Living in a Society Without a Past

It's almost impossible to imagine a society without a past, but before we attempt to do so, we should consider the context of that society. Let's assume an apocalyptic event forced humanity to board large generation ships that orbited around Earth (in a Wall-E type situation), and that over time, their knowledge of Earth's history deteriorated (let's say their library burned up in a huge fire and the only citizens who remembered anything passed away from disease). What would happen if these people returned to Earth one day, with no knowledge of the past cultures, traditions, and beliefs that once shaped this world?

It's a fascinating idea to consider, and makes us truly appreciate history's impact on our lives everyday that we take for granted. The first thing to contemplate would be the technological ramifications; with no past knowledge of the tools and machines that we used, and assuming the vast majority of our existing machines had deteriorated to urban decay, society would be forced to revert to a Stone-Age type civilization. They wouldn't even know how to work wood! Not only that, but the citizens would only have existing knowledge of operating their ship's machines. While they could progress technologically from that point, it would take decades of reverse-engineering remnants of old machines to get to the point that we have today.

Another aspect of historical knowledge that would be lost was basic understanding of where we came from. Why do some people have different skin colors? Or on a bigger scale, where did we, as human beings come from? (Sadly, even we cannot answer that, but we can go back pretty far.) The citizens would have no information on the great countries and empires that once existed; they would never know about the wars that had been fought on this land.

But history's greatest gift would be lost to them. It isn't cultural knowledge on the arts or beliefs we shared, or technological drawbacks, or information on past events. It is the fact that we will lose all the lessons we learned from past occurrences. Karl Marx once said "History repeats itself." and the idea of historic recurrence has existed for thousands of years. Nobel Prize winner Andre Gide believed that "Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again." Historic events occur in cycle, because basic human nature is unchanging. And without the knowledge of what happened before, the citizens of the ship would reundergo the countless wars, arguments, and conflicts that shaped our world before, causing countless loss of life. It would be a chain of disasters that could have easily been avoided by knowing the signs of the oncoming conflict beforehand.

History is such an integral part of our current civilization that it is hard to imagine what life would be without it. But we cannot take it for granted, and should continually appreciate the lessons it has to offer us. I would never want to live in a society that had no past, and am glad I don't have to.