The Cost of Forgetting, by Francis X. Maier

Americans have a genius for amnesia.  It’s in our DNA.  Henry Ford captured this best more than a century ago when he said “History is more or less bunk.  It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker’s dam is the history we make today.”  The past comes with annoying lessons.  It interferes with our imagining the future.  And yet it’s inescapable.  The past shapes who we are and explains where we came from – details that are handy when trying to understand a crisis like the political car wreck we face this fall.

The United States began as a marriage of Biblical faith and Enlightenment thought.  The tension between those elements in the American character has fed the nation’s dynamism from the start.  The Calvinism of founders like John Witherspoon, rooted in the Scottish Reformation, combined with the moderation of the Scottish Enlightenment, shaped the early American experience.  Together they distinguished the American Revolution from the more extreme revolutionary events in France and set it on a far more successful course. …