History is your Data for Maturity
Monday Memo: August 10 AD2026
Welcome to the Monday Memo, where I explore the world’s enduring dynamics; grounded in first principles, philosophy, character, and statecraft, rather than passing fads.
I am finalizing summer grades so I’ll keep this Monday’s post short.
“Well you learned your lesson” so goes the old saying from parents and teachers, and coaches and mentors. The idea is that you experienced something, you know what happened, and because of it you will remember to do or not to do something. You have grown, or at least they assert that you did. And you probably think you did to. That experience is your history.
I wrote about the link between history and memory last week and how history represents the truth as we know it, and memory is the truth we believe and act on. When they line up we have real experiential knowledge. What I’m pondering is the quote I will share with my students in the coming weeks at the beginning of a new Fall semester. “Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.”
Okay not really. I will not share that quote, because it is incomplete, and I find incomplete quotes rob the learner of what the originator intended. The quote comes from George Santayana’s The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress volume one which is called Reason in Common Sense and you dear reader can find it in chapter twelve. The full quote 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 not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in whom instinct has learned nothing from experience. In a second stage men are docile to events, plastic to new habits and suggestions, yet able to graft them on original instincts, which they thus bring to fuller satisfaction. This is the plane of manhood and true progress. Last comes a stage when retentiveness is exhausted and all that happens is at once forgotten; a vain because unpractical repetition of the past takes the place of plasticity and fertile readaptation. In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity. The hard shell, far from protecting the vital principle, condemns it to die down slowly and be gradually chilled; immortality in such a case must have been secured earlier, by giving birth to a generation plastic to the contemporary world and able to retain its lessons. Thus old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp.
Longtime subscribers will recognize it, but I find it a good practice to reintroduce it for new subscribers every so often because the full quote is much harder-hitting than the truncated one, and makes a more profound point.
A society that lacks a good memory is effectively stuck in perpetual immaturity. When you are a young twenty year old college student, what makes you no longer a child is that you now have those twenty years of experience behind you. And if you were awake for your journey, and not merely drifting by, you may find that while you still lack a lot of experiences, you are actually ready for college and your career path. The same holds for those who pursue paths other than university. That twenty years got you to where you are now. And your maturity level is what you took from all that.
The same for organizations, businesses, and yes, countries. Did you learn your lessons? Well, it is never to late to start learning from your own experiences, or from history.
Okay back to grading for me.