Can humankind, as a whole, learn from history?

That famous Santayana quote is still a great quote, but it deserves more examination than we usually give it. Can we collectively learn from history? Well, we can try but history seems to keep eluding us as an object lesson. Is it that perhaps we can only learn certain things from history? Is it that even if we do learn, our "lizard brains" overpower rational thought? We can codify what we think we've learned, but does that actually signify learning?

but when you see repugs in power deny the roots of the great depression and then do it all over again, it becomes apparent we are not all playing from the same songbook.

I was thinking more along the lines that it's hard to learn something without actually learning it yourself; that real wisdom isn't merely conveyed but discovered anew by an individual, but that's not always true either.

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The whole World is sitting idly by while the USA performs its Empirical genocide.

USA will eventually fall, as all empires do, but it will kill millions and waste much of the Earth's resources in the process

NO

We don't learn - we sheeples sit back, whine and watch.

It will take a monstrous catastrophe to wake us up;

and by then we will have digressed a few centuries

(sigh)

that's a very parochial and simplistic pov, imo.

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How many people use "parochial" in regular discussion?

to confuse, to belittle, to try to make someone feel stupid?

I dunno why people use words that they damm well know MOST people will not understand.

anyways

back to your "simplistic" claim of my pov - if you weren't to lazy to type it for the rest of us,especially the new people on board that don't have all the acronyms down pat - that's "point of view" to us that have the time and energy to type the whole thing.

USA has been running around the globe with a hard-on ever since they bombed the shit out of Japan, figuring the whole world will bow down to them, - -

and it pretty well did, until GWB did his two invasions.

Latin and South America are standing up to the USA's invasive tactics.

Middle East is trying to stand up, and may succeed.

USA has its bases all over the globe . .

what is so hard to understand that the USA government/military is trying to dominate the globe?

China and Russia have a certain amount of power, but as far as I can see, they stay within their own realm.

everyday conversation. I don't tailor my vocabulary to talk down to people. Most folks are able to deduce the meaning of a word by its context anyway.

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:rofl:

his/her past, animals on the other hand learn much more quickly, for some reason mankind/womankind seems to have a never ending need to repeat their own mistakes....IMHO.....

Learning from history is a much more complicated thing that any of the types of things you see animals learn. Animals repeat plenty of mistakes, especially when the mistake either isn't painful enough to make an immediate impact, or the mistake simply can't be recognized as a mistake at the animal's level of cognition.

Humans might fail to take full advantage of the capacity they have to learn from their own mistakes, the mistakes of other people, and the mistakes of history, but imagining that animals are better than humans at learning from mistakes, when they don't even have a fraction of the capacity (used or unused) humans have for learning -- that's ludicrous, nothing more than fashionable cynicism with no substance behind it.

Our 18 y/o cat still hasn't learned, from numerous unintended kicks and stepped-on tails and feet, that quietly sneaking up under moving human feet isn't such a bright idea.

and each generation being more advanced than the last (this was before vista, of course!:lol:). That is a very good question and like others have stated, we learn as individuals, and my experience or at least the emotions of fear, anxiety, loathing etc. did not pass onto my progeny, unfortunately, and he had to learn all his own lessons in life. Not a bad kid, but had my experiences somehow omosisized?(sic?) he could have begun life at about age 20 mentally!

In my view, it is our memory and perspective of our memories. Literally thinking on history is done in the present. History exists in our present minds and perceptions.

So when we try to learn from history, we learn from something created in part by our view, interpretation, and perceptions, of our memories of events.

This is why the written records of history are so important, they can give us a perspective we may have had at another time, and we can compare those perspectives, and see which ones might have been faulty. In this we can not only learn from history. We can learn to learn from history.

My guess is the failure to learn from history, is when we filter history through the same biases we look at the present. In that just like we create a choice of thoughts of now, we only see the history that supports those same desired thoughts.

To learn from history, you have to find what is different in both the actions and perceptions of those times, and how that is filtered by current perceptions, and accept that either could be better, and let that help show the better perspectives and the worse ones.

The one who can learn from reading..

The few who can learn from example.

The rest have to whizz on the electric fence for themselves.

I think the answer to your question is: Yes, but glacially slowly, with a great deal of backsliding and even more of two foot forward, one reverse.

And the point made upthread about agreeing on the course of history in the first place is a good one.

excellent points about how people learn differently. how do we learn as a whole?

That is the way a culture learns, the conventional wisdom accommodates new data.

The closer conventional wisdom is to reality then the more sane and effective your culture is likely to be.

Edited to add a word left out.

because a necessity for learning is truth and facts. People take away different truths from every lesson and I think it is damn near impossible to change that. Here is an example.....take my family history for instance...I have five siblings and we were all reared pretty shitty to say the least, and although we all witnessed and experienced the same neglect and abuse, we all came away from it with different self truths. I think the same holds true for history of mankind...we tend to gain our truths through perception and perceptions are not always factual.

