“History, by apprising them of the past, will enable them to judge of the future…”
Founder's Quote
“History, by apprising them of the past, will enable them to judge of the future…” — Thomas Jefferson (1782)
Understanding history to understand the future is such a common idea that it’s cliché today. It’s often heard as “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.”, which most likely comes from writer and philosopher George Santayana. He originally wrote it as, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
But it’s worth thinking about what it specifically means — what assumptions are underneath it and what it means for the perspective on humanity held by our Founding Fathers.
In order for the understanding of the past to be relevant to the future, there has to be some consistency in the patterns of both. That consistency comes from the nature of humanity. Our Founding Fathers assumed the existence of human nature as fixed and permanent. You can see that idea in the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence (DOI) that lays down the fundamental presuppositions from which all else rises.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…” — Declaration of Independence (1776)
This famous statement is akin to laying down a foundation for the building of a house. It’s like saying, “Because this right here is how things are for humanity, we are going to move forward in the following manner based on this primary truth.”
All belief systems have this sort of basic foundation. Even science requires a foundation that assumes a predictive pattern and consistency in the nature of the world. Otherwise the laws of physics that apply in one place, may not apply in another place.
Everyone starts with an “if this” foundation before coming up with a “then that” conclusion. For the Founding Fathers, their “if this” statement that allowed them to believe they could have a glimpse of the future, was that humanity had a nature and that nature is fixed.
Believe it or not, not everyone believes in the Founders’ assumptions about human nature.
Much of the culture war in the West today can be reduced to a conflict between ideas that assume humans do or do not have a nature that is fixed and tied to an underlying reality they cannot escape. That’s why the polarizing schism is so persistent: it’s about a foundational understanding of humanity.
If you look at the foundation of any critical social justice ideology, Critical Race Theory (CRT), modern feminism, queer theory (sometimes called transgenderism), Marxism, or post modernism, there is an assumption of a social construct which creates the nature of humanity. Instead of seeing human nature as existent and fixed, they see it as solely a product of the structures of society. This is why they keep moving into all aspects of our culture and injecting this idea. They seek to remake people by changing the structures of society in which we live. For them, all men are not created equal by a Creator, but created as blank slates awaiting programming from their social environments.
Thomas Jefferson’s statement, and thus all of our founding documents and structures, only make sense for people who first assume humans have a nature, and that nature of yesterday is the same nature of today.