Historians and the Future
Back in college, I knew a person named Kyle (I think) who was absolutely crazy about history. Lies My Teacher Told Me was his favorite book. He thought that history was something everyone should know forward and backwards. I think he knew the exact year that Caesar crossed the Rubicon. When I asked him why history was so important, his answer came shockingly close to the aphorism that “people who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it”.*
There is a problem with this reason to study history – it is a falsifiable statement. If we accept that a knowledge of past events allows one to draw parallels with present situations and make better decisions as a result, then we should observe that historians are better decision-makers and make better predictions about the future than the rest of us. A quick search of Google Scholar reveals that someone has, in fact, done exactly that, although no full articles appear to be available online. I intend to look further into this, and see what people have actually found.
*I suspect that this saying is to history as Keynes’s quote about people being “…the slaves of some defunct economist” is to economics. It sounds really neat, but it’s actually pretty dumb.
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History adds perspective. To the student of history, events do not occur in a vacuum, but rather in a historical context. However, the amount of historical background needed to provide understanding is much less than the amount required to publish in a journal.
Then there is the matter of objectivity. Lies My Teacher Told Me is a book about how the evil oppressive nature of the US is coverred up. He’s tried to approach small towns and get Angry Teen Rebels TM to find out if a town is a sundown town – i.e. it had a policy of excluding blacks. I also knew a deranged Marxist who knew all of the “crimes” for which all Americans after our founding fathers are guilty. Some of them were actual fact, but since he approached it wih bias, he didn’t get much out of it other than a confirmation of his madness.
So: Yes, Virginia, history does help you avoid repeating the mistakes of the past – if you approach it objectively.
Comment by OmegaPaladin — April 5, 02007 @ 12:31 AM