“Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past and historians are the people who produce it.” – Eric Hobsbawm

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana, The Life of Reason.

When contemplating the existential issues of the present, it is vital that we possess a sophisticated understanding of the past. Without that understanding humanity continues, over and over, to repeat the mistakes and failures of the past. That seems a constant in human history but never more so than in an age that believes it has perfected human knowledge and understanding through the application of reason, disconnected from morality, common sense, intuition and memory. Our age of reason has dispensed with these fundamental underpinnings of a civilised society simply by the application of blind reason to the present circumstance and without reference to context and history.

This can only sensibly be achieved by removing from the public mind any knowledge or understanding of history. That is why in the West, over the last 50 years, there has been a constant attack on the teaching of history, and attempts to eliminate it entirely as a non-useful subject for secondary and tertiary education. The concentration today is on the STEM subjects which, having been decontextualised from the........

© Pearls and Irritations