History Matters

History weighs like a nightmare on the living if they are ignorant of basic facts
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/12/20/the-living-is-ignorant-of-history/ 

Mitch Daniels in 2018:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/we-wont-know-how-foolish-we-look-until-a-long-time-from-now/2018/04/20/8b0f2dbe-4315-11e8-bba2-0976a82b05a2_story.html

“Presentism’s principal tributaries are a lack of knowledge and a deficient capacity for empathy. One of today’s premier historians has written that “historical illiteracy is the new normal.” How dismally true that is. The list of basic facts today’s Americans don’t know is too embarrassing and discouraging to repeat. The fundamental civic concepts of which majorities of both young and old are ignorant is equally appalling.

The quality of empathy, the ability to discern and understand the feelings of others, was denoted by Adam Smith as the most distinctive of human traits. Evidence of its erosion is everywhere these days, in the burgeoning cultural estrangement we now aptly call tribalism”

Does It Help to Know History?
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/help-know-history
Adam Gopnik:

“The real sin that the absence of a historical sense encourages is presentism, in the sense of exaggerating our present problems out of all proportion to those that have previously existed. It lies in believing that things are much worse than they have ever been—and, thus, than they really are—or are uniquely threatening rather than familiarly difficult. Every episode becomes an epidemic, every image is turned into a permanent injury, and each crisis is a historical crisis in need of urgent aggressive handling—even if all experience shows that aggressive handling of such situations has in the past, quite often made things worse.”

Why Do We Think Learning About History Can Make Us Better?
How the study of the past became the conscience of the present.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/why-do-we-thinking-learning-about-history-can-make-us-better