Lessons Not Learned From History

There’s a funny thing about history. It seems almost like a ghost, doesn’t it? Always lingering in the background, rattling its chains to remind us of the pitfalls and pratfalls of those who came before. And yet, people sidestep it with remarkable ease, whistling all the way to their own fresh disaster, assured that this time, things will end differently. The problem with history, if it even is a problem, is that it’s annoyingly consistent. Like that one old song you can never quite get out of your head - it insists on replaying, only louder, as if to emphasize the parts we were trying to ignore.

Now, it’s not that humanity is incapable of learning. On the contrary, we’ve made tremendous strides in, say, teaching household pets to perform basic tricks. No, what’s truly spectacular is our ability to misinterpret every moral, sidestep each cautionary tale, and insist that we’re inventing a better wheel while building a wagon with square ones. Look at the world long enough, and you’d be forgiven for thinking everyone just skims the final chapters, the ones with all the messy conclusions, before sprinting back to the start, giddy and reckless as the last fool who swore this time, things are going to be great.

There’s a kind of art to this amnesia. We make such a show of progress, such elegant speeches about innovation, and then proceed to trip into the same old ditches, each time proclaiming it’s a mere “learning experience.” Oh, we learn, all right. It’s just that we’re remarkably good at forgetting it by morning.

After the events of this week, it seemed like an appropriate time to look at some lessons not learned from history - not to judge, but to marvel at just how much optimism we can muster for ideas and mistakes as old as the hills.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

– George Santaya

The Bubonic Plague vs. COVID-19

In 1346 the Bubonic Plague swept across medieval Europe with a kind of grim efficiency, leaving behind a world where almost half the population was gone and cities were gutted by fear. People back then were quick to blame whatever they didn’t understand - cats, foreigners, the heavens themselves.

It wasn’t long before they were burning witches, closing off towns, and praying fervently for deliverance, while rats and fleas carried on with the real work of spreading disease. There were no standards of sanitation, no public health boards, and certainly no medical consensus. Instead, there was chaos, superstition, and the creeping sense that, even as the symptoms worsened, people were really just hoping the problem would quietly leave if they kept themselves distracted enough.

Fast forward several hundred years, and here we are, with the luxury of advanced science, immunology, and a global network capable of sharing information within seconds, making it easier for us to stay informed – or blissfully misinformed. One would think we’d have done better. And in some ways, we did. When COVID-19 reared its head, medical researchers raced to decode its structure, labs whipped up vaccines, and policymakers rolled out public health campaigns. But then the old ghosts came out to play.

Misinformation thrived - not so different from the medieval “bad air” theory - and fear stirred up its own fervor, a 21st-century version of medieval townsfolk with torches. This time, instead of witches, it was anyone who disagreed with you about masks, vaccines, or lockdowns. Facebook and Twitter became our very own public squares, filled with rumor and rage.

And just like that, history repeated itself - only now the rats carried Wi-Fi. We saw lockdowns that sparked rebellions, magical cures that were nothing more than wishful thinking, and a world divided over the most basic concepts of safety and care. So it goes, really. The plague years taught us the perils of disinformation, panic, and blaming the wrong sources. Our “advanced” tools simply amplified our oldest suspicions (like blaming “foreigners” or “cats”) proving that technology doesn’t necessarily sharpen our understanding - sometimes it only amplifies our prejudices. Despite having far more tools at our disposal, we proved remarkably adept at forgetting the lessons.

“We are not makers of history. We are made by history.”

– Martin Luther King Jr.

The Spanish Inquisition vs. McCarthyism

In 1478 The Spanish Inquisition began and lasted for nearly 400 years. Its ostensible purpose was as a campaign for purity - religious purity, that is. The idea was to cleanse Spain of heresy and protect the kingdom from the ever-looming threat of nonconformity. Heretics, Jews, Muslims, even the vaguely suspicious - anyone who didn’t fit the tidy narrative - were hauled in for questioning, often accused with the lightest of evidence and given the heaviest of punishments.

Fear became the air people breathed, and neighbor turned on neighbor, as any whisper could turn one’s quiet life into a show trial. It was a kind of public paranoia dressed up in faith, a moral crusade without any particular regard for truth.

Centuries later, on the other side of the Atlantic, American Senator Joseph McCarthy picked up the torch of suspicion and dragged it into the 1950s with an all-American twist. This time, it wasn’t heresy but communism that threatened the heartland.

