Understanding Santayana's Warning: The Price of Forgetting the Past
"Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it." How often have you heard this phrase? It’s not exactly George Santayana’s original quote—he actually wrote, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," in 1905. But let’s unpack what he meant and explore how the National Archives’ portrayal of American history challenges, or fails to challenge, us today.
George Santayana, arguably the most significant Hispanic-American philosopher, was born in Spain in 1863 and came to the U.S. in the 1880s to study at Harvard. As a philosopher, Santayana’s work resonates with the ideas of Alexis de Tocqueville—a European who observed Americans with both fascination and critique, deeply impacting how we see ourselves. Santayana, perhaps bisexual or gay, spent two decades at Harvard, influencing white American intellectuals like T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost. But around age 48, Santayana realized academia wasn’t conducive to his own intellectual ambitions and left Harvard for good, retreating to Europe and escaping what he saw as a narrow, professionalized academic life. He ultimately settled in Italy, where he died in 1952.
Santayana’s quote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” reflects his belief that cultural memory is essential to progress. His relationship with America transformed over time—from admiration for what seemed a boundless individualism to disillusionment as he observed a patriotic fervor that, for him, boxed Americans in rather than setting them free. As he wrote in 1920, he found Americans “bound by a gospel of work and belief in progress.” Freedom became, paradoxically, a rigid conformity to beliefs determined long ago by the country’s founders.
He criticized America’s habit of forgetting its true past, relying on historical myths like the “patriot myth” to reinforce national ideals at the expense of uncomfortable truths. Santayana observed that this myth-making didn’t just shape history but placed limits on growth by cementing an idealized but inaccurate view of American origins. The intellectual world he knew was steeped in Bancroft’s patriotic version of history—a 19th-century blend of romanticism that didn’t do justice to America’s complex foundation.
In The Life of Reason, Santayana referred to America’s “luminous blindness” and warned that when we only value history for the pleasure it brings, we risk endlessly repeating its mistakes. Without memory, he argued, “experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual.” In this cyclical, repetitive existence, people miss out on real progress. To remember history, in Santayana’s sense, is to avoid being condemned to an endless repetition of ignorant actions, fixed ideas, and, ultimately, mistakes.
Today, the National Archives and other institutions have a responsibility in this regard. But consider the language often used in these settings—words like “welcoming” and “unchallenging” that evoke comfort but strip history of the lessons that might provoke reflection and growth. This isn’t just about telling an accurate story; it’s about whether history serves us by empowering change or traps us in nostalgia. These “welcoming” versions of history dodge the hard truths and undercut our ability to apply historical lessons to current issues. We’re left in a space where history is a carousel, circling the same points of comfort, without the power to disrupt or inspire change.
Santayana’s conservatism and belief in individual freedom ultimately led him down some problematic paths; he even admired Mussolini at first for “restoring order” before realizing the dangers of authoritarianism. He ended his life in an Italian convent, aware that even intellectuals are subject to the powers they critique. The forces that kept him in Italy were the very forces he’d sought to escape.
So, the question remains: What happens when we shape public history to be more palatable rather than accurate? If we erase conflict and controversy in our history, we undermine its capacity to inform and improve our future. Today, those of us working in public history face the task of challenging a version of history that seeks to comfort rather than engage. When we teach history to be “enjoyable,” we risk cultivating complacency rather than resilience, ignorance rather than progress.
Ultimately, as Santayana himself suggested, understanding and remembering the past helps us understand the present and prepare for the future. As public historians, our role is not to serve up history that simply feels good but to present an honest record that empowers us to think critically about who we are and where we’re going. And in that mission, we’re all called to remember, to challenge, and to move beyond a history stuck in a carousel of past comforts.
