Do we learn from history?

[u/IrLievense]

Dear friends of the Reddit,

I stumbled upon a post on r/PetPeeves where someone was a 'bit annoyed' that people believe the philosopher Hegel held the position that we learn from history that we don't learn from history. Apparently, Hegel's position was quite the contrary, that historical circumstances are always different, so there is not that much to learn.

This got me wondering, is there any consensus among historians about whether we do or don't learn anything from history? Maybe because Hegel is considered 'right' and there is little to learn?

I guess it may be more of a philosophical question and might be impossible to answer meaningfully, but I thought I'd give it a try!

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[u/Bodark43]

There's no doubt we learn from studying history. Just a random pick; in 1873 the US government gave up on Reconstruction , and left the fate of recently-freed enslaved in the hands of the White southerners who had previously owned them. For more than a hundred years, a lot of people were second-class citizens because they were Black. If we didn't know that, it would be hard to understand a lot of the problems of the present that resulted from it, and so it would be much harder to deal with those problems. Or, a simpler example; if the people living in Love Canal had known the history of the site, had known how much toxic waste was simply buried beneath their feet, they would not have had such a high death rate. We better learn from history, because ignorance of the past is definitely not bliss.

But there's a limit to what learning can do. It was Marx, in his The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, who thought he was quoting Hegel when he said that history repeated itself, first as tragedy, then as farce; with Napoleon Bonaparte as the tragedy, Louis Napoleon as the farce. When Hegel himself noted that historical circumstances were always different, he was undoubtedly referring to that temptation of people to decide that, like Marx, they've learned enough, know enough, to go beyond understanding what was happening in their present to being able to predict the future. For centuries the Bible has been used as a guide for predicting it, of course, but many scholars have done it as well after thinking they had detected patterns, or that there was some sort of system.. Arnold Toynbee's Study of History is a famous attempt. None has ever worked well. But predicting the future has sold books, especially ones that say they've discovered the signs for when civilization is declining, or falling into the hands of barbarians, foreigners, lazy people, etc.. Writers do need to publish, so although we can't learn enough from history to predict the future, we can reliably predict there will be a new book coming out that claims it can.

[u/IrLievense → u/Bodark43]

Thanks, that's very insightful!