Without history the game is over.
IMHO, that's a fact, cornelis. Without history -- cultural and personal -- we'd have no way of knowing who we are, or where we are.
That being the case, it is hardly surprising that the engines of progressive change -- historically -- have seen fit to propound any number of systems that depend on "the end of history" in order to make their case. To name names, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Gramsci, and (to bring the matter up to date) Francis Fukuyama (et al.) have seemingly tried to mount their "bright ideas" of the new human civilizational order on the destruction of historical sense -- cultural and personal.
In both senses -- cultural and personal -- this exercise to my mind is akin to signing up for a full frontal lobotomy. The present makes no sense -- on either the global or personal level -- without reference to a larger context.
The personal aspect of this problem is of acute interest to me. History plays a major role (IMHO) in the development of personality. Present experience has no context absent reference to what we know of our past experience. Which can be recovered via the reliable technique of anamnesis -- recollection of memory.
Human memory is famous for its selectivity. However, a case can be made that the memory we can readily dredge up is probably the memory that helps us understand who we are as individual persons, and the kinds of contexts in which we try to find our way in existence. Anamnesis is a great well of truthful experience upon which we can draw, at will. The results that such extraordinarily luminous thinkers as Plato and Voegelin were able to achieve via the anamnetic route speak for themselves.