Knowledge of the Past

In the quote we were given by Jim Powell in his book Postmodernism for Beginners, it says "... any art attempting to represent the Holocaust should continue to haunt us with its inability to represent the unrepresentable." This means that since the Holocaust was so extreme and inhumane, no form of writing or art will be able to accurately represent it in its entirety. Simplifying a huge event to just words on a paper causes it to lose meaning. Although I agree with this, I still think it's necessary to write about history because it's the only form of documentation we have.
This got me thinking- what would happen if we couldn't rely on written history to look back on past events? If we somehow lost all memory and knowledge on history, would we repeat it because we are unaware of the consequences? Humans have truly come a long way in a relatively short period of time. Take the Holocaust, for example, this genocide in WWII happened only 80 years ago. For some reason, it absolutely blows my mind to think that there are currently still people on this earth that survived that insane event. Our world has developed so much for the better since then. But with a new government and everything, it seems like it would be so simple for an authority figure to just change the way life has been and reverse it back a hundred years. All of our advancement as humans could be gone in an instant, and we would have to rebuild society as we know it.

Comments

  1. Richard LiOctober 1, 2018 at 8:16 AM

    Really mind- opening post! I enjoyed the way you gave examples that thoroughly substantiated your point. Your WWII one was particularly interesting. In the span of one lifetime, we’ve developed so much as humans, and the tragedy of Hitler seems like a far off dream. Really interesting stuff. I like!

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