In order to understand your surroundings, you need to have an accurate view of the past, i.e. the events that produced your present situation. You cannot simply look around; you can't turn inward and find a universal, explanatory truth; you must consider the events that came before you to come to this understanding. NOTE: We will not consider the value of this understanding for now, though we will need to consider it at some point. It needs to be confronted, determined. If history has no value for life and if by understanding it we are only limited, weakened, then we should abandon it.
The reason you can't simply look around you to understand your historical situation is that it is impossible to predict the outcome of your actions. They are radically Simply recording your day to day observations may give a pluralistic account of the world--the many insignificant, mundane occurrences of our lives may be summarized by the coming historian in one keystroke, or crystalized by the theoretician as a single social movement--yet their outcome, their effect on history, cannot be discerned yet.
A man living in 1967 might note on his trip through the grocery store that chicken breast costs more than it did in the 1920's, and he might apply the finest economic wisdom of the day to understand this increase, but he will have no way of knowing what this way of life really was...he won't have the necessary frame of reference that comes only with time...he can't differentiate his time from any other, except the past. He might say that goods in his market move faster, the range of products is far greater, than the 1920's economy, and therefore make the conclusion that the 60's are far more commercial--trade has increased, the flow of goods has increased, the sheer mass of goods has increased, the speed at which they are produced has increased, and other such conclusions---
but he can only make these conclusions by comparing it to the economically slower, less commercial 1920s.
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