Are Those Who Cannot Remember The Past Condemned To Repeat It?
A New Interpretation of "History Repeats Itself"
The notion that history repeats itself can be found in Burke, Marx, Santayana, and Churchill, to name only a few. Nietzsche’s notion of Eternal Return, drawing on Eastern mythology, conceives the entire history of the world as a repetitious loop, one long GIF billions of years old.
The common adage, variously attributed, that those who do not study the past are doomed to repeat it is the kind of slogan you’d expect to hang in a high school history classroom. But it’s misleading, because it’s possible that those who study the past will also be condemned to repeat it, by drawing the wrong lessons or by misconstruing the past (or both).
The myth of Oedipus might well fit the drama of the modern historian—the search for knowledge of the past does not liberate Oedipus, because the tragedy has already occurred. All it does is hasten his recognition. Were Oedipus not motivated to get to the bottom of things he would be spared the realization that compels him to take out his own eyes in shock.
While neither Burke nor Santayana intended the interpretation I am about to give, allow me to defend those who repeat history precisely by not studying it.
To obtain my interpretation we should read “repeat” as “reproduce” as in biological reproduction. Those who are too busy producing and raising children to spend time thinking about the past, searching archives, contemplating the historiography of ancient events, are condemned—by their ignorance to repeat history; that is, to carry history forward in a literal sense. But those who seek to know the past perfectly—as Borges’s story of Funes the Memorius illustrates—will be so paralyzed they won’t be able to act. More anecdotally, they may come to an anti-natalist position, depressed about humanity’s future prospects, and thus refuse to repeat history by refusing to have children. Alternatively, they will be so engrossed in study that the pull of children will seem a distraction from their quest for enlightenment.
Inadvertently, Santayana can be made to say the opposite of what he thinks, namely, that the cost of remembering the past is a failure to perpetuate the human future.
Life is about the tension between understanding and action. The valorization of history (or any mode of understanding) hides this fundamental tradeoff. The person of action is too occupied with the present to have the luxury of historical consciousness.
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