Time is a flat circle. Everything we’ve ever done, or will do, we’re gonna do over and over and over again.
– Rustin Cohle
(hopefully this satisfies the spirit, if not the letter, of the original post)
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I always thought it was a transparent helix with many people confused about what level they’re on.
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I don’t get the reference.
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“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history that we make today.”
– Henry Ford
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
– George Santayana
“Go ahead, kill without mercy. After all, who remembers today the Armenian Genocide?”
— A. Hitler
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“A number of years ago, when I was a freshly-appointed instructor, I met, for the first time, a certain eminent historian of science. At the time I could only regard him with tolerant condescension.
I was sorry of the man who, it seemed to me, was forced to hover about the edges of science. He was compelled to shiver endlessly in the outskirts, getting only feeble warmth from the distant sun of science- in-progress; while I, just beginning my research, was bathed in the heady liquid heat up at the very center of the glow.
In a lifetime of being wrong at many a point, I was never more wrong. It was I, not he, who was wandering in the periphery. It was he, not I, who lived in the blaze.
I had fallen victim to the fallacy of the ‘growing edge;’ the belief that only the very frontier of scientific advance counted; that everything that had been left behind by that advance was faded and dead.
But is that true? Because a tree in spring buds and comes greenly into leaf, are those leaves therefore the tree? If the newborn twigs and their leaves were all that existed, they would form a vague halo of green suspended in mid-air, but surely that is not the tree. The leaves, by themselves, are no more than trivial fluttering decoration. It is the trunk and limbs that give the tree its grandeur and the leaves themselves their meaning.
There is not a discovery in science, however revolutionary, however sparkling with insight, that does not arise out of what went before. ‘If I have seen further than other men,’ said Isaac Newton, 'it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.”
― Isaac Asimov
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http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/philosophy/history/learning_from_history.html
Extract:
In February 1948, the British historian Lewis Namier delivered a lecture commemorating the centennial of the European Revolutions of 1848.
In this lecture Namier presented facts about the historical developments, themes, and events evident in 1848 and reached the conclusion that:-
"1848 remains a seed-plot of history. It crystallized ideas and projected the pattern of things to come; it determined the course of the following century."
If Namier is right in viewing the “Revolutions of 1848” as featuring a seed-plot of history, and if we can identify the early attempts at growth and development by such evident resulting “seedlings” as Liberalism, Constitutionalism, Democracy, Socialism and Nationalism ~ including such competition as came to exist between them for “a Place in the Sun” (in situations where, although shaken, down-but-not-out dynastic authority was usually trying to suppress them, fairly successfully in 1848 and with diminishing effectiveness over ensuing decades) then surely we will have succeeded to some degree in actually learning lessons of history.
Unduly optimistic, I think.
I was watching this just a few weeks ago:
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
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Reminds me of the Yeats quote:
Hurrah for revolution, and more cannot-shot!
A beggar on horseback lashes a beggar on foot.
Hurrah for revolution, and cannon come again
The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.
(he was not overly impressed with the Irish Civil War).
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It’s a common sentiment…
But on the other hand…
The thing that actually inspired my plus ça change comment was the discussion in the video of the dynamics between the factions. The bit starting at 2:04.
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That’s hilarious… Has that meme hit peak memeness yet? That might be it!
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Until I saw this, I thought this meme was done long ago. There is something here from the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, but I’m too lazy to put it all together on a Friday afternoon.
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Indeed me too… and I’m only halfway done on grading!
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You didn’t say we were going to be graded! 
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Explain for the clueless? I’m familiar with the meme, but not that image.
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Angelus Novus, by Paul Klee.
A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
–Walter Benjamin, Theses On The Philosophy Of History
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I can see what it is relevant, but I can’t see why staring eyes or an open mouth are supposed to suggest anything at all, or how we’re supposed to assume intended direction. Fuck, I can’t even tell if something is already moving towards me or away.
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You mean the Klee painting? I guess on some level more abstract works like that come down to individual interpretations and really, that was Benjamin’s view of the painting.
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“We said to each other, The time is coming near
When none shall have books or music, none his dear,
And only a fool will speak aloud his mind.
History is approaching a speechless end,
As Henry Adams said. Adams was right.”
(John Berryman: The Moon and the Night and the Men)
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Funky history thread:
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