History

If you don't know history you are at the mercy of the fads and fancies of the day. You have no real means of comparing current opinion to anything else and therefore you will find it much harder to see where current opinion might be right and where it might err.

One of the ways in which the world is currently being remade according to a materialistic agenda is through the neglect of history. People are either being completely separated from their past, their roots and traditions, or else these are being deformed and presented in a quite different light, one in keeping with modern leftist ideology which is the prism through which everything is increasingly viewed. A leftist will assert that this has always been going on, telling us that the winners write the history. But what is happening now seems to be a much more conscious attempt to destroy the past in order to reconstruct human beings in a form that has no connection to their true and natural being. For while the winners always have presented history in terms favourable to them, there was still, especially in spiritual matters, a concern with truth and a desire to be faithful to the good and the beautiful. Now that concern has been replaced by an ideological commitment to the destruction of truth, and those desires have been corrupted into a focus on false goodness and distortions of beauty.

Human beings have struggled to bring order out of chaos. History is the story of that struggle and shows the upward path humanity has taken as it makes its way out of a crude biological response to the environment to an engagement with intellectual and spiritual matters. In its arts it has tried to find and express higher representations of beauty. Through its religion it has sought to encounter God and understand something of what he is and what he wants from us. Through its sciences it has searched for deeper insights into the world. All until recently, that is. Latterly it appears that we only wish to celebrate the human being as a material construction, risen from the mud and without any higher input or spiritual responsibility. Moreover, something that can be formed into what we want it to be and according to our own will.

When the past is represented as inferior to the present in all aspects then it has nothing to teach us. We are wiser. We know better. But how can we judge? Our only criteria are the prejudices of the day so we have a circular argument, one which inevitably leads back to itself since it is the premise on which the conclusion must be based. This is not an argument for the superiority of the past but one for learning from experience. Nowadays we prize youthfulness over age, the new over the old. Consequently we are shallow creatures, full of arrogance who believe our elders have nothing to teach us. This attitude is natural, and perhaps even creative to a degree, if one really is young, but it is profoundly ignorant when it runs through the whole of society.

The study of history should be an essential part of proper education for without it we are like a rudderless ship adrift in the ocean. We are at the mercy of ideologues, sophists and charlatans. Tradition is not outdated ignorance but the distilled wisdom of the past and, even if some traditions are rightfully outgrown, they should still be thoroughly understood and their lessons learned before they are discarded.