I think that a better way of describing the lament in Niel’s AFJ article is that he felt, after his visit to the library, that the US Army had failed to progress.

We might review the bidding here and see that we have two disparate views on the value of the study of history. Some may view history as a review of and reporting on the deeds done by other agents in times past. The value in studying it is to save us from "reinventing wheels" by not redoing what has already been done before. Others (I suspect this includes Gian) submit that history falls within the realm of the “human” sciences. We study it to learn more about ourselves, who and what we are. We do this through a process of reenactment (to use a term from R. G. Collingwood) of the processes others have used to work through their problems in order to reach a resolution to them.

Regardless of which view we take, we need to remember that problems faced by people in the past were their problems, not our problems. Our problems may find analogues in the problems of past agents, but each pair of analogues also has relevant points of dissimilarity that we must keep in the front of our minds. Otherwise we will be seduced into repeating the past, which may be better described as failing to progress.


What Niel seemed to be espousing is what we find in George Santayana’s book, The Life of Reason. An apropos quotation, which puts Santayana’s most quoted (and misquoted) line into its context, follows:
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. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in whom instinct has learned nothing from experience. In a second stage men are docile to events, plastic to new habits and suggestions, yet able to graft them on original instincts, which they thus bring to fuller satisfaction. This is the plane of manhood and true progress. Last comes a stage when retentiveness is exhausted and all that happens is at once forgotten; a vain, because unpractical, repetition of the past takes the place of plasticity and fertile
readaptation. In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity.
The hard shell, far from protecting the vital principle, condemns it to die down slowly and be gradually chilled; immortality in such a case must have been secured earlier, by giving birth to a generation plastic to the contemporary world and able to retain its lessons. Thus old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp.

Not all readaptation, however, is progress, for ideal identity must not be lost. The Latin language did not progress when it passed into Italian. It died. Its amiable heirs may console us for its departure, but do not remove the fact that their parent is extinct. So every individual, nation, and religion has its limit of adaptation; so long as the increment it receives is digestible, so long as the organisation already attained is extended and elaborated without being surrendered, growth goes on; but when the foundation itself shifts, when what is gained at the periphery is lost at the centre, the flux appears again and progress is not real. Thus a succession of generations or languages
or religions constitutes no progress unless some ideal present at the beginning is transmitted to the end and reaches a better expression there; without this stability at the core no common standard exists and all comparison of value with value must be external and arbitrary. Retentiveness, we must repeat, is the condition of progress.
Sanatayana’s insistence on retentiveness as a condition of progress is really of little value. It simply is a precondition for us to be able to say that we have made progress. Progeress judgments work like this: We have to be able to make a comparison between the way things were and the way things currently are. We than make a normative judgment about the state of affairs today compared to that of the original reference point. If we do not “remember the past,” then we cannot say we have improved on the past because we have no basis for measurement. It is only in this sense that we are “condemned to repeat” the past: we are at a point without reference. We are “unstuck in time” as Kurt Vonnegut poignantly described Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five.