Apr 8, 2011
George Santayana’s famous warning, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” popped into my mind the other day. I have to admit that, at first, I remembered the quote as “those who cannot remember history” or “those who do not know history” are condemned to repeat it. I also thought Winston Churchill may have had said it. Google quickly set me straight on both accounts.
I also learned in the course of my search for the proper wording to Mr. Santayana’s quote that his full name is Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás. While he studied and did much of his writing and teaching in the US, ergo his Anglicized name, he was born in Spain and returned to Europe for the second half of his life. He was always a Spanish citizen.
I mention this because Spain, which has been very important historically to the formation of Western culture, just doesn’t get much notice these days — unless the World Cup is going. I also mention Mr. Santayana’s nationality as a small apology for having thought momentarily that his well-known quote belonged to a British curmudgeon like Churchill — something as a Spaniard he may have found hard to take.
It was a wry comment by my oldest son that brought the quote to mind. In the middle of watching together the film “Frost Nixon,” a docudrama on the planning of Nixon’s most candid post-resignation interview, my son blurted out, “What’s the big deal?”
I suddenly felt very old as I realized that while my own life had only been tangentially touched by Watergate and Vietnam, I still grew up in the culture those events created — a culture dominated by disillusioned people who knew the history of Nixon and the failed war all too well. I responded, “It’s a very big deal.”
My son was not convinced. For him, these events are as old as Elvis and the Civil War. All the past is equally distant to the young. History is dead and dead is dead. The present has its own scandals and villains. Not surprisingly, at eighteen my son has no reference point for these events nor do his friends.
But, does this mean that these events will repeat? Can failing to appreciate history really cause its repeat? After all, how much history can a person know? Certainly, we cannot know all of it.
With all due respect to Mr. Santayana, I do not think that simply knowing the past will keep it from repeating. In fact, there are plenty of well-known, undesirable historical events which repeat. There are recurrent economic failures, for instance. Our knowledge of the Great Depression may have helped us limit our current crisis, but it did not keep us from adding a Great Recession to the recycled history pile. Clearly, knowing is not sufficient for avoiding recurrent negative events altogether.
Moral change is the real agent for stopping the repetition of past failures. In the end, the only negative events of history that we can be sure will not repeat are those that precipitate a societal conversion or moral advancement of sufficient magnitude and cultural significance to be passed on to subsequent generations. In other words, history changes for the better when we change for the better. Some things are about our character, not dates and events.
The abolishment of slavery provides a good example. Institutional, government sanctioned slavery did not end with a history lesson. No, slavery, which had been far too long a part of history, far too long obscured by the so-called complexities of history, required something much harder than a history lesson to bring it to an end. It required the admission of grievous wrongdoing. It required a moral shift of tectonic proportion. (Hopefully, soon, we will have the same global response to abortion.)
Fortunately, we humans, while we will never have a perfect history, still have the opportunity to make a more perfect future. This is the divine opportunity provided to us by a Creator constantly interested in supporting our pursuit of self-improvement. Moral change is difficult. It requires discipline and humility. But, it alone has the ability to keep the failures of the past from repeating. Maybe that is why Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás decided to live his last years with the Blue Nuns instead of historians.