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Repeating History
Feb. 8th, 2008 08:33 pmI never cared for history in high school, but lately I've been reading a lot of it. I bought another remaindered book on the 1600s today - this one about a Swedish man named I think Rudbeck who became convinced that the lost city of Atlantis, and also all the Greek Gods, were actually from this one area in Sweden. I'm hoping it will be as amusing a read as the cover blurb suggested.
In honor of all that history, here's the random pretentious thought o' the day:
When we tell kids that "those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it," this is one of those silly lies-by-simplification. The thing is, history is just the record of people being people. We're all doomed to repeat it. The point of studying history is not to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, so much as it is to be more aware as we fumble through the mistakes of the present. The best analogy I can come up with here is physics: studying Newtonian mechanics will not exempt you from the law of gravity. [Though I suppose it can lead eventually to the construction of machines that allow one to temporarily circumvent gravity, though the gravity is still there... perhaps studying history can do something similar for us.]
In honor of all that history, here's the random pretentious thought o' the day:
When we tell kids that "those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it," this is one of those silly lies-by-simplification. The thing is, history is just the record of people being people. We're all doomed to repeat it. The point of studying history is not to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, so much as it is to be more aware as we fumble through the mistakes of the present. The best analogy I can come up with here is physics: studying Newtonian mechanics will not exempt you from the law of gravity. [Though I suppose it can lead eventually to the construction of machines that allow one to temporarily circumvent gravity, though the gravity is still there... perhaps studying history can do something similar for us.]
