Can Experience Teach?

A traveler in Europe in 1959 discovered a farming valley dying not because the soil was poor or young men were unwilling, but because inherited customs had chopped property into absurd fragments, destroying ownership and driving families away. A woman slept in one house, had the right to meals in another, and could warm herself only in a third; some farmers legally owned one-eighth of their own land. Such laws doomed the valley to be empty within a generation. This problem is ancient: Rome, as historian Guglielmo Ferrero noted, died from excessive urbanization crushing farmers with controls and taxes until it was easier to live on welfare in the city than work the land. The lesson should be obvious, but men and nations seldom learn from experience. Like gamblers who lose repeatedly yet return to the table, people persist in destructive patterns because experience alone cannot teach them; only faith and character can. Today we see the same signs moral decay, credit-fed cities, farms under pressure and yet we continue as though folly will somehow make us winners. Without a return to faith, and to the Word through which faith comes (Rom. 10:17), we will not change, and like that European valley, we will deserve the ruin we bring upon ourselves.