The word “Un-American” became the scarlet letter, slapped onto artists, professors, even government workers, with a nudge and a wink that seemed to say, “If you’re innocent, then surely you won’t mind proving it.” Lives and careers were ruined, all in the name of defending the homeland from an invisible enemy. Purity has its price after all, but what’s a few livelihoods if it’s in the name of righteousness? And just like the Inquisition, the actual evidence didn’t much matter. In both cases, it was the fear of contamination that drove the process - a fear so strong that rational thought had little room to maneuver.

Yet the lesson that fear makes poor policy remained unlearned. Society’s answer to uncertainty has always been to seek purity through exclusion, rather than strength through understanding. So, history repeats itself, and we keep trading one form of hysteria for another, convinced each time that this particular fear is worth tearing each other apart over. It seems we’re overly fond of crusades - the modern kind, complete with shiny headlines and public takedowns. Perhaps that’s the real lesson: that, given the chance, humans will zealously pursue the wrong answers, just as long as those answers feel grand and righteous enough to drown out the quieter, inconvenient truths.

“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” – H.G. Wells

The British Raj in India vs. Modern Occupations

The British Raj was an exercise in imperial optimism. Here was the British Empire, sprawling and self-assured, convinced it could manage India’s vast landscape and complex cultures as one might manage a distant province, all while extracting a steady stream of riches.

To the British mind, they were doing more than mere conquest; they were “civilizing” the subcontinent, introducing railroads and bureaucracy, as though paving roads and installing rail lines would somehow smooth over centuries of local tradition and pride. The result? An uneasy quiet on the surface, while resentment bubbled underneath. Every imposed law, every resource drained, every attempt to rewrite customs only made the eventual rebellion more certain, until the British were finally shown the door by a people who, rather sensibly, didn’t wish to be “civilized” quite so aggressively.

Fast-forward to the modern era, and we find this same hubris in a new costume, particularly in places like Afghanistan. The goal might be phrased differently now - “nation-building” has a nice ring to it - but the sentiment remains remarkably familiar. Foreign troops arrive with the best intentions, armed with manuals on governance and political advisors on how to make a democracy flourish in rocky soil.

But cultures don’t tend to change under force; they adapt, yes, but often in ways that subtly, or not so subtly, resist the intrusion.  

The story of imperial ambition ends much the same each time, and yet, remarkably, it’s always a surprise. Nations think they’re bringing progress, yet what they often deliver is a kind of smothering embrace - one that eventually drives people to wrench free. The British learned that people are not so easily governed by foreign ideals, however cleverly marketed. And so here we are, repeating the same missteps with more modern weapons and even grander assurances, as though human beings will eventually learn to play along. The truth, though, is simpler: they don’t, and they won’t, not when the cost of “progress” is a borrowed identity and a loss of self.

“If you want to understand today you have to search yesterday.”- Pearl S. Buck

Prohibition vs. the War on Drugs

Prohibition in the United States was the moral crusade of its day, a grand attempt to polish up the nation’s character by banning the devil’s drink. Alcohol, that seductive villain, was accused of causing everything from poverty to insanity, and so, in 1920, it was banished by constitutional decree.

Politicians and reformers clinked their glasses of tonic water, convinced they’d ushered in an era of virtue. Yet, almost immediately, Americans discovered something extraordinary: they could get their whiskey on the sly. Speak-easies sprang up in basements and backrooms across the country, bootleggers made small fortunes ferrying hooch across state lines, and suddenly the average American was drinking more than ever. Organized crime flourished, with men like Al Capone making a killing - literally and figuratively - in a business that, as it turned out, wasn’t deterred by a few laws.

Fast-forward to the latter part of the 20th century, and the country once again girded itself for a similar moral offensive - this time against drugs. The War on Drugs was billed as a campaign to rid society of its darker impulses, to clean the streets and save the youth.

Marijuana, cocaine, heroin: each was cast as a new kind of demon, and the answer, naturally, was zero tolerance. What followed, however, wasn’t so much a triumph over temptation as a reinforcement of all the old lessons. Drug cartels grew into empires, a shadow economy flourished, and incarceration rates soared. And much like Prohibition, demand remained stubbornly high, while those who profited from supplying it evolved from smugglers with sawed-off shotguns into international businessmen with private armies and offshore accounts.

