‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’

Isuppose I am getting old enough now that there is some meaning to the old saying: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

What with pandemics and aggressive and acquisitive behaviour by nations, it seems to me we would have all been better able to weather the demands and challenges of COVID and to respond internationally to Russian military advances toward and in Ukraine if we had paid more attention in our history lessons.

An ancient wisdom tradition informs us that “there is nothing new under the sun.” It offers this insight as a way to initiate us in the way of wisdom; to initiate the beginning of wisdom in us. This is a helpful observation since we tend to treat new or novel situations as if they represent something genuinely new, and thus require new or novel ways to respond.

Seeking the new, we can spend unnecessary time, time we sometimes cannot afford, in formulating our response. Jettisoning the guidance of the old we prove the maxim: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

I will grant you that there are “new” things, but I am in doubt if most are truly new. New ways of being aggressive are still aggression, new diseases are still diseases. I realize, of course, how old fashioned all of this sounds.

I realize we have lost confidence in truth, in knowing truth, and would be hesitant to proclaim something as “aggression” without qualification. (Ironically, though the relativity of truth was supposed to serve the cause of tolerance, have you noticed how we have with it lost the basis for social discourse — which has for the most part turned into shouting matches). Especially, this “new” insight into the relativity of all truth, since it is a return to ancient sophism, is proof of the maxim: those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.

I must be getting old, because that old maxim is beginning to have a real ring of truth to it.