Why Should We Study the Past?
Why Should We Study the Past?
Pearl S. Buck once said, “If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.” In order for us as a people to know where we are going in life, we must study the past of our ancestors to find out where we have been.
The human animal by its very nature is curious. We must know the answers to, who, what, where, when, why and how. We cannot help ourselves from asking these questions, and we cannot stop ourselves from going in search of the answers. We have an overwhelming need to feed our in satiable curiosity. The human psyche has not changed the way the mind works. Therefore, how we lived in the past will give us an extreme insight on how we will react and live in the future. The people who lived thousands of years ago were just as intelligent as we are today, perhaps even more so, because they couldn’t afford to be inept and survive without the amenities that we have today. We study the past to learn just how they lived and survived.
We must study the past to find answers to questions of how did some of these past cultures, who allegedly did not have the wheel, transport 200 ton blocks of stone from one place to another, and then use them to build structures for living, storage of food, and ceremonial rituals, all without the what we today call “proper tools.” It is something we must study to find out how they did this because we don’t seem to be able to do it today.
And although technology has changed over time, the behaviors associated with them, has not. A bow and arrow has changed to a gun. Our ancestors used a bow and arrow for hunting and going to war with their neighbors. We today do the same exact things with the gun. We study the past to try to understand why this fact hasn’t changed.
We have learned from the past how to irrigate crops so they will survive in virtually in any climate. We took what we learned from them and made improvements so it will continue to work for us today.
Edmund Burke said
Pearl S. Buck once said, “If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.” In order for us as a people to know where we are going in life, we must study the past of our ancestors to find out where we have been.
The human animal by its very nature is curious. We must know the answers to, who, what, where, when, why and how. We cannot help ourselves from asking these questions, and we cannot stop ourselves from going in search of the answers. We have an overwhelming need to feed our in satiable curiosity. The human psyche has not changed the way the mind works. Therefore, how we lived in the past will give us an extreme insight on how we will react and live in the future. The people who lived thousands of years ago were just as intelligent as we are today, perhaps even more so, because they couldn’t afford to be inept and survive without the amenities that we have today. We study the past to learn just how they lived and survived.
We must study the past to find answers to questions of how did some of these past cultures, who allegedly did not have the wheel, transport 200 ton blocks of stone from one place to another, and then use them to build structures for living, storage of food, and ceremonial rituals, all without the what we today call “proper tools.” It is something we must study to find out how they did this because we don’t seem to be able to do it today.
And although technology has changed over time, the behaviors associated with them, has not. A bow and arrow has changed to a gun. Our ancestors used a bow and arrow for hunting and going to war with their neighbors. We today do the same exact things with the gun. We study the past to try to understand why this fact hasn’t changed.
We have learned from the past how to irrigate crops so they will survive in virtually in any climate. We took what we learned from them and made improvements so it will continue to work for us today.
Edmund Burke said