Both eras teach us the same sly, frustrating truth: when society decides to legislate morality, it rarely ends well. Denying something outright only seems to intensify its allure, especially when the public is dead set on having it. Prohibition turned bathtub gin into a national pastime, and the War on Drugs transformed quiet recreational habits into an underworld market complete with its own supply chains and corporate-like hierarchies. The real tragedy is that each crusade leaves the country with more crime and less faith in its institutions. It seems we are keen to repeat this lesson, certain that this time, purity will prevail. But as history quietly chuckles, it reminds us: nothing tempts human beings quite like a “no.”

“What experience and history teach is that nations and governments have never learned anything from history or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.” - Georg Hegel

The 1929 Wall Street Crash vs. The 2008 Financial Crisis

The 1929 Wall Street crash hit with all the subtlety of a cannonball, upending a world of champagne-soaked optimism and sending it spiraling into a black-and-white catastrophe of bread lines and broken fortunes.

It was, by all accounts, an unmitigated disaster, born of wild speculation, irresponsible loans, and the kind of greed that assumes tomorrow will forever be brighter than today. In the years leading up to the crash, brokers practically threw credit at anyone with a pulse, convinced that the stock market’s skyward climb was as permanent as the Empire State Building rising in Midtown. When the bubble burst, it was as if the nation awoke from a fever dream to find itself penniless. And the rest of the world, tightly tethered to America’s economy, came crashing down along with it, dragging banks, jobs, and optimism straight to the bottom.

Fast forward to the mid-2000s, and the story had found a slick, new costume but kept the same script.

This time, the feeding frenzy wasn’t over stocks but housing. Banks, hedge funds, and mortgage lenders fell over themselves to hand out loans - "subprime" loans, a term that sounds benign until you realize it’s shorthand for “not quite as secure as a rusty paperclip.” Homes were sold to anyone who showed up with a grin and a pulse, and before long, the entire economy was again bloated on speculation, loans bundled into abstract financial products, and the same dangerous belief that prices would never, ever go down. The housing market seemed an unstoppable juggernaut until, predictably, the bottom dropped out. Banks failed, homes foreclosed, and a new generation discovered the bitter taste of sudden poverty.

What’s remarkable isn’t that both crashes happened - it's that the lessons from 1929 seemed to have slipped away with astonishing ease. Despite decades of economic theory, new financial regulations, and a public that supposedly "knew better," history had no trouble repeating itself. Greed, it seems, is an ever-welcome guest at the party, and when it shows up, caution is always shown the door. In each case, we believed that this time would be different, that our new financial tools had tamed the beast of economic chaos. But history has a way of shrugging off new technology, new markets, and new jargon, as if to say, “A bubble is a bubble, no matter how cleverly you dress it up.” And, as always, the only thing more inflated than the market was our own sense of control.

“Study the historian before you begin to study the facts.”- Edward Hallett Carr

The Fall of the Roman Empire vs. The Fall of Every Empire Afterward

The Roman Empire, in its prime, sprawled across continents like a great gilded octopus, its tentacles reached from the windswept hills of Britain to the shifting sands of the Middle East.

It was civilization, with all its marble and marble-bound laws, stretching out under a unified banner, convinced of its own permanence. Roads were paved, aqueducts flowed, and the Caesars believed they’d crafted something as unbreakable as stone. But, of course, Rome was mortal. The empire's hunger for land led to overreach, and its insatiable appetite for luxury and ease softened its spine. One day the Visigoths came knocking and what had seemed like a monolith came crashing down, all the statues and Senate decrees toppled under the weight of its own arrogance and complacency.

Now, you’d think that watching Rome implode would have given every subsequent empire a cautionary tale: stretch too far, spend too freely, indulge too much, and you’ll find yourself swept off the map by someone tougher and hungrier. But history has this peculiar way of fogging the rearview mirror just enough to keep optimism alive. Enter the Ottoman Empire, the Spanish Empire, the French, the British –

each of them convinced they were special, that they’d figured out how to tame the tiger that devoured all those who came before. They, too, built networks of colonies and territories and kept subjects in line with soldiers and bureaucrats. And each, in turn, grew bloated, struggled to maintain distant colonies, and stumbled under the weight of their own ambition, unraveling from within until all that was left were echoes of past glories and half-remembered victories.

