[detbuch]

Originally Posted by JackK

And that reminds me of George Santayana's famous quote:

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

I admire Santayana's writings very much. I especially am in tune with his views on nature. Not the syruppy isn't it all beautiful and scenic and lets take a picture view, but on nature being the foundation through which we experience life.

As for the quote of which you are reminded, it has become a truism. We now apply it to the horrors and wars of the past. But Santayana was not referring only to destructive events, he was talking about the destruction of the past itself. There is much in history that he loves. He is very much a traditionalist and a believer that much of the past is good and we would not be "condemned" to repeat but would be blessed to retain.

A fuller quote which includes what immediately is written before the famous passage is: "Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

This so much applies to what has happened in the history of our country. The Founders searched the past, and retained that which previous experience from classical history to their present day would best secure natural liberty. They weren't about absolute change. They were about improving history and the liberty of the beings that populate it. Then, a movement, progressivism, sprung from cataclysmic 19th century thinkers who wanted to reject the past as a means to improve the lot of the common man. Their "theories" were not based in nature as a foundation, but nature to be tamed and molded to fit what they considered good. That movement spread to "intellectuals" here, ironically, as an administrative method copied from Prussia which was instituted there to keep the masses from overthrowing the monarchy. The Progressives considered the Constitution "outdated," irrelevant, and an obstruction to their goal of an all-powerful system of central government which could more efficiently deliver and administer an "effective" freedom to the people rather than a merely legal freedom garanteed by the Constitution. It is this administrative system based on "modern" thinkers rather than past experience which we have today. Actually that "modern" system has been applied in recent history from WWI to the present in the West and, in a more severe form, in the East. It is no longer modern and the experience of effective liberty has not been as beneficial to freedom as was legal liberty. Actually the trajectory has been to benefit collective groups at the expense of the individual.

To that point, you might consider another Santayana quote: "individualism is in one sense the only possible ideal; for whatever social order may be most valuable can be valuable only for its effect on conscious individuals."

Another quote by him that I find more interesting than the rest: "There is eternal war in nature . . . War is but resisted change; and change must needs be resisted so long as the organism it would destroy retains any vitality." This can not only apply, again, to the Constitution and the war being waged on it and the resistance to that change if there is enough vitality left in the resistance. It also gives the lie to the quest for peace without victory. We are the product of war. Every molecule of our being is at war to survive and flourish against constant invasions of microbes and forces of nature. It is a war which we, as individuals will eventually lose. But we live on with the progeny who survive natural deaths and unnatural abortions and who will continue the battle. Our universal, material, biological inheritance is composed of this battle and every fiber of our being is informed by it. It is our natural mode. We must win to survive. We cannot compromise in this battle, not only with the forces of nature, but against the human forces that wish to enslave or destroy us. Santayana also said "Only the dead have seen the end of war." Peace will come with victory, either by those who wish to enslave or those who wish to be free. And that peace will last only until the next battle.


If one is willing to live life by the tenets set forth in a two thousand year old book, then they shouldn't conveniently ignore all of the events that occurred afterwards (as a direct result of said book). That goes for christianity, islam, judaism, etc, etc.

We humans have this wonderful capacity to misread. Often we do so intentionally. If we have a purpose that may be a direct contradiction to a bible, or a Constitution, but knowing the influence of quoting or adhering to that bible or constitution, we may with malice "interpret" those binding documents in a way that makes it easy to impose other than what is in them. Such is the unfortunate and malicious way that good books and constitutions are corrupted and thus lead to "events that occur afterwards," and which can erroneously be seen "as a direct result" of those documents.

As for The Bible, the "New Testament" version, much is blamed on it, such as inquisitions and conquests, which are not professed in the book. Certainly there have been those who seemed to read the words in ways not intended and twisted them to aid in horrific events. Blaming the Bible would assume, since you consider it the direct cause, that such horrific events would not have occurred if there was no Bible. Nonsense. The Bible was an excuse. Something else would have been the cause if there was no Bible. Remember the quote about those who cannot remember the past. The original history of Christianity was one of suffering and persecution and poverty and enslavement. Christ was a redeemer of the unfortunate, not a torturer. Those that forgot that message were the cause of being condemned to repeat the horrors that original Christians wanted us to escape.