Issue120 [Jet]小组第十四次作业 第七篇I，欢迎拍砖

goldin2008UID: 2140085

TOPIC: 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."
WORDS: 633          TIME: 00:45:00          DATE: 2008-3-6 6:59:19

The speaker claims that since so much in today's world is new and complex the past provides little guidance for living in the present. Iagree with this assertion insofar as history offers few foolproof panaceas for living today. However, I disagreewith the speaker's claim thattoday's world is so unique that the past is irrelevant.

让步段：
Admittedly, I concede that as the speedily development of the industry and science, so much new happened in our society. Many problems are so modern that we could hardly find a track from past and no any experience can serve as a panacea for all problems. However, learning the past helps us understand the trend of the society, and provide some hints for solving today's problems. Although so many new and detailed problems happened in all the fields of the society, the main trend of it does not change. Learning the history make our direction clear.

历史是不断重演的：
As a threshold matter, history repeated itself, thus we study history in order to learn from it, improve our past experiences and avoid repeating past mistakes. However this is not always the case. So are many new politic, scientific and artistic problems or ideas we have today, in fact, they are the same problems as our ancestors met hundreds of years ago, at least of the same origin, we might say. Therefore these new problems and ideas of today are not completely strange. An even more remarkable example from the judicial system aptly illustrates this point. History sets precedents of judicial cases, which are studied by judges before they make decision in similar cases. Moreover, the effectiveness of certain punishments for offences is also evaluated through history.

历史人物对我们有重要的意义：
In addition, the stories of accomplished celebrities often provide us with motivations to attain a similar success. One such individual, who led his nation's communist revolution, is Mao Zedong, a very strong leader, and through his teachings, many people began to follow him and share their beliefs. When China emerged from a half century of revolution as the world's most populous nation and launched itself on a path of economic development and social change, Mao Zedong occupied a critical place in the story of the country's resurgence. Looking at the whole period from the foundation of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921 to Mao's death in 1976, one can fairly regard Mao Zedong as the principal architect of the new China. It is the importance of history that motivating individuals and giving a feeling that arouse our deep wish to become an accomplished person.

其他：
Finally, Human beings experienced fast progress of knowledge, but we have undergone no general development in human nature. The disadvantages in our blood and bones such as greed, laziness and violence do not change at all. Thus in the level of human nature, the history could help us settle certain problems. This is true especially when it comes to war. The results of wars in the past reveals that wars would lead to a huge amount of lost in human lives and social capitals for both the victors and losers. For instance, although U.S. wins in the Iraq war, it suffers from many difficulties and too many lives are lost already. If we take a realistic view on the Iraq war, then we must say that U.S. also lost the war.Thus, the history tells us the optimal approach for solving confliction is negotiation rather war.

To sum up, in the light of these relevant examples and analysis above, we can conclude that although sometimes reviewing history provides us little use in solving some modern problems, history, on the whole, has much to do with modern society and it is always beneficial to mankind. In the final analysis, history review actually provides us great guidance for living in the present.

[ 本帖最后由 goldin2008 于 2008-3-6 07:04 编辑 ]