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发表于 2013-2-12 12:09:08
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第三篇,历史篇。
Claim: Knowing about the past cannot help people to make important decisions today. Reason: We are not able to make connections between current events and past events until we have some distance from both.
When North Koreans are blindly worshiping Kim Jong Il, the country’s leader, and suffering from severe poverty brought by his dictatorship, they simply do not associate what they are doing now to the similar conditions under Mao’s governing of China before 1980s. From this example, it seems true that humans sometimes could not connect current events with past events, especially when they are participants of current events. But does this infer that our understanding of the past events do not help us in making important decisions today? I would say no. An objective understanding of history, though not a panacea for today’s problems, is helping all rational individuals to avoid repeating mistakes and to understand human nature.
First of all, if a person is taught an objective understanding of history, he can make sensible judgment when he faces a similar current situation; otherwise he cannot. (这一段我不是不小心分成小段的。我是想,一个大的point放成一个block of text。然后里面的小例子再分小段。这是我的个人风格。其实GRE作文没有严格要求必须是怎么分段,主要是看我们自己最后成文的逻辑,所以平时看一下英文母语的人的写作方式,你会发现其实很多中方法都可以,不用那么rigid) Consider again the example at the beginning, perhaps only after one hundred years could the North Koreans find out similarities between their current era and China’s pre-1980s. But this is because the people are currently not given opportunities to learn the recent history of China in an unbiased way, as their government would not let them know any bad sides of being led by a dictator. This, on the contrary, emphasizes the importance of history. Consider also the situations in most developed countries which allow citizens to freely spread information and learn history: when certain social problems emerge, there are always critics who stand out to compare and contrast the problems with past similar ones in the history and exhort politicians and regulators to take certain actions. The above examples prove that understanding history correctly and objectively could help people to make connections between current events and past events, without the need of waiting for the former to become history itself; and an ignorance of history’s true picture makes people unable to do so, let alone of making judicial decisions on today’s events based on history.
Secondly, history informs us the mistakes or failed attempts humans have made in the past, and thus teaches us not to repeat them when we come to make important decisions on current events. If we know that some social ideologies have been proved to fail in the past, why do we bother try it again? For example, Robert Owen, one of the fervent proponents for the once popular utopian socialism in early 19th, purchased a land to do community experiment to test the practicality of this ideology. But the experiment turned out to be a failure. One straightforward reason is that, in a society of public property, the slackers can always enjoy the fruits of others—so no one work. If political leaders can interpret this historical experiment correctly and thoroughly, he would become very careful and suspicious when directing the society to pursue the socialist ideal. Therefore, knowing about the past helps people to think deeper on the current social directions, and thus makes better decisions on a societal level.
Another important lesson history can teach us is human nature. Napoleon, the famous French military leader, once said, “History paints the human heart”. Through study of human history we learn the basic human nature—our desires and motives, as well as our fears and foibles. History is replete with examples of how compromise and mutual understanding result in happy win-win situations, how violent suppression evokes rebellions, how selfishness and greed lead to isolations by others, and how jealousy leads to one’s disastrous life. Through learning of each of these facts, we could understand ourselves better and discern cause-and-effect relationships between human nature and behaviors. In this way, we become aware of possible consequences of different kinds of our behaviors. This helps us in making judicial decisions in our everyday life.
In the final analysis, people’s decisions are always influenced by the history taught to them, in one way or another, unless they do not acknowledge the importance of history or not understand history in a disinterested way. By presenting the past mistakes humans have made, as well as how human nature causes certain historical events, history contributes to our everyday decisions in a varying degree, from personal to societal level. |
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