Why History Isn’t Useless
We can learn more from the past than you probably think.
Never think about the past — always look to the future.
People who dwell on their past are sometimes dismissed as being too introspective and stuck in something they cannot change.
Sure, in our personal lives, being too obsessed with the past is a bad thing. But when this transfers to the dismissal of history as a form of knowledge, it can be alarming.
As a wider society and entity, we are obsessed with the future and often ignore the lessons we have learnt from history. In the age of the immediate, the past can feel distant and redundant.
However, if we have learnt anything from the past few months, whilst being in the middle of a pandemic, experiencing the revival of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the looming threat of mass extinction, we should have learnt that history matters.
The time we are living through is unique in the sense that 2020 has never been lived through before. But what we are living through now, has been lived through multiple times.
Although “unprecedented” has become part of the popular, political discourse, it is the wrong word to describe our present moment.
I spent three years at university studying the past, and as a result, I like to…
