Is it ever possible to learn from history?

[Jeanlouise]

I came across this quote this morning and thought it worth posting:

“Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and given him triumphal processions. Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the “new wonderful good society” which shall now be Rome’s, interpreted to mean "more money, more ease, more security, and more living fatly at the expense of the industrious".”
......Marcus Cicero

[DefensiveCarry.com]

[Caertaker]

Human nature doesn't change. That realization and some thought will serve you well.

[ppkheat]

That's so true it's scary.

I quit blaming the politicians long ago, I'm blaming the voters who put them there.

[ghost tracker]

AGREED! I'm substantially more concerned about the voters who've made the decisions to follow the path we're heading than I am about...the chuckle-heads in office. The vote is a societal mandate, the elected politician is just the symptom.

[pgrass101]

This is a quote from John Greer

Most currently popular ways of trying to put pressure on the American political system presuppose that the politicians will pay attention if the people, or the activists who claim to speak in their name, simply make enough noise. The difficulty is that the activists, or for that matter the people, aren’t actually giving the politicians any reason to pay attention; they’re simply making noise, and the politicians have gotten increasingly confident that the noise can be ignored with impunity.

If we don't remove them from office, then we are to blame

[mano3]

I'm a professional historian and I can truly say that folks do not seem to learn from the past...

[dbglock]

How democracy works: if you're not in the majority, your opinion is worthless.

[ghost tracker]

I am a folk and I can truly say that neither do...professional historians! Have you heard what's passing for a College Education these days?!? With few, rare exceptions it's a four-year indoctrination to socialism! History professors included!

[Piratesailor]

If you don't understand history, you are doomed to repeat it... Paraphrasing.

We as a population, and I think humanity as a whole, are too uneducated regarding history and we will repeat history. The echoes of history are reverberating this very day, and will continue. The echoes of the past have been there for awhile too. History never repeats "exactly" but pretty close.

It is repeating.

[gasmitty]

Is it ever possible to learn from history?

Smitty's Corollary to Santayana's famous quote is "what we learn from history is that we don't learn from history."

[rammerjammer]

Democracies by their very nature vote themselves out of existence.

[kapnketel]

Democracies by their very nature vote themselves out of existence.

Fortunately we are a republic. The Framers of the Constitution were altogether fearful of pure democracy. Everything they read and studied taught them that pure democracies "have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths"

I agree that at times it looks more like the streets of Cairo than Washington DC...

[ccw9mm]

Is it ever possible to learn from history?

Many do. But it's generally not nearly enough to make much difference, except on an individual basis. True studying of history's lessons seems to be perennially out of favor.

[HotGuns]

Is it ever possible to learn from history?

Sure it is...as long as we keep teaching it.

Quit teaching it...
(sorta like the last 20 years or so) and history WILL repeat itself.

[blitzburgh]

I think it's a combination of not enough people learning from history for it to be more than individually and not enough history being taught to learn anything from.

My great grandmother, grandmother, and mother were all teachers. Both of my grandparents just recently passed away and while cleaning out their house, I spotted some of my grandmother's old textbooks that she used teach from. Let me tell you (those who do not know already), there's a huge difference between what used to be taught as history and what I was taught in school. (I'm 26 for time difference comparison)

As a parent, this deeply troubles me.