Doomed!

I heard a person on a podcast make the cliche quote about learning history or being doomed to repeat it. I was on my bike, but I couldn't help thinking what a stupid comment that is.

The first example I thought of was General Lee (thinking of two of his biographies I recently read). He was an excellent student of military history, especially Napoléon Bonaparte. He knew all about Napoléon's mistakes in Russia: trying to push his forces too far and during too extreme conditions, and still Lee repeated those same mistakes pretty well. Maybe an expert in military tactics and history would say I'm over generalizing the commonalities, and maybe I am. But I'm sure if we dug deep enough we would find historians make a ton of the same mistakes they have studied. That's my real point. History will not save us. Hindsight makes it easy to say, "history would have told us." But there are so many factors leading to any event, how could anyone know which factors to focus on or which ones to avoid? It is ridiculous.

I'd have to say, knowing history might make you less likely to repeat it at best, but definitely not exempt.

While looking for the exact quote to use I found the top google hit was an article with someone claiming the same idea I had. I have to say, the articles examples are weak. Not that my example is better, but it is more specific, thus better.

According to Nicholas Clairmont at Big Think, the phrase probably originated from George Santayana.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it

I like that version a lot better because being a student of history is insignificant. Instead, the problem is memory and not the learning. With how unreliable our memory is, this phrase makes a lot more sense.

In the end, people and governments are doomed to make mistakes. Maybe super intelligent computers or super humans of the future will be able to know/remember so many things that they will be able to prevent mistakes of the past, but ntil then, us homo sapiens sapiens might just be doomed!