Hardly a day goes by when we don't hear something about the Y2K problem. Indeed, the doom profiteers are hard at work promoting food storage, and other survival paraphernalia.

A friend of mine has even taken the step of moving his family to a remote area, presumably to avoid the urban chaos that will surely unfold.

If you believe everything on Gary North's apocalyptic website, you might well contemplate extreme measures. But North, you see, is a historian, not a technologist, and states that "things are interconnected in ways we can barely understand." How enlightening!

No, I'm not advocating "credentialism" whereby one must have certain qualifications to speak on a given issue. I'm merely pointing out that an expert's perspective should be examined before accepting every word that he utters.

Perhaps North also believes that knowing history prevents us from repeating the errors of the past. That this statement is accepted as an axiom is tragic, because it is demonstrably untrue!

This notion assumes the following:

• History repeats itself
  
  
• The circumstances which surround historical events can exactly repeat themselves
  
  
• Somehow we can eliminate all the irrelevant facts, and get to the core of the essential truth of what happened, and can, like some engineering project, repeat or not repeat the event--whichever is desired

How many of the tremendous victories won by the English in the Hundred Years' War (ca. 1337-1453) were due to bad weather? Two out of three major victories were preceded by rain, which made the ground soggy. Were the French so demoralized by the wet defeats that they lost the third (dry) battle? Who knows? But assume that it is true.

Flash forward to Waterloo, June 18, 1815. Napoleon was a student of history. It rained very heavily the day before, so he waited for the ground to dry before beginning his attack. But this tactic gave the Prussian army enough time to arrive to attack his army, while he was trying to attack the English.

Thus, by learning from the lessons of history, he committed what history regards as a blunder. He delayed his attack.

So, what was the "lesson" of Waterloo? And how, if you are Napoleon do you not repeat it, or if you are Wellington, do you repeat it?

One more. The lesson of own Revolutionary War was to declare independence, and fight for it against the oppressor. Less than 100 years later, Jefferson Davis and associates applied this lesson against the Federal government. Lincoln did not agree, of course. What lesson did HE get from the American Revolution--this time taking the role of the British?

So much for history, as a way of dealing with the future.

North highly touts an article by John L. Petersen, Margaret Wheatley, and Myron Kellner-Rogers. The authors are futurists and consultants, who cite other social science consultant types to prove their contentions. That one of their big guns, Ed Yardeni, is now sounding optimistic about Y2K, is not as highly publicized.

But how accurate is their article? Wrong from the beginning!

They make a big point of identifying Kiribati in Micronesia as the first inhabited place in the world that will see the sun rise on Jan 1, 2000. They tell us how many people live there, and how they only got television in 1989. The problem is that Kiribati is NOT the first inhabited place that will see the sunrise. That honor goes to Kahuitara Point on Pitt Island in the Chatham Islands, a dependency of New Zealand. Read all about it.

Talk about faulty research! If they can't even get provable scientific facts right, how reliable can they be on the rest of their article, which is pure speculation? So much for responsible scholarship.

If North and his cohorts really did want to learn from History, they would note that in the year 999, a very similar millennium fever was occurring. No, there were no computers to crash, but most of Europe was panicking that the year 1000 would bring in the apocalypse. Huge crowds formed in St. Peter's Square the night of December 31st, waiting for some cataclysmic event--which never occurred.

History doesn't repeat itself, but human nature remains constant. People are as gullible as they were 1000 years ago!