It’s almost as if each empire came equipped with its own blindfold, a built-in inability to see that no one, in the end, is immune to time, to rebellion, to the inevitable wear and tear of rule. As if each new ruler can wave the empire back from the brink by the sheer weight of their ambition, declaring that, this time, the laws of history will surely bend to their will. They all start by building cities, law codes, proud symbols of permanence, and end by leaving behind statues in museums and ruins that make for excellent tourist photos. The lesson is hidden in plain sight, but it seems that each empire only hears what it wants to: the sweet sound of its own strength, not the steady, patient ticking of history’s clock, waiting to remind it of the only unbreakable rule - nothing, not even the mightiest, lasts forever.

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results” – Albert Einstein

The French Revolution vs. The Russian Revolution

The French Revolution began with all the pomp and promise of a grand moral reckoning. Citizens of every stripe rose up, tossing powdered wigs and aristocratic titles aside with glee, declaring that liberty, equality, and fraternity were not just ideas for the salon but birthrights for every man.

Then, with a peculiar logic, they promptly began to slaughter each other, particularly those deemed insufficiently enthusiastic about the cause. The Revolution, in its fever, created the guillotine, a device so splendidly efficient at removing heads that it became the era’s symbol of equality - though, rather pointedly, only in death. By the time Napoleon marched in to restore "order," the noble cause had devolved into a gory circus, leaving France gasping for stability, even if it came in the form of a dictator with a penchant for empire.

Skip forward a century or so, and Russia decided it was their turn. The Bolshevik Revolution, similarly awash with promises of power to the people, began with equal fanfare and swiftly careened into an opera of blood and betrayal. Tsars were toppled, land was redistributed, and the whole machinery of the state was supposedly rebuilt for the benefit of the worker.

Yet, as with the French, idealism soon gave way to paranoia, and the machinery of the revolution began to devour itself. Anyone who so much as muttered a complaint about the new order risked a one-way trip to the gulags. Instead of liberty and equality, the people got purges and propaganda, with Stalin’s gaze replacing the guillotine as the era’s symbol of terror.

The irony is as thick as it is predictable: two revolutions, launched by oppressed citizens sick to death of autocrats, only to end up with authoritarian regimes of even greater ferocity. It seems the banner of “power to the people” rarely waves for long before some opportunistic strongman pulls it down and drapes it over his own ambitions. History has a curious sense of humor, as if to say that each generation of idealists is welcome to try - just don’t expect a different result. Revolutions may start with lofty speeches and swelling anthems, but they have a funny way of ending with the same old tune: meet the new boss, as unbending as the old one, and quite possibly a bit more paranoid.

“History teaches us that man learns nothing from history.”

- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

And so, here we are again, with political promises echoing about a renewed greatness wrapped around a nostalgic yearning for an era that likely never existed in the way it’s now fondly remembered. The old formula of success - through iron-fisted resolve accompanied by a large dollop of anger, suspicion, and a side of spectacle - gets trotted out as if it were a shiny new innovation. We’ve seen this before, this whole belief in “restoring” something lost, propped up by a charismatic figure who assures us that only they alone truly understand the way back to glory. History chuckles at this, because it knows how easily we mistake a familiar shortcut for a bold new path.

History’s greatest lesson is less a revelation than a running gag. It teaches us, over and over, that we’re remarkably adept at building monuments to the same mistakes, then posing beside them with pride. Civilizations rise and fall, leaving behind grand cathedrals and crumbling statues, while the next hopeful ruler or rabble-rouser confidently insists, “This time, we’re gonna make it great – the kingdom will rise again, stronger, purer, and absolutely immune to history’s old tricks.” It’s a routine as old as empires themselves, as predictable as the turning of the tide - and yet, each time it pulls us under, we come up sputtering, asking ourselves how we could have missed the signs? Each cycle reminds us that humanity never tires of stepping off the same cliff, fully expecting to float.

In the end, we’re left to wonder why anyone would expect a different outcome from the last time. The scroll of history is filled with last-ditch grandiose promises and fading glories from those convinced they’d finally sidestepped the pitfalls of those who came before. The more we cling to the belief that history can be rewritten on demand, the more likely we are to stumble into its oldest punchline: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” Whether it's politics, ideology, or sheer hubris, we seem committed to learning the hard way, letting ourselves be led by tired old actors who insist they’re pioneering a new script. So far, our greatest historic consistency may well be our inability to stop repeating it. It seems sadly clear that, left to our own devices, we tend to mistake recycled promises for progress, rallying for purity, simplicity, and a great new era, only to end up watching the whole thing unravel yet again.

“If you don’t know history, it’s as if you were born yesterday. If you were born yesterday, then any leader can tell you anything.”- Howard Zinn

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