The future as a guide to the present.

We were fortunate in Wellington to have a visit by Prof. Mark Steiner of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He gave a short talk about one of his many areas of expertise, Rabbi Israel Salanter. One of the great things about knowing so little is that I can always learn a lot. Prof. Steiner talked about Salanter's view on the conundrum of why good people do bad things. (I hope that I got the drift of his talk right). He said that the reason for this is that people are disconnected from the future. He used the analogy of doctors smoking, even though they know its consequences. Why smoke if you know that it is going to kill you? Why do evil when you know its evil consequences? This is a question that is very relevant in considering the Holocaust. The perpetrators, or even the bystanders, were mostly ordinary human beings, who committed evil deeds or condoned them. The question that this raised in my mind is: if such disconnect with the future makes evil acts by good people possible, is there a similar impact on people by a disconnect with the past? We can't know the future, but we can know the past, though that is capable of various interpretations. Would a connection with the past lead to good actions?  And how can we connect with the past in a way that this forges universal connections? These are big unanswered questions. But even if we know the consequences of past actions we may not learn the appropriate lessons. The Americans thought that by changing the political regime they can achieve geopolitical aims, and got bogged down in the Vietnam War. Yet a generation later, wanting to impose 'democracy' a concept not known in the region, they got bogged down in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, You could argue that they got the Ayatollahs in Iran because they thwarted the democratic aspirations of the people a generation earlier. Look to the past and consider the future.