This is an improved version of my GP Prelims. Did some touch ups, but I still cannot fathom why the examiner claims that I have a lack of real-life examples in the essay.
'History helps us to understand the past, but it does not help us to prepare for the future.' Is this true?
'Learn from history, for it shows us our pride and our faults.' There have always been many common sayings about history whereby history is seen as a tool that helps us to understand our past, and that learning from history would prepare us for the future. What the common person often perceives of history is that it is something objective which records the past. However, this is a misconception about the nature of history as a study of the past. History is mistakenly credited to reflect truth, accuracy and objectiveness when the fact is that history is actually subjective in nature. History is written by historians who are often people in service to the state or simply just people with their own agendas and viewpoints. As such, history is never objective because it is in Man's nature to be bias and to take a stance. Take the Japanese involvement in World War II for example, the victims of the war would write terrible histories about the cruelty of Japanese ; the Japanese would write about their war heroes. In reality, Japan has indeed changed the history of war to omit the Nanjing Massacre by Japanese soldiers in Japanese school history textbooks. Therefore, the study of history is never credible and one cannot hope to say that history helps us to understand the past.
Why is then, that the common sayings about history exist? Of course there has to be some value in history if wise men have continually urged us to learn from it. What we must learn from history is to study trends. While history does not let us understand the past fully, it shows us the consequences of certain motivators (such as power and survival) and we can learn from these lessons. Rwanda's genocide did not happen overnight, and neither did India's plunge in economical status in the 1960s. From history, we learn important lessons on what pitfalls there are, so that we would avoid them in the future. Is this helping us prepare for the future? Yes, undoubtedly so? After all, isn't education from history always important?
What exactly is future? Am I going to die the next minute I step on to the road? The future is an ocean of murky waters, and we are on a wooden boat afloat on it, unknown of the hidden dangers. Future is undetermined. Twenty years ago no one would have known that technology would spread so rampantly. A hundred years ago no one would have thought it possible to travel to space for a leisure trip. We cannot predict the future. The future happens. The future changes from time to time, era to era. History, on the other hand, does not change - it merely accumulates. What we can learn from lessons centuries or decades ago may not apply to reality. Now we face problems of game addicts and threats of computer viruses that cause a loss of important data stored in the complex systems of computers. We face a growing problem of rich-poor divide. Does history prepare us for these? No. We cannot prepare ourselves for the unknown. Even a forward-looking country like Singapore who draws many lessons from history cannot do so. Singapore can only make use of history and other knowledge like economics to predict the future, trying hard to pre-empt disasters, just like how Singapore makes use of the 1997 global recession as a learning point which now enabled her to keep her economy growing even in the present situation of inflation and America's recession. The point to note, however, was that Singapore predicted and foresaw the future. Singapore has an image of the future that was projected based on history and other knowledge areas. Instead of wandering in murky waters, Singapore visualises a bright torch beam shining down at murky waters. Singapore does not prepare for the unknown, but the known - the predicted future, not future.
The subjective nature of history combined with the indeterminate nature of the future makes it difficult to prepare for the future. If we cannot truly and completely comprehend the past, what we learn from history may be misleading. Take the century old battle between Christians and Jews for example, the study of the Bible (which is considered a historical text) deems the Jews as the reincarnate of the devil, and such prejudice has persisted and eventually led to the tragic holocaust. When a group of such people who take texts at face-value without questioning if it is the truth and acts upon what they have learnt from their own 'perceived' lessons, stereotypes occur. Following the onslaught of stereotypes, discrimination would often be developed against what these people perceive collectively as 'threats' and 'impediments' to their future. This does not help us prepare for future, and the biased nature of mis-interpreted history only furthers the cohesion of the world because it highlights differences and conflicts more often than peace and stability.
The real future is elusive and ever-changing. As such, one can never be prepared for it. We can, however, prepare for a future we predict using knowledge and history. Nevertheless, the subjective nature of history and bias of Man makes us prone to misunderstanding our past, and we cannot use history to dictate how we perceive and prepare for the future.
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