To understand our future, we must study the past – and study it hard

People without a decent sense of history (and I should add: geography) live in a total fog when it concerns their future. But now at least two generations have been educated mainly to consume the present, and to do this with unprecendented voracity, lacking even the most basic understanding of how their present came to be.

When I grew up – which was in the 50s and 60s – history was served at dinner, at school, on Television, in books. Sure, it was still served in a way faintly reminiscent of the heroic tales which constituted the main part of ‘history’ in our parents’ time and in the 19th Century. But the many movies and upcoming documentaries with increasingly realistic footage at least provided people of my generation with a sound ciritical attitude towards history – and all but the wish to throw it away.

Then, heroism was out, and our newly acquired sense of progress – and progressiveness – became the overriding driving force in our public culture, and this very much included education policies. History had to accept the back seat. Children could readily discard it in their curriculum resulting in an endemic ignorance even of elementary chronology: “Yeah, in the old days they had to learn dates and events etc.”. In the old days...

So increasingly people respond in highly short sighted terms to the events of their own time. In many ways the crazy hypes which have visited my own country in the recent years should largely be attributed to the lack of basic information about the historic context of many of these events whether in our own country or in foreign places.


This little girl in the Middle East experiences the force of history every day, every night

We also know that history is not a static phenomenon. The past is just as much alive as our present, and – of course – our future. Especially the past decade is a demonstration of this. Until 1990, Europe seemed such a simple thing, as was East versus West. But today things are not that simple any more. And the only way to grasp this is to go back in time and revisit the events of the late 19th and early 20th century.

I do not live in the past, but I thoroughly like to walk around in history. I thoroughly enjoy pondering about the issues of religion and politics as they developed troughout the centuries; I thoroughly enjoy every effort I make to understand the history behind the conflicts between our Western world and, for instance, the Arab world. But the greatest enjoyment I derive from gaining a sharper view of our possibilities in the future: the potential for history that lies ahead.