Learn From History
History is experience with theory and practice. It cuts to the chase. Looking back on our own individual history gives us better savvy to face what lies ahead. Experience brings us to know in a very personal and definitive way what works and what does not. No one would say that if they could take their history with them and live life over that they would not be able to do a better job of it.
We can’t do that but we could listen to those who have lived more life than us and take their life wisdom to guide our own. But no. We think we know better, don’t listen, prefer to talk and insist on making our own mistakes and suffering our own bruises. Society as a whole does the same thing. The history of the world is experience in storybook form. We can read it for entertainment or we can learn from it and save ourselves from repeating the same mistakes over and over. Find out more here; YouTube education videos
One of the reasons we do not pay attention to history as we should is because we think we are different from people of the past. Our heady time of technological pyrotechnics creates a smugness that leads us to presume that pre-modern era humans were unsophisticated or stone-age brutes. But a closer look tells us that is not so. As far back as written records go, clear back to the Phaistos disk printed by a printing press using a syllabary of 45 signs (one sign for each syllable) 3,700 years ago, there is clear evidence that humans were as innately intelligent, or more so, than we are today. As archeologists dig deeper and deeper into the strata of our history there is every reason to be humbled. The abandonment of the hunter-gatherer nomadic life for iron-based statehood may not be intellectual progress at all.
We can’t do that but we could listen to those who have lived more life than us and take their life wisdom to guide our own. But no. We think we know better, don’t listen, prefer to talk and insist on making our own mistakes and suffering our own bruises. Society as a whole does the same thing. The history of the world is experience in storybook form. We can read it for entertainment or we can learn from it and save ourselves from repeating the same mistakes over and over. Find out more here; YouTube education videos
One of the reasons we do not pay attention to history as we should is because we think we are different from people of the past. Our heady time of technological pyrotechnics creates a smugness that leads us to presume that pre-modern era humans were unsophisticated or stone-age brutes. But a closer look tells us that is not so. As far back as written records go, clear back to the Phaistos disk printed by a printing press using a syllabary of 45 signs (one sign for each syllable) 3,700 years ago, there is clear evidence that humans were as innately intelligent, or more so, than we are today. As archeologists dig deeper and deeper into the strata of our history there is every reason to be humbled. The abandonment of the hunter-gatherer nomadic life for iron-based statehood may not be intellectual progress at all.
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