“The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.”Hmm... now I know why Karl Marx was so bad at predicting history. He was a student of a teacher who didn't know or understand history!
-Friedrich Hegel (German Philosopher (1770-1831)
For a guy who claimed that you can learn nothing from history, Hegel was awfully pedantic and pushy about his vision of history:
"World history... represents the development of the spirit's consciousness of its own freedom and of the consequent realization of that freedom."Yep... that sure nails it. When I read history I see a "spirit of consciousness" behind the scenes everywhere poking and prodding us forward. Sure enough!
Now you can understand why Karl Marx was such a nut over the "stages" of history. Marx was peering into the Hegelian mish-mash and seeing "spirit" unfolding in stages. Nutty.
I'm going to peer into history and discover:
Empires rise and fall. There is no "unfolding" of history. It is a typical evolutionary process responding to exogenous forces. When the barbarians come, you collapse. When the plague hits, you tear down the walls and let the Spartans in. When you hit upon the world's biggest store of gold you become the Spanish superpower of early modern times and then fritter it all away in incessant continental wars. Yep... there's a lot of rhyming and rhythm to history, just not much sense.Wow! I can pontificate with the best of them.
2 comments:
RY;
Sorry to comment so much today... I haven't a lot to do these days while waiting to hear about work. I should be reading and posting like you are. I do enjoy your blog.
Anyway, I just thought that I would add that "history repeats itself" because people don't seem to learn. I can only see us going back down into a great depression because of this lack of learning from history, but that is another prediction based on history and maybe (hopefully) it is wrong.
Thomas: Don't worry about "too many" comments. You are pretty well the only person who takes the effort to comment.
I was reading a blog which pointed out that the site's statistics showed that it was getting 10,000 reads before it got a comment. Most people are simply browsing and don't feel a need to comment. That is fine.
I entertain myself these days by looking at the wide range of nationalities of those reading my blog.
I'm also amused by how some items get a lot of attention while a great deal never get viewed at all. But that is life. This is just another variant of the 80-20 rule and the squeaky wheel rule.
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