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Understand the present in terms of the past is one of the popular ways in which we position ourselves and make decisions to act. Unable to predict the future and stop the present, the past is seen as our only point of support: a kind of shortcut to rationality
History, in this way – at least according to some – provides a series of teachings
which, properly absorbed, should dispel doubts and stimulate political change. The rise of the far right in recent years in general and the Trump presidency in particular, have been two moments in which these feelings have been condensed in a particular way. The idea that the past contains lessons
which often take the form of historical comparisons, prevails in public discourse. Such analogies are often accompanied by dire warnings about the fate of those who they forget
either ignore
the story and then there are condemned to repeat it
as the saying goes dictum Attributed to George Santayana.
However, the value of the lessons from history
nothing is given and depends on the philosophical position regarding history that one takes, a field that oscillates between the –apocryphal– saying of Santayana (who spoke rather of the difference in development between babies and adults), to a −true− contradictum of Otto Friedrich that Those who cannot forget the past are doomed to misinterpret it.
which in the face of the alleged dangers of low memory
rather points to the dangers of its excess
.
Thus the claimed dictum, often by the first group, existing since antiquity and attributed to Cicero of History as a teacher of life
-“history, magistra vitae”− which serves as a commandment to go learning
The idea that learning the lessons of the past and not forgetting it is far from universally accepted. As Tony Judt, for example, observed in recent decades: “we have become extremely good at teaching the ‘lessons of history’, but quite bad at teaching real history” (sic). For Reinhart Koselleck, whose work rests on the thesis of the inescapable plurality and plurivocity of historical experience, historical memory and historiography are sites of perpetual reinterpretation and conflict, not of lessons
. Emphasizing the evolution of the notion of history as magistra vitae, Koselleck preferred to see it as a sequence of singular and unrepeatable events that do not constitute any model and from which no conclusions can be drawn for the future. Although a certain recurrence exists, the dilemma of the historian and of all who claim to learn something from history
is to find these repetitions and isolate them, although in the end, according to him, The only thing history teaches is that it teaches nothing.
.
Inspired precisely by Koselleck’s skepticism, Enzo Traverso points out that Drawing lessons from the past is necessary and indispensable
but this It does not immunize us
and in itself It is not the solution to any problem
: just think of the countries of migrants seized by xenophobia or those devastated by dictatorships immersed in their apology. New generations are faced with new problems, and knowing history is no guarantee of knowing how to deal with them (as in the case of the rise of the extreme right). Knowledge of the past is necessary, but that should not be limited to the thoughtless attachment to the idea that “history is magistra vitae”, which is no guarantor of anything, so treating history as a means for the interpretation and transformation of the present and the future is a misleading task. For Traverso, it is a delusion
given that It is not enough to know the past to avoid repeating its mistakes
although ignorance is not the solution either: “the problem is how to ‘process the past’, which is not the same as knowing it.”
While understanding the past, building a critical discourse about it and draw the lessons
It is the historian’s job, the lessons of the past, according to Traverso, can be understood in different ways and the representations and interpretations change in each era and according to the political coordinates. Today, with politics lacking any utopia or vision of the future and the world devoid of any horizon of expectations
(Erwartunghorizon) of which Koselleck wrote, the only guide
in the face of the void left by communism and anti-colonialism with their emancipatory visions of a different future, seems to be precisely the story reactivated
omnipresent and focused on the lessons
and the analogies that have much to say about the ways in which, supposedly, Trump for example resembles Hitler (sic), but nothing about the alternatives to imperialism, the market and capitalism. And the model of learn
It is the same – rooted in the Enlightenment and connected to the idea of progress
–, a linear and cumulative conception of history, famously criticized by Walter Benjamin in his Thesis on history (1940). In the face of this, Traverso proposes to recover the concept of reactivation
or the return of the past like lightning
of which Benjamin spoke: the moments in which, in some historical circumstances, the past returns
when a certain collective memory can be activated through joint action, serving precisely as a kind of lessons from history
but very different from those that are usually talked about.
