Practice 9　　Think carefully about the issue presented in the following excerpt and the assignment below.　　How valuable is history for our generation? On the surface this question is not as easy as it once might have been, for there is a widespread belief that history may no longer be relevant to modem life. We live, after all, in an age that appears very different from the world that came before us.　　Adapted from Stephen Vaughn, History: Is It Relevant?　　Assignment: Is knowledge of the past no longer useful for us today? Plan and write an essay in which you develop your point of view on this issue. Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your reading, studies, experience, or observations.

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According to the famous aphorism, those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, and this is often cited in discussions about the usefulness of history. The utility of history is commonly seen as its predictive value: knowledge of the past and how particular events unfolded is useful because it enables us to predict the outcome of similar events in the present and avoid making the same mistakes as others. This might be true when the circumstances are broadly similar, but nowadays technology is advancing so rapidly that it is constantly creating totally new circumstances.
In the last 10 years, developments in technology have fundamentally changed the way we live and interact with others, and theorists have highlighted the lack of integration between the past and the present. Lyotard and others have claimed that modernity, which began with the Industrial Revolution, ended in the 1980s and we are experiencing a postmodern condition in which modern concepts like truth and progress have become obsolete. Some other scholars, like Aug,, claim that we are experiencing hypermodernity, a condition characterized by a deepening faith in the power of science and technology.
Whether we choose to describe the current condition as modern, postmodern, or hypermodern, it is undeniable that the present circumstances generate a context that is fundamentally different to anything before. However, this does not mean that knowledge of the past has become useless. History has never been a particularly reliable guide to the future because circumstances are always unique. The real value of knowledge of the past lies not in predicting the future but in understanding the present. The past causes the present, and so it causes the future, and in order to understand why anything has happened we have to look for factors that took shape earlier.
All the problems in the modern world, like the India-Pakistan conflict or the relationship between the Islamic world and the West, have complex historical origins. We cannot understand the context if we do not know the history, and if we do not understand the context then we cannot resolve them. Constant change is the defining feature of the contemporary world, which means it is more important than ever to understand change. Only through studying history can we grasp how things change and only through history can we begin to comprehend the factors that cause change. In these circumstances, knowledge of the past is more important than ever.

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