The Meaning of History and Life, Part I

I decided on this decidedly pretentious title for a introductory video I'm putting together for my fully online courses.  On the blog, it will come in several installments.  I hope to make it available on Youtube in a couple of weeks.  Despite the ironic sounding language, I'm sincere.  I'll cover four broad topics that I think the study of history bears on: our limitations; the peculiar nature of modern life; the unusual dilemma in which we find ourselves; and, of course, a solution--of sorts.

I'd like to begin with my first two of four points of what a study of history (or just plan common sense, which is closely related to historical study, I think) reveals about our limitations:
1) That our knowledge and understanding is always limited.  Brilliant people disagree on all sorts of fundamental questions, and life is far too complicated for any of us to fully grasp.  I love the perspective of the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who asserted that there are indeed ultimate truths, rights and wrongs (a belief that is not very popular among contemporary intellectuals), but that no human being will ever know what all of them are, will ever get everything right.  We can therefore rest assured that some of our most cherished beliefs are right and some are wrong.  We just don't know which ones.
2) We are also limited in our moral character.  Some of us have persecuted evils of epic proportions, are responsible for the deaths of thousands, even millions of people.  Most of the rest of us have learned to tolerate or ignore such evils, including ones that we could easily do something about.  Thousands of children perished today from the consequences of hunger or common diseases that could easily be cured.  People from so-called third-world countries come to the U.S. and are startled to find homeless and hungry people living in this land of plenty.  Furthermore, if we are honest, I think that the great majority will admit that we exercise all sorts of petty acts of cruelty in our every-day lives, from wishing misfortune on people we envy or our intimidated by to failing to offer some small act of kindness to a neighbor, family member, friend, or stranger.

Next week: Two more human limitations.