A housing boom in the early s led to high rates of mortgage debt, and banks were making lots of risky loans. When the housing bubble burst, many people defaulted on their mortgages. During these economic crises, President Roosevelt and President Obama both increased federal spending. Economists and historians are still studying the causes of the Great Recession, but there are certainly many similarities between it and that situation 80 years ago.
People who studied these two cases of economic decline could not help noticing that it was a great example of history repeating itself, teaching us that more financial education is needed before lending money to the mainstream.
Most of the time, when we think of examples of history repeating itself, we think of human activities, but the natural world also has its own stages. Over the history of life on earth, there have been several periods of mass extinction, during which over 75 percent of living species were wiped out. The well-known asteroid impact led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. That was the last big extinction event, 65 million years ago, but it also was the smallest one.
This is by far the largest mass extinction in natural history. The Triassic-Jurassic extinction happened about million years ago, and these extinctions paved the way for dinosaurs to rise to prominence. Finally, the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction 65 million years ago wiped out the dinosaurs, and the proliferation of mammals began.
Great sinking ships: the Titanic, the Vasa, and the Tek Sing The Titanic is the most famous sinking ship, partly because its story is the setting for one of the highest-grossing movies of all time.
Natural history: mass extinctions Most of the time, when we think of examples of history repeating itself, we think of human activities, but the natural world also has its own stages. Roosevelt and Jewish conspiracies. This occurred a full six years after the concentration camps started in Germany. American history sometimes casually likes to omit those events in its recounting of World War II. Americans were undoubtedly the good guys of World War II, saving many countries and millions of people worldwide from fascism, but it has also done a poor job at ensuring these fascists ideas stay out of the country in recent years.
The late s saw the Nazi regime kill about six million Jewish people. It saw a country commit genocide against the Jewish people. It saw a country continue to commit mass murders all the way up to the point of defeat. This is the type of behavior the current administration is excusing by not taking a stand against the neo-nazi groups popping up all over the country.
The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany conducted a survey that found that 41 percent of respondents did not know what Auschwitz was. A third also did not know that the true death tally for Jewish people during the war was — six million.
How can we protect history and avoid making the same mistakes we made in the past when we forget what happened? In the same survey, 93 percent of respondents said that students should learn about the Holocaust in school. Americans understand the importance of passing down the knowledge of this dark past, but we have a government that still refuses to condemn groups promoting the same ideas that tore the world apart 80 years ago.
White nationalism and white supremacist groups have made a push in recent years in the United States. The violence and disgusting ideas that these groups promote have no place in a country that fought fascism the s. But we forget, and history repeats itself. Recently, a group of white nationalists in Washington D.
Is humanity doomed on this cyclical historical pattern, as it sometimes seems? The advance of human race—both material and intellectual—is simply something that does not depend on a particular ideological or geopolitical context: it is a feature shared by all in the contemporary world. The world is inevitably becoming a better place for life, no matter whether we are always able to make use of it in an optimal manner.
What might, in that respect, the upcoming decade reveal is a sort of new balance between two mainstream histories: the particular and the universal one, the history of nations and the history of ideas.
Both dominant worldviews of this century—international liberal order and particularistic populism—were seriously challenged by the mayhem of COVID It is likely that both worldviews will continue to struggle over key historical narratives, ones that might help them to win the battle for hearts and minds: technological advancement, the growing power of social networks, and global interconnectedness might become allies of both.
Irrespectively of the aforementioned battle—or, rather, alongside it—the history of ideas will itself continue to unfold. The impact of all these events—the magnitude of change that each separately and all of them together implied—led humanity into the early modern age; and this shift, no matter how slow, was irreversible.
In the same manner, the COVID pandemic revealed all the deficiencies of the old order: its narrow-mindedness, inequalities, prejudices, and fallacies. If history is to be believed, the Cartesian impact of such an awareness is inevitable: it might be slow, but it will again be irreversible.
What should be—in this context—the duty of intellectuals? No matter if a particular cause is good or bad, national or ideological, or if such service would help or hinder it, such help will often be at the expense of the helper himself. But a serious intellectual should be both able and willing to do more than that.
Whoever among us—the author and readers of this essay alike—lives long enough to see the end of this decade might come to discover the outcome of the current battle between international liberal order and particularistic populism will be. Most likely, in finding it out, he or she will not need the help of an intellectual: the outcome will be both self-evident and self-explainable.
What remains, however, the paramount duty of any serious intellectual—scholar, writer, philosopher, and historian alike—is not necessarily to help this or that warrior, but rather to describe and explain the battlefield.
There are dozens of issues that, for quite some time, desperately lack modern critical theory and should go beyond simple description: they should go deeper than just weaponizing these in actual social conflicts. For instance: relationships, such as one between the material world and the world of ideas; an individual and a community; freedom and security; production and distribution; democracy and inequality—are all important and challenging enough to be examined and impartially analyzed, outside of dominant frameworks.
If all current wars between global narratives constitute the Armageddon of the Twenties, so to speak, then all these issues are its battlefields; however, they are certainly much more than that—by representing the features of the world we will at some point leave our children to live in. Therefore, it looks like there still are some common standards for understanding and applying history in our world—no matter how wide the rifts in our political, ideological, economic, and cultural backgrounds might seem.
In this penultimate section, we can try to compose a brief manual for the historian of the s. We can start by asking: is there anything he or she could do in order to help us leave it with at least a little clearer sense about the past than what we had going into the present decade? For the purpose of this essay, I have tried to summarize all the key advice to be proffered to contemporary historians in ten brief truths:.
First, history is a science. It is not a product of fiction or wishful thinking and it must be based on a thorough research of historical sources and well as their verification and comparison, in order to establish—inasmuch as possible—precise and verifiable facts: their analysis and synthesis. Second, history is dynamic. Like any other science, history is constantly advancing towards new knowledge, finding new historical sources, and connecting and reinterpreting all.
Therefore, a revision of established historical facts is possible, but only as result of new research, as opposed to historical revisionism, which is nothing but manipulation with historical facts in order to serve a particular and already set-in-stone political agenda.
Third, history is a discipline of critical thinking. It is not a taboo that serves to enforce national sentiments and disseminate policies of identity by spreading stereotypes and prejudices.
It serves to help us check the authenticity of data and recognize manipulations with and abuses of facts about the past. Fourth, history is a multiperspective.
Historical facts are established by scientific methodology, but the interpretation of such facts might be different, depending on the perspective from which they are interpreted.
But it does allow for an area of debate in which all relevant facts and conflicting opinions about them should be taken into account, without enabling the sanitization of facts and data that do not fit into the dominant worldview of the day.
Fifth, history is integral. Sixth, history is supranational. It cannot be confined to national, religious, or ethnic boundaries. The past is a wide web of interconnected, interdependent, and mutually affecting ties.
States, nations, social groups, ideas, and movements were created, developed, and ultimately vanished by virtue of having influenced each other. There is no other way, except in this permanent complexity, to explain the past, understand the present, and envisage the future.
Seventh, history is contextual. Both past and present cannot be understood separately, taken outside of the wider context and confined on any particular, and thus isolated, problem. The realities of the past were influenced by a multitude of factors; thus, any attempt at non-contextual interpretation leads to an ultimate distortion of our understanding of the past. This is an issue that is constantly being overcome by cooperation among historians.
Eighth, history is rational. It is not a myth, dogma, religion, ideology, or an emotion.
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