xBlog: The original visual thinking weblog

“Why should we look to the past in order to prepare for the future? Because there is nowhere else to look. The real question is whether the past contains clues to the future. Either history is a series of individual and unrepeated acts which bear no relation to anything other than their immediate and unique temporal environment, or it is a series of events triggered by recurring factors which manifest themselves as a product of human behaviour at all times. If the latter is the case, it may be that the past illustrates a number of cause and effect sequences which may take place again, given similar circumstances. If it is not, then, as Henry Ford put it, ‘history is bunk’, and there is no profit to be had from its study, or from anything not immediately and only concerned with the unchanging laws of nature.”