When it comes to the future, there are three kinds of people: those who let it happen, those who make it happen, and those who wonder what happened. -- John M. Richardson, Jr

http://www.marxist.com/History-old/historicalMaterialism.htm

But of course I expect you to dismiss it out of hand.

I think the piece you linked to makes some valid points, and some that don't work. For instance, it's inconsistent to say that we know very little about primitive cultures and then go on to say that primitive man would have thought this or that.

it said we could know what primitive man wasn't thinking, and in the context of that paragraph it's pretty simple, old Og couldn't conceive of a football game, it was completely alien to his experience.

a bit further on in the text. There's just a lot that doesn't hew to historiographical standards. You can't really make the judgments that the author makes over and over again about pre-historical culture. We don't know, for instance, that there were no class divisions in human societies 10,000+ years ago.

Admittedly, Marx was shooting in the dark on that, that he was so right, based on later acquired knowledge, makes him all the more impressive.

Studies of extant hunter/gather societies are the main basis of this conclusion, along with the fact that anthropologists to date have not found artifacts that would indicate class division.

in structuring a contemporary social order. It's my belief that humans evolved to live in a simple tribal way, BUT we outstripped our own evolution in short order. We have to deal with that reality. That is not to say that we can't draw on what limited knowledge we have- and it's more antropological in nature than historical- but we have to deal with a myriad of factors that weren't part of the social fabric or human experience.

And no, I don't believe that it is universally accepted that there were no class divisions until 10,000 years ago, but as I said, it's not that important a point. Say it's true, what happened to change that and is it realistic to think that it can be changed again? In any case, throughout history, there have been class divisions in the great majorities of human cultures. Is any of that "hard drive"? I don't know, but it's interesting to ponder.

I found him very persuasive.

The nut of it is that humans lived in egalitarian societies for something like 200,000 years. It is what we are adapted to do, it is part of our genetics. It is what is natural to us. Denial of this is likely a major source of our societal woes.

Some years have passed since I read him, but I recall agreeing and disagreeing with him.

(btw, I'm enjoying this exchange of ours)

Even if we did live in egalitarian societies for thousands of years, could you address the points I made, above? I agree that how we evolved to live is very different from how we live, but we can't change that without reducing to population to no more than a few million people worldwide. As Pema Chodron says, Start Where You Are, and we live in a world where technology has advanced and changed the human/natural world equation. That can't be denied or ignored either. I had an anthropology prof once who said the best thing for humankind would be being bombed back into the stone age. I know exactly what he meant, but I understand that the wasn't being (wholly) serious.

by the by, are you familiar with Paolo Soleri, Arcology and Arcosanti? Ever been there?

Though, as Shepard puts it, we never left.

There is no going back to hunter/gathering, as you point out population alone negates that, the habitat degradation of the past 10 millenia further mitigates against this.

What we can do is to return to those social norms most appropriate to our species. Egalitarianism is the obvious go to. The trick with technology is using only that which is really needed, is as close to environmentally null as is possible and which does not distort human behavior. Engels said that tools made man, the problem today is that the 'tools'(manufactured products)which we are inundated with today are not the products of necessity but rather of the profit motive.

I am passing familiar with Arcology, innovative thinking of that nature will certainly be helpful in reaching a more humane future.

Doesn't matter anyway.

that a small part of the volume is outside the cup itself you know, a little rise just above the rim, with little more than surface tension to retain it otherwise one more drop and over it spills. It might seem that tea cups have had their fill of the history of tea and yet...

Left to it's own devices; aside from our drinking the history ourselves; whether we sip or gulp, whether we spill it, pour it on someone, etc, twist it; but even with a brimming tea cup left to it's own...evaporation takes place where but for a scratchy cleaning pad full of soap bubbles the tea cup is soon empty once again, void, ready to receive: the history of tea

Tea cups. We understand their mission to retain, to codify the parameter of fluids...but have they learned the history of tea?

Not only that, but they tend to revise it every few years to suit their own purposes.

You can't take seven billion people and turn them into a monolith. There's always going to be some woefully ignorant morons and/or assholes, and there's going to be some people who get it. Once the brush gets broad enough these kinds of discussions are really meaningless.

Humankind as a whole most assuredly does exist. What conclusions one can draw from that fact, is certainly debatable. Can societies and cultures develop from knowledge of the past?

It is very important to have leaders who are well-versed in history and have a desire to move us forward.

Of course, many are knowledgeable of history but are not concerned with humankind as a whole.

We have only been reading and writing for a few thousand years so we haven't had much time to learn the importance of our past.

it seems to be, then probably not Cali.

We continue to meet violence with violence- cave dwellers dressed in man-made materials.

:shrug:

there are some good examples of learning from history- such as the number of countries that have banned the death penalty, the disavowal of such things as eugenics, etc. that said, I tend to agree with you.