HOW TO LOOK BACK

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 824, 13 May 1955, Page 25

HOW TO LOOK BACK

OT to be interested in the past is to be forever a child, said Cicero, and to that proposition J. J. Saunders adds a fervent "hear, hear" in Approach to ‘History, a series of talks now being heard from 2YC, and later to be heard from other YC stations. Mr. Saunders, who is senior lecturer in History at Canterbury University College, says we probably read history chiefly out of sheer’ intellectual curiosity-to know what happened in the past and to find out how the present has come to be what it is. But it is also a means of attaining self-knowledgey which the Greeks held to be the goal of true wisdom. As a collective biography of mankind it helps to deepen our knowledge of human nature, and so of ourselves. It is a preservative against parochialism, and a cure for "present-mindedness," that obsession with what is happening here and now which can produce dangerous and irrational excess of optimism or pessimism. "The man who knows no history," says Mr. Saunders, "thinks in times of relative peace and prosperity that the millennium is just round the corner; and in times of war and revolution and economic collapse that the human race is finished and that we may as well cease to struggle against inevitable fate." : But even when we have decided, for one reason or another, that history is a useful study, there are a number of different ways in which we can approach it. These are what Mr. Saunders dis‘cusses in his talks. Listeners who have

been hearing the series from 2YC will already have heard Mr. Saunders on the ways of Providence. At the end of his second talk, "Cross-examining the Witnesses," he reaches the point where historians ate ceasing to bother about the ways of Providence: man, they feel, makes his own ‘history, and God, having as it were wound up the universe like a gigantic clock, has left it to run on its own way. In his next talk, to be broadcast at 8.15 p.m. on Monday, May 16, he turns to an examination of Humanist history, and particularly to one of its most notable examples, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. Other talks are "Romantic Nationalism," "Ideas in Action," and "Marxism and the Masses."