Why Study History? - Nego

It had been a long day. My mind was full of worries about my job at the athletic club, college, my trigonometry grade, piano and the impending SAT. I sat wearily down on the couch in the living room and reluctantly picked up Herodotus – opening it up, the first sentence my tired eyes fell upon was, “Croesus, son of Alyattes, by birth a Lydian, was lord of all the nations to the west of the river Halys. This stream, which separates Syria from Paphlagonia, runs with a course from south to north, and finally falls into the Euxine”….. My attention was swift to wander. After a few pages of taking in the words without their meaning, my brain snapped suddenly back to what I was reading. “This is completely useless,” I groaned, and tossed the book to the floor. Herodotus had nothing to do with my daily struggles or my life. His exaggerations and sermons did not relate to me in any way, shape or form and at the moment, I had no patience left to attend to them.

            “The first man to distill bourbon whiskey in the United States was a Baptist preacher in 1789.” “The ancient Egyptians recommended mixing an onion with beer to ward off death.” “Aristotle was born in 384 and died in 322 B.C.E.” “The Civil War began in 1861.” Honestly, who cares? In today’s world, it doesn’t really seem to matter – history is a required course we take to graduate high school. The question then becomes, why study history at all?

            Historians and teachers clamor, “History perfects the present! We learn how to mend our mistakes of the past by studying it!” But this doesn’t seem to hold true – if it did, by now we should have accumulated enough information about our ancestors’ mistakes to be rid of war, poverty and corruption. Moreover, how will knowing that Napoleon’s attempt to invade Russia failed stop us from doing the same? The modern world is very different from the ancient civilizations of Greek and Rome and the Romantic civilizations of nineteenth century England. What may have been true for our predecessors will most likely be untrue for us. In either case, humankind is bound to repeat its mistakes, whether or not history contains valuable lessons. This is a result of our fallen and fallible nature.

            Proponents of history also claim it foretells the future – whether it is the outcome of a battle, an everyday decision, or a political choice. In other words, we learn from the past how to better the future. Yet the same argument against the past stands – history cannot “tell” the future. It is not a crystal ball which we can look into and see consequences of causes. “History repeats itself” may be a maxim that is generally true, because human nature has not changed significantly, but it does not aid mankind in his daily decisions. This is because times and seasons do change and men have adapted to them.

            Lastly, the study of history is not important – the study of the present is. Stories of the past may be entertaining enough, and perhaps if you know them, you can show off how educated you are by writing a book. But it is the now that the majority of us are worried about – and it is the us who matter, not the Napoleons, Alexanders, or Romanovs of days gone by.