Knowing about the past cannot help people to make important decisions today.
I fundamentally disagree with the speaker’s assertion that past cannot help people to make important decisions today. On the contrary, I am in favor of the claim that we are able to learn useful experience and lessons from the long run of history.
Just as Bacon said: “Histories make men wise”. History actually can serves as a guide as well as teacher for us. When facing with difficulties, we could often find tips after rethinking special history profoundly. Though the era has changed, the condition has changed and the historical figure has changed, successful experience in the history will point out the way in which we move forward. Consider, for example, The Art of War, created by Master Sun more than 3000 years ago, is still able to be utilized in modern military strategies along with economic life.
Likewise, history figure also produce caution on us. Given an example, Hitler, the war criminal of World War Two, was a self-willed person who always sticks to his own ideas instead of adopting others’ advices which to some extent cause the tragedy of Jews in World War Two. From Hitler, we learn that being receptive to others’ good advices is significant for one person.
Moreover, not only by Hitler but by Japanese failure in the World War Two, ended with two American atomic bomb exploded in its territory, tell us that we cannot use nuclear weapon easily.
Of course, when making important decisions, we cannot replicate the history without reflection. It is generally accepted that we should see history in developmental vision and absorbing lessons from history to be used for making significant decision. Just as Chinese emperor said:
Consequently, due to analysis and reasons mentioned above, which sometimes intertwine to form an organic whole and thus become more persuasive than any one of them, we may safely arrive at the conclusion that we cannot depend ourselves excessively on history to make decision, for we have to take different surrounding into account and see whether the history event is similar enough to be used for reference. As a result, we must treat history and learn lessons from it critically.
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