The climate ‘calamity’
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” George Santayana wrote in The Life of Reason, published in 1905. The philosopher’s aphorism, somewhat hackneyed after nearly a century and a quarter, and always true only in a limited way, assumes that men are capable of directing history to a certain end, while diverting it from other ones. Santayana was a very wise man and certainly no ideologue. Nevertheless, his maxim shares something with ideological thinking. Both assume that men are collectively aware of the realities of the present time and their possibilities, capable of determining where they wish their societies to go in future and in what shape or form, and then — with varying degrees of success — guiding them there.
