Well, he sort of said that. Like so many popular aphorisms, the “doomed to repeat” statement is more of a paraphrase/variant. To quibble, the genesis quotation actually is this:
“Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
All a tortured, too-long means of saying that however the more pithy version of Santayana’s observations developed, it remains true, nearly 67 years after his death.
We have a new generation, “informed” by the predominantly “progressive” worldviews of their public school teachers and university professors, that can weep for endangered whales and desert tortoise (good causes, don’t get me wrong), yet cheer abortion, and most recently even extending it to infanticide in cases of unwanted or genetically/intellectually “imperfect” babies who survive birth.
Various forms of socialism, some as potentially extreme in usurping individual freedoms as anything the failed USSR, Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba or the chaotic disaster of modern Venezuela wrought, are being pushed by the extreme left (and currently loudest) wing of the Democratic Party.
Rational discussion about sexual identity, gender and all that goes with that has gone by the wayside. It’s not how you are born physically, but what you imagine. Put on a blindfold, it seems, and genitalia disappear. Question any aspect of that “self identity,” and you become a bigot, someone guilty of “hate speech” for stating the obvious:
You may be gay, but you are still male. You may be lesbian, but you are still a female. If you are transsexual, you can undergo operations to physically change to what you believe, perhaps, should have been born to be. Beyond that, it gets rather complicated; a few years ago, for example, Facebook added no less than 50 “gender options” for its users.
The popular saying goes, “Sex is a matter of the body, while gender occurs in the mind.”
Well, OK. Let’s just say I question that. I think my skepticism about this, informed by both my faith and reason, is solid. That said, I will not condone treating anyone as less of a human being (after all, we all are created to bear the image of God) because their struggle for meaning takes them on, to me, are bizarre journeys.
I’m much too busy, as I should be, fighting to subdue and root out from my own mind and life the frailties and sins of my fallen, broken humanity.
So, back to history. I grew up in the Cold War period, the ashes of Nazi Germany’s crematoria and destruction of multiple millions of Jews, Slavs, Roma and others deemed undeserving of existence by Hitler. Millions more innocents died in the decades following WWII, among them many condemned for holding to their Christian faith in the purported Soviet socialist paradises of the USSR and China.
Yet here we are, well into the 21st century, and antisemitism, religious persecution, and philosophies and political movements dedicated to eradicating freedom of thought, belief and action all are on the rise.
Truly, we do not seem to learn from history, because we ignore it. Intellectual sloth and intentional concessions to political correctness gone mad, the kind of thing warned about (predicted?) by George Orwell – “Newspeak,” “thoughtcrime,” “Doublethink” all come to mind as hauntingly familiar today, in intent and application if not precise terminology.
In light of all this, let's return to Santayana, where we started – and some of his other thoughts seemingly applicable today?
“Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.”
“The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.”
And, this: “All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.”
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*Santayana defined himself as atheist, but he was no hater of God nor faith; a benign skeptic, he sometimes saw religion as poetry. Indeed, he spent his last decade of life in the care of nuns, He was a flawed human being, as are we all; for example, he held views about racial superiority and toying with eugenics.
