We can all learn the lessons of history. The sad truth is that most people don’t learn from it. The Spanish author and philanthropist George Santayana penned in a 1905 book, entitled The Life of Reason, that “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

In the present day, too many not only choose to ignore history, they want to completely eradicate it – and vilify many of the past who are still remembered.

This phenomenon is known as presentism, which we will designate as our word of the year. Those who embrace it believe that only today matters. They maintain that history is filled with so many mistakes and errors – which is absolutely true by the way – that it is better to be forgotten – a conclusion that is tragically wrong.

Greg Coco, a renowned Gettysburg author and historian who has since passed, once remarked to me that we cannot place our values on those who lived in a different era. Without fully knowing what made them act, we cannot judge them fairly, and so we have to be careful in our judgment.  

History is often muddled, as so many who participated in it and recorded it had such different points of view. Incomplete truths and sometimes lies were told and written then, just like they are now. Just because something was written down in 1842 doesn’t make it true. Slander and libel were just as effective then as they are now, and just as pernicious. We have to try to be as thorough as possible to reach the truth from the past, and not use it to boost our own points of view. Or ignore or erase it because it doesn’t fit a particular narrative.

The Civil War is a perfect case in point. The Battle of Gettysburg is another. It’s difficult to envision all that transpired during these conflicts, and trying to decipher the multitudinous varying points of view is close to impossible at times. It’s even more difficult to decide who was good and who was evil. Both sides had honorable people in their ranks, and both had their share of awful people. Societies of the past have always contained both types of people, or a plethora of people of varying shades of both traits. It’s called being human. Time and the pushing of presentism will never change that fact.

We cannot quantify the past – or in other words, put it into this package, abbreviate it, consider an event or a people all one thing or all another; and judge it as prosaic and unremarkable. History is far too complicated for that. Putting the past into a modern box called presentism is going to lead us to that alternative so eloquently written by Mr. Santayana. That scenario is too worrisome to contemplate.

We can do much for ourselves by learning from the mistakes of the past. One of them is to realize that we are not infallible. (That was General Lee’s mistake at Gettysburg.) I remember learning as a child about the Roman Colosseum, and how the citizens of Rome killed human beings and wild animals for entertainment in that immense arena. I remember thinking, “Well, we would never do that these days. They were way too violent back then.”

How foolish I was to think we were past all that. History can, and does, repeat itself. By implementing presentism and employing quantification in a widespread manner, we encourage a terrible repetition.

As we begin 2023, we will hopefully remember the dangerous precedent that can be created by presentism.

We need to live for today, plan for tomorrow – and learn from the past. To learn from it requires a careful and objective study. We have a duty to those who will come after us to ensure history’s survival. Perhaps doing that will preserve our own survival.

Pass the word.