To My Readers: Help!

[mycelium89]

Okay, I just finished my paper. But what really prevented me from finishing it sooner was this: Chris doesn't think history is important. How does that work?! He said that all that matters is the present situation and off of that, there's no need to know about the history of how it came to be. History is just "fun facts" as he put it. Please

Comments

[haolepanda]

Ignoring history is the biggest reason why the same problems keep recurring. When people forget how a situation came to be, they can no longer avoid it. And when they find themselves in that situation again they don't remember how they got out of it either. Discounting history is like dismissing your experiences instead of learning from them, and it's why the life of the world is so cyclical.

[mycelium89]

That's what I tried to tell him, but he says that you don't have to look back on a situation in order to assess the current problem. The example he gives is the credit crisis, and that one wouldn't have to look back on an event such as the Great Depression. People should have just seen that lending money to people with bad credit was a bad idea.

I'm really trying to have him write down his own argument. It would make this a whole lot easier.

I'm a retard. I got super carried away. But i spent a long time on it so i'm gonna post it allanyway

[slagg89]

Hm... based on what you’ve said i can't really see why he's wrong. After all, just “assessing the current problem” is very different from knowing how to resolve it and avoid it in the future. For example, it is very easy to look at a broken computer and say, “The problem is that this computer is broken.” You can even analyze how it’s broken. For example: “It’s screen is cracked and it won’t turn on.” But only when you look at history can you confidently say: “when you throw your computer across the room it will break. It would probably be a good idea not to throw it across the room in the future.” You didn’t really need past experience to tell you that the computer was broken. I think that might be what your friend is getting at

[mycelium89]

Yeah, I get what you mean. I understand his view to an extent. But I'm glad you wrote this because it says everything I wanted to say to him. I wanted to bring up reading to him, but it slipped my mind. Indeed, history is defined as all things recorded with prehistory being before writing was invented. (Although I think that's a different point in and of itself.) But yeah, history is just ingrained in our society. You can't just erase history and expect to make progress off of nothing.

What he really wants is a specific example. I'm really gonna try to get him to make his argument for himself.

[monopolist0]

Sara has been trying to get me to say why history is not important for a while, and I've been pretty resistant. Mainly because I think I would sound like an ass if I just talked about how pointless a subject is, especially a subject that a lot of people really like. I'm not trying to be mean, I just don't understand why it matters

[k_a_i_o_m_i]

Sorry I'm replying to this whole debate thing pretty late. So here's my very long and drawn out argument