This essay open as follows:
I have always thought George Santayana’s celebrated phrase that those who fail to remember the past are condemned to repeat it to be one of the dumbest things ever said by a smart person. It assumes the past repeats itself, which hardly seems likely, and that the past can be understood by posterity as offering simple moral lessons—history as a kind of McGuffey’s Reader writ large—when in fact history is almost never morally binary, but rather bears out Walter Benjamin’s saturnine claim that every document of civilization is also a document of barbarism.
Rieff would have done well, first, to read the quote more carefully, then have found out its context. The quote makes no mention of history. The subject of the sentence is the word past. Here is what Santayana wrote: “Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” He was talking about progress, not history.
That was as far as I got with Rieff''s piece. If a writer's opening gambit demonstrates that he doesn't know what he's talking about, why continue?
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