Remembering the past won’t save us from the future | The Outline: Even if we “understand” history in this way, then what? The alternative is not so much a positive future as just not the same bad past as we think we know it. It invites delusion, as though we can replay history like loading a video game from a save point and trying again, now that some of us, at least, have the walkthrough. Moreover, the proverb implies paradoxically both that history will keep operating without human intervention (the notion that “history repeats itself”) and that, Sideshow Bob-like, humans seem to keep stepping on the same rakes: all of our bad pasts seem to have kept happening regardless of what we did; maybe we’re just a bad species. We’re all equally to blame for the past, but also powerless to really make a better future.
It appears clearer by the day that such thinking is suicidal, on a planetary scale. We face something truly unprecedented — the certainty of human-made climate change and the possibility of annihilation. Santayana’s axiom is not only an irritant to a malcontent like me. It has become the worst kind of common wisdom: the kind that promises to guide but can only mislead. There is no walkthrough to follow, and if we fail to mitigate the coming horrors of the Anthropocene, we will be doomed to repeat nothing at all. Nothing, that is, but being forced to bear the sight of ghostly palimpsests of centuries past or eerie warnings from earlier victims of an unforgiving planet, stitched together into a kind of historical highlight reel, a flash of civilizational recollection before slipping into oblivion.
It appears clearer by the day that such thinking is suicidal, on a planetary scale. We face something truly unprecedented — the certainty of human-made climate change and the possibility of annihilation. Santayana’s axiom is not only an irritant to a malcontent like me. It has become the worst kind of common wisdom: the kind that promises to guide but can only mislead. There is no walkthrough to follow, and if we fail to mitigate the coming horrors of the Anthropocene, we will be doomed to repeat nothing at all. Nothing, that is, but being forced to bear the sight of ghostly palimpsests of centuries past or eerie warnings from earlier victims of an unforgiving planet, stitched together into a kind of historical highlight reel, a flash of civilizational recollection before slipping into oblivion.