Continuing on Collingwood’s idea, the most important lesson that history teaches us is what we are. Human beings are what they are today because of whatever happened in the past. Studying history, gives us the keys to understanding how we achieved what we did, how we got to where we are or why we wanted to reach this point. Through the study of history we do not only, as one would think, understand our past, we in fact understand our present. A good example of this idea put into practice can be found in the documentary “Guns, Germs and Steel”, based on a book of the same title by Jared Diamond. In this documentary, Diamond explores why there is an unequal divide of wealth in the World. He tries to understand why the present Western World is so much richer or in other words, how it got so rich, by means of history. He eventually explains this difference through our geographical position when we started settling over 13,000 years ago. This study is the perfect example of history teaching us who we are and why we are this particular way.
According to Collingwood, “knowing yourself means knowing what you can do […] the only clue to what man can do is what man has done”. He argues that in order for us to know what we are capable of as human beings we have to look into our history. Our past will teach us what we are capable of because it shows us what we have been capable of before. This idea is regarding both the positive and negative capabilities of man. History shows all the amazing things humans can do ranging from the construction of the pyramids to the creation of renaissance art to the discovery of antibiotics. However, it also shows what great evils man is capable of such as the Holocaust and the enslavement of Africans. The study of history can therefore reveal what human beings now can do. In order to know ourselves as Collingwood suggests, we need to look into our past and understand it.
Woodrow Wilson, the president of the United States during World War I, once said, “a nation which does not know what it was yesterday, does not know what it is today, nor what it is trying to do”. Wilson is also playing to the idea that we need history in order to understand our present and an absence of history leads to ignorance about our current situation. We need to know who we were because who we were defines who we are now. The past defines who we are now and can also help us define who we will become. History is not limited to understanding the past, as Wilson stipulates, it also plays an important role in our future and what we are trying to achieve. What we learn from the history we study defines who will become. The study of history is therefore not only the key to understand the present; it is also the key to changing the future. Its importance to our daily lives is vast and unlimited unlike is commonly thought.
History is obviously one of the most important and consequential ways of knowing. It might seem like a dead or boring subject as it is often thought of as the simple memorizing of dates, battles and important figures. In reality, it is much more than that. It is the key element to understanding our present and defining our future. It is vital to our understanding of who we are as human beings and what it means to be a human being in our present day world. We are our history and our past and without it, we are reduced to nothing. Even though we know far from everything and what we know is nothing more but an interpretation of a recreated past in our minds, it is still vital to who we are. “History is the intellectual form in which a civilization renders account to itself of its past”, the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga said. He managed to capture the essence of the importance of history. It is our way of defining who we are and who we will be by who we were.
