[This week the Jews celebrate passover and tell the story of how, 33 centuries ago, our ancestors were slaves].
3300 years is a long time, and I sometimes used to wonder: do we really need to remember events that happened long ago? Then, quite recently, I read J.K. Galbraith’s classic work on the great crash of 1929. Could it happen again? he asked. Yes it could, he said, but the memory of that disaster would probably protect us, because those who lived through it had vowed, Never again.
That book was first published in 1954, just 25 years after the events it describes. And with a tremor, I realised that the great crash through which we are living took place almost 80 years later, at more or less exactly the point at which the events of 1929 passed out of living memory for all but a few. What we remember, we can avoid. What we forget, we can repeat. And so it happened. It is uncanny how similar events are now to those of 80 years ago.
We’ve become a society with very little memory….What we forget we can repeat….
Didn’t a wise man say something like “..they who forget to learn the lessons of the past must suffer to learn them once again”.