We are just like them, and if their experiment ended in disaster, it is likely that ours will too.
Now Bernie Sanders is calling for a Socialist revolution. If only there was some history to which we could turn, but obviously all previous attempts were filmed in black and white, and the people wore those drab, frumpy clothes, and they must not have been very smart or clever than us if things ended so badly for them.
Sevenwheel:
Leftists always think it’ll work THIS time.
Also, socialists can point to places like Sweden as being just fine, although it’s actually not all that fine and in addition Sweden was a very different type of place to begin with.
You also might enjoy this, from Allan Bloom.