Why Does History Repeat?

There’s that old saying that if you don’t learn from history, you’re doomed to repeat it. Everyone in power loves to say that as if it means anything, as if they’re wise and original for saying it, and as if it’s clearly true. But is it? No—in fact, the opposite is true: if you constantly focus on history, your brain will be full of what has already happened, and you won’t be able to do anything other than what you have studied historically.

This is the gist of Nietzsche’s philosophy of history, put forward in his early essay “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life.” This happens with cultures too—when we collectively look backwards too much, we can only move backwards. That’s why nothing ever changes, and we keep repeating everything. It isn’t because we are ignorant of history, but because we are too aware of it. Nietzsche calls this condition suffering from an excess of historical consciousness, and thinks it’s emblematic of the modern age.

Education today has become far too historical—there is very little focus on new ideas or on any kind of future. That’s why it’s 2022 and it doesn’t really feel like the future. When the future is focused on at all, it is only in a technical way—like Elon Musk’s bogus vision of a future with solar powered cars and reusable rocket ships, and promising a Mars colony that’s always just five more years down the line, and not much else. The future now is just a shell game being played on you by an entrepreneurial con man.

A real focus on the future would be about new ideas for living together—new social theories. This is especially necessary now that capitalism has failed so clearly, and young people are looking for something new. According to a recent poll, a majority of young people in America hold a negative view of capitalism. But instead of new theories of post-capitalism, or even just understanding the basics of communist theory (dialectical and historical materialism), we get the libertarian/reddit futurism of Elon Musk.

So we have little if any idea of a collective future, and then we get lots and lots of historical education. What form does historical education take? Mostly just about bad things that have happened, atrocities and evilness, mainly of the racial variety. Students learn more about slavery and the Holocaust than probably anything else. What is the reason for this? I suppose the people who design our educational systems think that it’s a means of making sure that no more slavery or Holocausts or racism happens in the future—like there’s a presupposition that racism is waiting inside everyone and everything ready to bubble up and create new slavery systems and Holocausts, and this threat needs to be forcibly combated with endless historical education about these things. That if students just learn about slavery, racism, the Holocaust and Hitler enough, they will realize how bad all these things are.

Clearly, this hasn’t worked. People are more obsessed with Hitler, the Holocaust, and racism than ever. It’s just more in the air these days than ever, and more than anything else. There’s even a leading pop star, Kanye West, basically adopting a form of neo-Hitlerism (though he is most likely doing it because he knows it will get people talking, rather than actually believing in it). Rather than suppressing all these things, it seems like our educational system’s obsession with them has kept it all at the forefront of our social life.

Why do we seem doomed to just keep repeating history, over and over? Not from a lack of historical knowledge—not because we are ignorant of the bad things that have happened—but because we are all too aware of them. And because the only concept of the future being promoted is boring and narrow—also because science fiction, which used to be a popular, mass market genre, is now just about the identities of characters in the shows. That’s what the new slew of Star Trek products are about, not about actual science or discovery or any new worlds. And because the best system devised for thinking about a more human future—historical and dialectical materialism, the theory of social change based on classes and contradictions—has nothing to do with public education in America.