ABSTRACT
“we learn from history that we learn nothing from history,” George Bernard Shaw once wrote. That is the modern world’s blessing and its curse. We have, in profound ways, liberated ourselves from our pasts by ignoring the constraints imposed by those pasts. In the process we have unlocked many of the mysteries of science, extended our life spans, created ways of traveling, communicating, and sharing information and knowledge that our forefathers could not even have dreamt of. We have made our societies materially wealthier and held out the promise of endless, technology-driven quality-of-life advances. Yet we have also developed a startling shell of hubris. So convinced are we of our special natures, of our difference from those who came before, that we tend to dismiss the lessons of history.
