There is
a rather widespread movement lately, especially among the new Ron Paul and tea
party conservatives, to use historical precedents as a justification for modern
policy. This approach has a great deal of power, especially when the vast
majority of politicians and pundits seem to live in a post-historical fantasy
land. Part of what made Glen Beck's lunatic ideas into a fortune for him was
his willingness to appropriate historical footnotes to support his arguments.
This was a misuse of history, to say the least, but the mere act of citing
historical precedent is a powerful tool for argument, easpecially if the
opposition does not have the historical savvy to play the same game. Beck is an
extreme example, but he is a symptom of a much more prevalent misuse of history
throughout society. The problem with any attempt to use history to try and
inform policy decisions is that it only becomes possible to do so if the
history lesson is simplified beyond recognition.
To
illustrate this I want to look at a recent article by Robert Kagan in the WallSt Journal which argues that the world needs American hegemony.
This
article opens on a ringing note of: "History
shows that world orders, including our own, are transient. They rise and fall,
and the institutions they erect, the beliefs and "norms" that guide
them, the economic systems they support—they rise and fall, too."
The
argument that institutions are connected to the powers that create and enforce
those institutions is true enough, but it is stated far too strongly throughout
the article. For the statement to have
the scare value that it seems designed to have, the reader has to also buy the
rest of the argument; namely, that it is a bad thing to have such a change in world order.
Also,
whenever someone says "history shows" it is best to be wary. History
is complicated and shows many things, not all of which demonstrate the same
message. The statement of "history shows" is one designed to simplify
history and to claim authority for the author, i.e. this particular author is
claiming that he actually knows what history shows and that you should listen
to him because of it.
Now, if
we are to accept his history shows, Kagan has to provide examples of history
showing the issue he wanted to illustrate, and here is where things start
getting really problematic. What I want to focus on here is his use of Rome as
a scare tactic to emphasize his modern point.
"The
downfall of the Roman Empire brought an end not just to Roman rule but to Roman
government and law and to an entire economic system stretching from Northern
Europe to North Africa. Culture, the arts, even progress in science and
technology, were set back for centuries."
This
reading of the fall of the Roman Empire is a classic one that could come straight
out of Gibbon's Decline and Fall. It
is also a deeply problematic narrative. The purpose of this version of the fall
of Rome was a myth created for the purpose of linking the enlightenment era to
Rome. The logic runs something along the lines of "Rome was good, the
middle ages were bad, the renaissance rediscovered Rome, and therefore it and
the following enlightenment are good."
There are
quite a few problems with this narrative. First, you have to accept that Roman
culture was actually "good," or at least that it was better than what
followed. I won't go into all the details of this here, but suffice to say
there are some rather massive problems with using Rome as a model in the modern
world.
The
second problem is that the line a out culture, arts, and technological progress
being set back is complete and utter garbage. Culture is subjective, so I will
not deal with it, the idea that it can be set back is in and of itself somewhat
worrying. Art is equally subjective, but it can be demonstrated that in the
Byzantine empire there was no real break in the development of art. While the art certainly became more abstract, the idea that abstract art is somehow worse than realistic art has distinct problems in today's world of abstract modern art.
The
biggest flaw with the statement is that technological progress actually
increased as the successor states to Rome had to deal with the reality that
they no longer had the kinds of manpower and territorial resources that Rome
had. In the east, Roman law as we know it was codified a century after the fall
of the western empire, at about the same time that the most technologically sophisticated monument in the Roman world was constructed and the first western silk production began. A century later naval warfare was revolutionized by the
introduction of what can best be described as a full blown flamethrower, which
hardly could have happened in an era of technological backwardness. And that is
just a few Byzantine innovations that come to mind off the top of my head, if I
actually made a list of the innovations of the sixth to eight centuries in
byzantium, Persia, and the Arab states I would be writing this for a very long
time.
In the
west there was a collapse of infrastructure, but even there the idea that
technological advancement ceased is problematic. For the recently conquered
Romans, there would have been a loss of technology, but for their new rulers
the period was one of incredible technological advancement as they incorporated
parts of the roman infrastructure into their lifestyles. It should also be
pointed out that the very fact that the western empire was overrun by foreign
invaders invalidates it as an example that can be compared to modern US
hegemony.
I won't
go into detail on the rest of Kagan's article, as he moves into more modern
comparanda, but I think the problems with the Roman section should cast the
rest of his narrative into doubt. What his use of rome is designed to do is to
illustrate just how bad losing hegemony could be. Even if it was a relevant
comparison to the modern us, and even if he wasn't vastly overstating how
complete the post Rome collapse was, the point would still be to scare. His
argument hinges on the belief that a change in the economic and social world
order would be fundamentally a bad thing, and the example of Rome serves as an
exclamation point and worse case scenario, despite the fact that he both
misreads the roman collapse and forces it into a comparison where it really
does not belong.
The point
to all this is that it is incredibly difficult to use history to inform
political arguments unless the message is that things are always more
complicated than they seem. Political arguments tend to use history in a manner that is diametrically opposed to good scientific methodology. They start with a thesis
"it will be bad if the US declines" and then find the historical
evidence that backs that thesis up, usually ignoring any evidence that
runs against their thesis and simplifying the data to match what they already
believe to be true. This is a very human approach, and one that I suspect every historian succumbs to from time to time, but it is also an approach that effectively
guarantees the misuse of historical evidence.
In short, be very careful about trusting historical anecdotes when they are being used to argue for modern policy, usually the history being cited is also being simplified dramatically for the purposes of a modern agenda.
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