The Spanish-American poet and philosopher George Santayana supposedly - famously - said: 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.' Could he have meant only the bad things in history, and not the good stuff, are repeated if they are not remembered? Would we not want to see the likes of Mahatma Gandhi and Albert Einstein again? Presumably, there are historical periods that were relatively peaceful, prosperous and not unpleasant to live in, though perhaps far less frequent than their opposites. Do we not wish to see these periods repeated - perhaps by studying them? Santayana must have taken a dim view of the past but held an optimistic view of the future, or at least its possibilities.
I was led to these questions while rummaging through the personal blog of Errol Morris, the prize-winning documentary filmmaker whose new film - Standard Operating Procedure - about the Abu Ghraib torture scandal in Iraq, has just been released in the United States. His investigation into the scandal has also been published as a book with co-author Philip Gourevitch. Morris offers far more interesting insights on the Santayana quote than me.
If you have seen his previous films, such as The Fog of War, a portrait of former US defence secretary Robert McNamara, you would probably agree that Morris is a historical sceptic. Here is what he said in his blog: 'Human nature being what it is, isn't it hopeless to expect that we can do better regardless of whether we remember anything or not? And what if what we remember leads us to false analogies and misunderstandings? I prefer: 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility.' Or how about this: 'Those who cannot condemn the past repeat it in order to remember it'.'
A sceptic is someone who questions what we take to be knowable. How do we, for example, know which lesson or lessons are the right ones to draw from history? A CIA interrogator, a Palestinian militant and an anti-American Chinese will all have drawn very different lessons from Abu Ghraib. A US woman soldier - posed smiling while giving the V-sign for an infamous photo beside the ice-packed body of an Arab prisoner who was tortured to death - was condemned by world opinion. She was one of the few lowly soldiers court-martialled. Yet, she had nothing to do with the man's death, while those who had direct responsibility were never punished, as chronicled by Morris and Gourevitch.
What lessons can be drawn from that? What is fascinating about Morris' work is that it is not so much raising these questions in ethics but in epistemology - the theory of knowledge - about what we can claim to know. We thought we knew a lot about that terrible woman soldier in the photo when, in fact, we knew next to nothing.
By contrast, in The Fog of War, Morris was giving his full due respect to Santayana. He allowed Mr McNamara, a lifelong methodical and systematic analyst, to draw all the lessons he claimed the Vietnam war had to offer for future generations, including his own terrible mistakes when he helped escalate the war as defence secretary, first under the Kennedy and then the Johnson administration. Mr McNamara, clearly, was a firm believer in the Santayana quote.