Why Don't We Learn From History?

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As we build up so many lessons over time, it often baffles me why we don’t learn more from what we’ve gone through—as professionals, as learners, and as humans.

These days, we seem to move in ways that we’ve tried before but haven’t worked. How many entrepreneurs have we lionized because they bring “the next big thing?” We put them on pedestals and then…discover that they aren’t who we thought—they’ve deceived boards, employees, customers, and others (think, most recently, of Theranos and FTX) or are actually poor leaders in the long run. This holds in business but also more broadly.

The past teaches about the present...and the future

We know that the rise of anti-semitism, the far right, and admiration of “strong men” autocrats isn’t new, so why can’t we learn from what came before? A recent podcast, Ultra, examines the support for and rise of armed militias, far-right forces in the U.S….in the 1940s. That's a long time ago and yet so much of how people were recruited, charged up, and how they infiltrated organizations like Congress (!), sounds scarily similar to today. If there was a movement as similar today as one before and during World War II, why don’t we learn from that, instead of reliving it?

Why don't we learn from history?

That’s where a small book by British military historian B.H. Liddell Hart comes in. He draws on military battles from the days of ancient Greece up to wars in modern Europe. Many lessons are applicable. First published in 1944 and reissued in 1972, his book, Why Don’t We Learn from History? is enjoying a small revival.

Here are a few of Hart’s comments that struck me:

• The value of history is in the countless and repeated ways things go wrong.
• History reminds us that “tough times” are temporary.
• The real lessons come from history’s “negative value"—that is, learning what to avoid.
• Learning from personal experience should come second to learning from the experience of others, because there are thousands of years to draw from.

It’s easy to think, with unlimited access to information (not necessarily knowledge) that studying history is a waste. But maybe, to speed up progress, it’s time to look backward, to learn from what we’ve tried, and then move forward.