Those who forget history

I'm sure you're familiar with the Santayana quote: Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it. In that case, we're in serious trouble, since the collective historical knowledge of most of the freshmen I come into contact with is that George Bush was elected president--and was it 3 or 4 times?

At any rate, I subscribe to Powell's Bookstore's Review A Day. Sometimes the books are boring, sometimes the reviews are boring, but most of the time the books and reviews seem very worth reading and I have a big file of books to catch up on when I retire.

Today's book review was of Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts by Clive James (you can read it here: http://www.powells.com/atl/review/2007_04_10), and there's one paragraph in the review I particularly like:

"Alasdair MacIntyre once wrote an essay called "How to Write About Lenin -- and How Not To," in which he said that the one unpardonable historical sin was that of being patronizing. If you could not or would not care to imagine what conditions were like in 1905 or 1917, then it might be best if you kept your virginal judgments to yourself."

I've always thought this was important when it comes to writing or thinking about history. You can look at the past through a modern lense--Marxism, feminism, political correctness--but you cannot apply current cultural mores to the people who lived that history. To understand how and why something happened, it seems to me you have to be able to see things through their eyes. We can use our philosophical lense to tease a lesson we can use in our time, but we can't use it to understand or define; we can only do that by putting ourselves in their time.

Here endeth the opinion.

(Another great quote, from the inimitable GBS: We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.)