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!