Ignore History at Your Peril

Each culture is the product of centuries of its history.  The way modern Americans think about the world, for example, is a product not only of individual experience, but of America's history.  We abhor slavery, coerced religion, and despotism, and we love liberty, achievement, and individualism because of what we, collectively, have experienced.  Much of this experience is not first-hand, but is passed down through generations or is taught in our schools (which is a topic for another day).

Likewise, other cultures think about the world in ways shaped by their own histories, and sometimes these can be hard for Americans to understand.  The current crisis with Islamic fundamentalists is a stark case in point -- their actions and goals are almost incomprehensible to us.  We shout at the news, "Why would you ever do that!?  How could you think that way!?"

Americans have in our collective experience the writings, teaching, and actions of philosophers, elected officials, writers, and others that gradually shaped our way of thinking -- figures like Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, Twain, and writers too numerous to mention.  And we share much of western Europe's ideological heritage from figures like Churchill, Dickens, Voltaire, Francis Bacon, and writers too numerous to mention.  Revolutions, struggles, and upheavals have molded us -- the separation of State from Church throughout Europe in the 1700's, the Age of Reason, revolutions against tyrannical governments and the rebirth of democracy, civil war over slavery, women's suffrage, and the Civil Rights movement.  Without all those authors, leaders, expounders of ideas, and upheavals, the West would be unrecognizable.

Islamic fundamentalists have not gone through those revolutions and evolutions (yet -- I believe they will come).  Many reject all things "Western" out-of-hand.  They also reject five hundred years of science and the hard lessons taught by history, and they selectively reject parts of their own histories.  In extreme cases, they limit education to the Koran, and that for men only, completely ignoring the lessons learned from history and other cultures.  And so they have no heritage or understanding of concepts of personal liberty, democratic/republican government, scientific discovery, civil rights, women's rights, tolerance, etc.  These are only seen through the lens of narrowly restricted, dogmatic education.  For the masses, it can be said that they reject that of which they know nothing.  These are also the reasons a democratic/republican form of government cannot be successfully imposed on them -- it must be earned, and yearned for from the grass roots.

Those who reject history are dooming themselves to repeat its hard lessons, and the ones who will pay the heaviest price are they, themselves.  History teaches us, however, that there will be a lot of collateral damage.