Issue120 [Jet小组] 第十四次作业

滴滴雨儿UID: 2392741

题目：ISSUE120 - "So much is new and complex today that looking back for an understanding of the past provides little guidance for living in the present."

Present, in my view, is a dot connecting past and future. Like a number line, every dot cannot stand along and so does our time. Looking back for an understanding of the past is a necessary procedure for us to face this complex and novel present.

As a threshold matter, people learning history to search guidance for present and future. There was a famous saying (and I paraphrase): "history is always similar with itself." This sentence precisely points out the character of history: similarity. Because history cannot be made without millions of events and millions of opinions from different people, the trend of history, revolution or peaceful period, is composed by these parts. When we learn history, we should not only get acquainted with the history events, but more important, think about why such things would happen and what influence it made to the human society. Take China for instance, in the 60s of last century, China had faced an extremely difficult situation in economy, which was caused by a false decision made by Chairman Mao that everyone in this country should stop to produce steel. Then few farmer cultivated grains and thus there were little food for all the people in this country the following years. Leaders of China then realized that it was a mistake and change the policy that China has stepped into a new era of "open policy", which has been proved later that it was the wisest choice. From this case we can see that history does provide guidance for living in the present because not making mistakes in the past is more or less a useful guidance.

Admittedly, as the rapid change in contemporary society, only looking for guidance in the past without any innovative actions and analysis may not be strong enough to handle the complexity of present. Hong Kong University did a survey among its students in 1998 about for what purpose do students learn history, and surprisingly 38.7% answered history was a required course while themselves didn't quite in it. Another 24.9% chose that history was fun and only 17.2% said that learning history benefited in making decisions in today's society. Some people hold the idea that contemporary society is so complex that many events cannot be found in history, thus history can provide little guidance. These people fail to know that we learn history for guidance not from only from similarities of certain events, but more from making decisions as a whole and see what kind of change will make what kind of influence on the whole society. No matter how many new problems occur at present, the main directions of solution remain the same.

What is most important is that we need to keep a clear mind that where are we in the river of history. History can be paralleled as the Nile River, starts from high mountains and flows towards the Mediterranean Sea. It flows day and night that every single drop makes the river as a whole. We are those drops in the river of history, flowing together with other people and events towards a certain direction which ourselves cannot decide. History determines the very direction because the rule of human development can only be discovered by accumulating waves of history. Thus learning history is the only approach to know who we are, where are we from, and what should we going to do. Though complex the present is, new problems such as global warming or overpopulation appeared only in today’s world, can be found origins from history and thus search guidance from basis which any new technology cannot replace.

To sum up, not only do we have to learn history, but also need to clarify the guidance which past provides for us and reconsider it with contemporary situation.