by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright October 2015
People learn from their successes and mistakes. This is the heart of analytic thinking. And this is why circumstance is so important to how a historic event evolves.
Learning from mistakes is often a dramatic process. We start this with our painful lessons in childhood.
But there are also much bigger examples of this happening -- historical examples. One that comes to mind is the difference between the peace processes that were engaged in after World War One and World War Two. Those put in place after World War One turned out to be dismal failures -- the net result was another world war just twenty years later. But much was learned during that twenty year effort, and when the peace processes were begun again after World War Two they worked out much better. There was peace, (although it was scary at times) and the world, including the conquered nations, prospered mightily under those peace processes for the next seventy years and more.
This is a fine example of learning from mistakes.
Learning from successes is something that happens just as much as learning from mistakes, but the circumstances are less dramatic.
A big example of learning from success has been learning how to adapt free market systems, finance, and capitalism to the challenge of making Industrial Age technologies work for the good of the community.
The number of places where advancing into the Industrial Age using other methodologies has proved difficult and produced lots of unrest and violence shows that this transition is not an easy or inevitable process.
The rise and then decline of many Industrial Age communities also shows that learning from success is a skill which must both be mastered, and then constantly relearned. The learning is not inevitable, and it must be relearned with each generation.
Circumstance affects the course of history. Much of the effect is due to what people of that historic generation have learned. What people have learned affects the actions they will take. Circumstance is very much part of the fabric of history.
--The End--