A familiarity with history provides us with a wisdom we should never generate ourselves, even as it describes pitfalls we should never be able to avoid ourselves. G.K. Chesterton stated simply that tradition extends voting privileges to the dead. To the extent that we are serious about history, the dead can vote. I often approach history from another angle. The person or institution without any acquaintance with history is like the person with amnesia.
Amnesia is total loss of memory.
To have no memory is to have no identity. It's not the case that persons and institutions with no memory are extraordinarily nasty. It is the case that persons and institutions with no memory tend to be quixotic, erratic, unpredictable, inconsistent, always controlled by the latest fad, fashion, whim, notion or scheme. All of the mainline denominations of North America demonstrate this over and over. All of the mainline denominations have chosen to ignore history.