Does anybody learn from history?

[Ayatollah So]

Does anybody learn from history? Plenty of folks say we should, and people are always drawing historical parallels to current events. Trouble is, they're usually drawing very different parallels, and coming to opposite conclusions.

Learning from history, or trying to, has been going on for a long time, so there ought to be quite a track record we can examine. Rephrasing my question a little: take a randomly selected person, reasonably intelligent and historically knowledgeable for that time and place, who tried to "learn from history". Did it work? Or were the results laughable, or tragic?

 

[Knight-Dragon]

Good topic for discussion.

Too often, the people who matter (i.e. those who make the national decisions) don't know enough about the past to learn fr it... is my observation. Most people also tend to view their past thru a prism, which only shows what they wish to see. They also tend to stick to learning about a portion of history that's of immediate interest to them, and skip most often the darker, worse parts (and miss the point about learning fr history...).

 

[stratego]

I think the problem is people assume we're much more civilized than people of past. Even if we're making the same mistakes, people will often ignore it and assume it's a much different situation.

 

[Gelion]

Interestingly I had trouble explaining to people that we are no different from the people from the past. Teach an ancient Minoan in modern science/life from age 4 he'll be as educated as any person today. We haven't evolved we just got better at using the resources given to us.

 

[Sir Bugsy]

I think it depends upon the person. Someone like George Patton studied history and used those lessons extensively in developing battle plans. Whenever you have someone who is a student of history, you find that they have learned from history and rarely repeat the same mistakes. You see examples of this in all walks of life, including medicine, electronics, aviation, maritime, and military, to name a few.

Then you get the ones who don't know how to spell or pronounce history, let alone learn from it (a certain person from Crawford, Texas comes to mind.) As a result we end up relearning the lessons we learned in Vietnam and Somolia.

In general, I think mankind has learned well from the school of hard knocks.

 

[Hitro]

I think the problem is not only a lack of learning from history, it can be as much or even more dangerous if people draw the wrong conclusions from it.

 

[FriendlyFire]

The only thing we learn from history is we dont learn from history

 

[Provolution]

I think what we can learn from history, is that it is a major source of entertainment.
People are stupid pigs, flawed, egocentric, mean, brutal and greedy, not to mention powerhungry, and will always create historical problems.

However, we can learn that the general trend is that the ones that deny modern education, technology and modern organization will be destroyed, and that migration and reproduction used on libertarian borders may have worked in the Dark Ages, but will not match up to the modern supersociety of 2004-

 

[Adso de Fimnu]

History is the fiction we invent to persuade ourselves that events are knowable and that life has order and direction. That's why events are always reinterpreted when values change. We need new versions of history to allow for our current prejudices.

(From my quote page, if you're curious.)
He's right, you know. No matter what happens, people in the future reinterpret it to convince themselves they're different. I read history because I enjoy it, not because I think I'll learn much from it.

 

[Red Threat]

I think yes but the Nietzsche's work "On the Use and Abuse of History for Life" makes a great impression to me. It can be summarized by this quote:

"Incidentally, I despise everything which merely instructs me without increasing or immediately enlivening my activity."

 

[Lonkut]

We are human. And that is what humans do: reapeat history.

 

[Persia_Immortal]

Looking at the current global trend, i'll say we'll haven learn from it yet

 

[Dragonlord]

Yes, important lessons can be learned from history. But they are only seldom applied, for several reasons:

1. It's hard to analyse one own's situation objectively
2. One hasn't all the facts of the situation but only limited knowledge

For both these reasons, it's hard to draw a true historic parallel - it's much easier to draw parallels in hindsight.

3. New generations always feel superior to older ones - most people assume that ancestors of many generations back must have been much stupider than we...
4. Most important: those with much knowledge of history and the mindset to anlalyze it extensively aren't usually the ones who make the decisions. Take a look at most policy makers today - how many of them seem to know the first thing about history? Or geography?
The president of the most powerful nation on earth is the most glaring example of this, of course. Though some of his predecessors weren't that much better... Ronald Reagan? Puhleeaaze...!

Of course, for most people the question never arises, since they know nothing at all about history in the first place... ...

 

[Ayatollah So]

So if there are important lessons to be learned from history, what are some examples? And by the way, I didn't mean the history of the sciences. OK, obviously scientists have learned from the experiments of history. I'm thinking primarily of government and foreign policy.

The best proof that it is possible for people to learn from history is to show that historical figures have done so successfully. That is, they drew lessons from their history and applied them and got pretty much the results they expected. And not just by chance, but because the "lesson" drawn really was supported by the evidence available to that person.