The Nature of Things

George Santayana wrote, "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." The extraordinarily pessimistic theme of Barbara Tuchman's book, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, seems to be that we are all incapable of learning from history and so we are doomed to repeat its errors over and over and over again, ad infinitum. All of human history has been a march of folly with occasional flashes of insight and brilliance which allow us to advance a bit. Tuchman finds plenty of examples to support her thesis. Her definition of folly within the context of the book is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests, despite the availability of feasible alternatives. She begins with a general discussion of several examples from history and literature such as Rehoboam, a king of ancient Israel whose obstinance in refusing to listen to the just complaints of his people resulted in the loss of the ten northern tribes of Israel, and Montezuma...

I saw a reference to this book recently in something else I was reading and thought, "Oh, yes, I remember reading that book." But then I took the book down from the shelf to look at it and realized that I hadn't read it at all. I think I may have started and stopped. After all, it was published in 1978 which was an extraordinarily busy time in my life, so I may simply not have had the energy for it. It is a dense and long book. I'm so glad that I picked it up again. The world has turned many times since its publication date more than thirty years ago, but when you get right down to it, not much has changed about human nature. Indeed, not much has changed since the 14th century about which Tuchman was writing.  Europe - specifically France and England - in the 14th century was beset by an incredible series of catastrophes. There was climate change (the Little Ice Age), the Hundred Years War between England and France, the papal schism, the last Crusades, pillaging comp...