George Santayana is perhaps best remembered for this observation and its variants.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Sometimes we aim to retain too much of the past, especially where nostalgia exerts its rose-tinted influence. Yet if past times represented some kind of improvement over more distant times, then the improvement may be worth retaining or taking further. We inherit something, we improve it, we call it progress.
Yet a culture may forget inherited strengths passed down from its cultural history. In forgetting its historical strengths it is likely to forget what progress is. The word is retained but progress is not real and cultural gains from the past are lost. Ironically, a progressive has become person who tends to substitute political doctrine for knowledge of the past, someone who may not even understand what progress is.
This second Santayana quote explains the first, why we need to recognise and retain something essential from of the past if the future is to represent genuine progress.
Not all readaptation, however, is progress, for ideal identity must not be lost. The Latin language did not progress when it passed into Italian. It died.
Its amiable heirs may console us for its departure, but do not remove the fact that their parent is extinct. So every individual, nation, and religion has its limit of adaptation; so long as the increment it receives is digestible, so long as the organisation already attained is extended and elaborated without being surrendered, growth goes on; but when the foundation itself shifts, when what is gained at the periphery is lost at the centre, the flux appears again and progress is not real.
Thus a succession of generations or languages or religions constitutes no progress unless some ideal present at the beginning is transmitted to the end and reaches a better expression there; without this stability at the core no common standard exists and all comparison of value with value must be external and arbitrary. Retentiveness, we must repeat, is the condition of progress.
George Santayana - The Life of Reason (1905 - 1906)
The idea isn't complicated, but it seems to confuse political activists. Piling one failed policy on top of another isn't progress, because as ever the art of judgement comes into play.
2 comments:
Yes, people who think of themselves as "progressives" often pride themselves on how antagonistic they are towards the past. But all too often their understanding of the past is a series of crude received stereotypes. It might be that we need to revere the past in order to even pay attention to its details. The example of classical scholars comes to mind. We get from them a real flavour of Ancient Greece and Rome, because the idea of those civilisations kindled something in them.
Sam - well put, it certainly is a series of crude received stereotypes. Ironic because stereotypes are supposedly one of their moral targets.
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