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History has value

The real value of history comes with the realization that other people have tried to solve problems similar to our own. Besides, as George Santayana said in his Life of Reason, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." It saves time and effort if we need not rediscover what those who have gone before have learned.

What really ruins our characters is the fact that none of us looks back over his life. We think about what we are going to do, and only rarely of that, and fail to think about what we have done, yet any plans for the future are dependent on the past.¹ 

We do not move forwards, but rather wander, turning this way and that. We return over our tracks. I am afraid that our knowledge is weak in every direction; we do not see far ahead or far behind us. It embraces little, and its life is short in both extent of time and extent of matter:

'Many heroes lived before Agamemnon, but no one weeps for them; they all lie forgotten in darkness.' -Horace, Odes, IV,ix,25.² 

However seriously wrong, awkward, sad, or bad our past may have been we can't alter the way we were. We can only hope to learn from it.

One does not explain away what is already done, one does not argue against what is already accomplished, and one does not condemn what has already gone by.³ 

It serves no useful purpose to be held hostage by what has gone before. We hunted down Nazi War criminals to hold them up as examples for others who might contemplate similar evil. The punishment was to be the deterrence for the future crime.

Nonsense. However appropriate punishment may have been for individual crimes, better deterrence for future crime is the establishment in the overwhelming number of individuals of a process of thoughtfulness that will not tolerate another Third Reich.

Certainly the Nazi war criminals did hideous things that deserved to be punished. But, the best value of history is not to exact retribution for crime, but to learn from it lessons so that evil will not recur.

The Iranians pursued the Shah to no useful end. Killing the Shah would not have made Iranian life easier. Others are not deterred from repeating the Shah's deeds.

Nothing is durable, whether for an individual or for a society; the destinies of men and cities alike sweep onwards.⁴ 

 

The works of nature herself suffer. So it is only right that we should bear the overthrow of cities with resignation. They stand just to fall. Such is the sum total of the end that awaits them, whether it be the blast of a subterranean explosion throwing off the restraining weight above it, or the violence of floodwaters increasing to a prodigious degree underground until it breaks down everything in its way. . .⁵ 

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¹ Seneca, Lucius Annaeus. Letters from a Stoic. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd., 1969. Pg. 140.
² Montaigne, Michele de. Essays. Translation and introduction by j. M. Cohen. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd., 1958. Pg. 275.
³ Confucius. The Analects. Translation and introduction by D. C. Lau. Harmondsworth,. Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd., 1979. Pg. 230.
⁴ Seneca, Lucius Annaeus. Letters from a Stoic. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd., 1969. Pg. 179.
⁵ Seneca, Lucius Annaeus. Letters from a Stoic. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd., 1969. Pg. 180.

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