Sep 2, 2017 01:45 PM
https://aeon.co/ideas/far-distant-days-t...-ground-us
EXCERPT: [...] But not all great powers live among such warning signs. Today’s richest and most powerful nation is less than 12 generations old, built on a continent where ancient cities are notably hard to come by. And I can tell you, as a lifelong citizen of that nation, that many of its people do not fully grasp the concept of a distant past or future. Few of us ever have reason to count primeval centuries, since our cities contain no streets or buildings of such age. As the American novelist Howard Fast told The New York Times in 2000: ‘Americans have no sense of history. And not much memory.’ In fact, to many people who grow up in the United States (myself included), the Old World tends to feel like a sort of fantasy kingdom.
[...] The English historian B H Liddell Hart wrote in Why Don’t We Learn from History? (1944): ‘There is no excuse for anyone who is not illiterate if he is less than 3,000 years old in mind.’ This is less an admonition to learn from specific events in the past, and more a reminder that our own mighty civilisation exists at a specific time and place within the grander sweep of history. The Roman rhetorician Marcus Tullius Cicero, writing in the first century BCE, put an even finer point on it: ‘To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child....’
MORE: https://aeon.co/ideas/far-distant-days-t...-ground-us
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EXCERPT: [...] But not all great powers live among such warning signs. Today’s richest and most powerful nation is less than 12 generations old, built on a continent where ancient cities are notably hard to come by. And I can tell you, as a lifelong citizen of that nation, that many of its people do not fully grasp the concept of a distant past or future. Few of us ever have reason to count primeval centuries, since our cities contain no streets or buildings of such age. As the American novelist Howard Fast told The New York Times in 2000: ‘Americans have no sense of history. And not much memory.’ In fact, to many people who grow up in the United States (myself included), the Old World tends to feel like a sort of fantasy kingdom.
[...] The English historian B H Liddell Hart wrote in Why Don’t We Learn from History? (1944): ‘There is no excuse for anyone who is not illiterate if he is less than 3,000 years old in mind.’ This is less an admonition to learn from specific events in the past, and more a reminder that our own mighty civilisation exists at a specific time and place within the grander sweep of history. The Roman rhetorician Marcus Tullius Cicero, writing in the first century BCE, put an even finer point on it: ‘To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child....’
MORE: https://aeon.co/ideas/far-distant-days-t...-ground-us
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