There's a big difference between learning from history and trying to rewrite it. In my opinion, there's far too much of the latter and not nearly enough of the former.

Take the recent spate of demands that governments or individuals apologise for historical misdeeds. How far back do you go? Do we ask the Italians to apologise for the ancient Roman tendency to throw Christians to the lions? Or a democratic British government to say sorry for the savagery of kings like Richard Coeur de Lion during the Crusades? (Though stopping idolising him as a hero might help - after all, he didn't even like this country and hardly ever came here).

In more recent times, take the shooting of so-called mutineers during the First World War. It was a terrible thing and, in most cases, a huge injustice, that shell-shocked soldiers were shot for cowardice. It was not only terrible for the men concerned but also for their families, who had to live with the consequences and often had to face shame and ostracism and financial hardship. But it happened nearly 100 years ago. Times have changed. Nothing quite like that would (we hope) happen nowadays. You can't undo the past and, in my view, you shouldn't even try. Instead, we should learn from those terrible days how to prevent such things ever happening again, as I hope we have.

Then there are things like the slave trade, for which present day politicans are often asked to apologise. As far as Britain is concerned, the slave trade was abolished in 1834, and slavery had been illegal on British soil for half a century before that. No-one alive today is likely even to have had a grandparent who had a hand in the slave trade, never mind been involved themselves. How can anyone apologise for something which they have never done nor ever could have done? If someone hurts my feelings, it's not going to make me feel better if somebody quite unconnected with them says sorry for what they've done.

Of course, if there's a way of righting wrongs done in the past - for instance, by restoring goods or lands taken from people still alive - then you can make a case for that. Though there's no saying that the people who now own those things are the ones who took them in the first place.

The troubles in Northern Ireland go back 400 years or more, to the taking of land from Catholic native Irish and the settling on it of Protestants from England and lowland Scotland. But even the most ardent Irish Nationalist doesn't say the homes these people live in, the farms they own, should be taken from them and restored to the descendents of their previous owners. What we can do is learn from what was done all those centuries ago. But, if we'd really learned that lesson, we could have helped to avoid the anguish that now tears the Middle East apart.

In fact, when you think about it, a lot of the injustices of the past come from one simple human tendency: the one that labels another group of people as not only different but less human than we are ourselves - Africans, for instance, or Arabs, or Jews, or frightened soldiers. As soon as we do that, then they become expendable and we stop caring about how we treat them. Sadly, that tendency's still part of human nature. A greater knowledge of history and a willingness to learn its lessons might help us to overcome that tendency once and for all.

Published: 27/10/2005