The study of history for the purpose of comprehending what has gone before and to abstract from it patterns of behavior that may be repeated is an interesting avocation that one may purse for a lifetime usefully as it fits reasonably well into a philosophy of history and a philosophical consideration of human behavior at a general social level as well as that of in an individual level. Individual do comprise social history though one may view them concatenated as a society or culture. Subjective psychology or epistemological content of individuals within organizations from intra-social micro scale such as dyadic relationships to a corporate and state scale affect the behavior of the organization. Organizations such as states at the national or empirical scale have structures that recur over history into the future though they may be and often are new synthetic forms comparable metaphorically to the aggregations of bits of continents that formed the state of Alaska over eons with tectonic drift.
Individuals learn institutionally within organizational agents of socialization that indoctrinate and train youth. One found that in the NAZI youth movement and the content of educational indoctrination for hate is well expressed in certain Middle Eastern nations regarding Jews and Israel. History is the iceberg below the surface and the present is the tip of the burg above the surface that living people experience. The past does not of course entirely pre-determine present behavior of individuals or nations and civilization yet the inertial forces of continuity that comprise the complete economic compresent elements do have historical continuity that continues into the present.
Nations and other large social organization have organizations within such that the entirety might be comparable to a cell with its organelles and other parts including D.N.A. Challenges and responses occurs from within and without the nation-cell to the global existential state of affairs.
An example of historical continuity might be that of two allies from the First World War; Germany and Turkey that were then the primary Axis powers. Maybe they share historical periods of opposition to the existence of Jews or of the Jewish state. Since each are in NATO and have excellent military histories the future possible policies of NATO without the United States being a member are interesting and complex to consider, and I won’t do that here, instead, because of limited time I wanted to write a little more about the value of learning history well enough to develop one’s own theories of history and test them against those of others and actual history.
Writing on a lunch break I There is concrete present contemporary history and all of the things people think and national policies and history that tensor them in particular directions forward in time, and there is an abstract synthetic analysis of the contents of each of the nations, civilizations and their history that one might develop and interpret current affairs and directions with. If one has a good purpose for learning existential historical analysis (I liked Sartre’s books such as Being and Nothingness and the Critique of Dialectical Reason as well as Toynbee’s Study of History”, such as trying to configure relations among nations in a socially beneficial direction if possible, it is useful to understand the role f major historical institutions such as the Catholic Church, The Muslim World and so forth to comprehend how they affect the formation of a state and its policies within a heterodox international political environment. It is useful to understand how economics, education, and energy plus food productions have determined national and international policies. T is useful to learn what effect elites have on determining the structure of state establishment even if one wants to reform capitalism or transition to ecological economics nationally.
There is more to history than just abstract documents of dubious accuracy that recorded it for present readers; history is that which went before (such as the history of the Universe of which the present instant, relativistically framing it, occurs entirely because of the exteriorities of relations and space-time presentation of the energy field locked into a steady state through decoherence ( physics term).
Toynbee noted that the Greek city-states were not able to politically adapt to the challenge of the new ‘federalism’ or nation-state that Rome presented, and so they were defeated. Rome too did not adapt to many challenges not the least of which was the failure to equal the Huns in the use of horse calvary to travel as much as 200 miles a day. Today a challenge for the world is to adapt to new and reformed egalitarian capitalism that coheres within ecospherically synergistic economic procedures. Unfortunately human lifetime is limited thought the institutions continue on. There is little time for real learning much less to acquire the political knowledge of the way to reform society so that it can adapt to the external Toynbeen challenges of global warming, mass spices extinction, population and consumption pressures and so forth.
Garrison Gibson: books and blog 