George Santayana was a Spanish-born (Madrid, December 16, 1863), American-educated philosopher who practiced education at Harvard University (died September 26, 1952, in Rome). In an almost-off-hand comment in a book, he wrote the statement which is this blog’s unofficial motto:
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
(The Life of Reason, vol. 1: Reason in Common Sense)
Who or what is Santayana’s Ghost? It’s the shade of Santayana, watching us, watching those condemned to repeat history as they repeat the bad parts over and over. The shade smiles when a student learns a valuable lesson from history, and laughs with delight when those lessons find application to prevent further tragedies that could so easily be prevented, if policy makers only made the effort to avoid the errors of the past.
Why does the ghost haunt us? Because he knows, as Santayana also wrote, “only the dead have seen the end of war.” (Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies, number 25 (1922))