The endless repeat of history

They also know the story of the Jewish ruler who slaughtered every male child in the town of Bethlehem, two hundred of them, because he was told one of them would overthrow him one day.

And these horrors are given reality in the present era not just by repetition of the stories and reflection on them, but by symbols and rituals designed to embed them in spiritual, moral, and ethical perspectives. Despite what postmodern theologians might tell you, Christian theology is imbued with the understanding that evil is real and often appears deceptively benign, as in the Judas kiss.

Not that most Christians are any more far-seeing than the average person, but the practice of Christianity surely produces more Cassandras on average.

We also have secular ceremonies that serve the same function. I was 31 before I went to my first Anzac Day service, and I wondered why I had left it so long. This must be unique amongst national military commemorations in celebrating a defeat. I teared up when I thought of those young men (and some not so young like my great-grandfather) who were standing in the landing barges about to charge up a beach under savage gunfire. Why is it always the young that have to be sacrificed to protect the older? What a muddle of good intentions and wrong outcomes.

There are other ways of producing Cassandras. The British Empire was run by men (mostly) with a classical education. This wasn't just about studying Greek or Latin, but giving them an education that fitted them to be good citizens and also introduced them to the true, the beautiful and the good. You might not approve of empires, but you have to admit that administering a colossus like the British one would have required a lot of delegated power and ingenuity in the days before radio.

In the sixties and seventies, I received a species of that education. We were drilled in primary school so we could be taught more Socratically in secondary school, learned to think, and were introduced to great works of culture. As they were mostly religious schools we also explored the virtuous, the true and the good.

Now that style of education has morphed into training for a 'good job' and the furphy of 'self-directed learning' – despite the fact that most educators expect their charges to have portmanteau careers spanning several disciplines, which surely demands more generalist skills than training. I'm told by Catholic school teachers that even in their system the true, the beautiful and the good have gone truant.

The result of this is fewer Cassandras and more group think. Children are taught that the past doesn't really matter and that if it wasn't invented yesterday, it is inferior. They impose today's values (really the values of woke educators) on yesterday's heroes and condemn them for contemporary faults. They have no capacity to live in the skins of yesterday's people, and little capacity for forgiveness or redemption.

It was Winston Churchill who sent those young Anzacs into battle, but should this one error of judgment (or his racist views) condemn him utterly, or should he be celebrated for the totality of his life and recognised as a man struggling under the limitations of his own age?

In this week caught between Easter and Anzac Day, we need to think about how we reintroduce imagination into our culture.

History doesn't die, it repeats endlessly, and a population primed to think everyone is basically like a modern Aussie, just dressed and fed slightly differently, will be run over in the race.

My solution would be we should go to more of the great religious ceremonies, even if we're atheist, and drink in and reflect on the symbolism and the truths. Have a chat with a four-thousand-year tradition. Attend, and possibly invent more secular ceremonies that commemorate the past. With any luck this year Anzac Day will be bigger than ever and the destruction in Ukraine will direct our focus to the evil that exists in the world.

And let's all join the movement to reintroduce a modern form of the classical education – Socratic, stoic, and universal, exploring the true, the beautiful, and the good.

Let's rediscover the meaning of citizenship, and let a 1,000 Cassandras bloom. Our future and security depend on it.