What is studying history good for? This is a question that
has been asked by many more qualified people than me (sometimes with the answer
of “nothing”) but it is something that anyone interested in spending a lifetime
studying a period of long dead time really needs to think about from time to time.
I want to begin by talking about what history is not good
for, namely that it does not predict the future. The old adage about “those who
do not know the past are doomed to repeat it” is just that, an old saw (albeit one
I believed strongly back in high school). Those who know the past, if anything,
seem more likely to repeat it, at least if people like Gingrich and Robert Kagan
provide an example. There is no way to truly get the correct message from
history without a lot of luck. So far, every attempt I know of to use
historical precedents to try and predict the future requires the predictor to
oversimplify everything in their attempt to draw a single lesson from the past
that can be applied to the future. Successful
predictions are either so vague they would have had trouble being wrong, or
they are simply lucky.
As much as I would love to say I could tell you what will
happen in the future if you just pay me to study history long enough, any such
statement would be self serving and frankly disingenuous.
This isn’t to say I do not see a value in studying history,
obviously I am in the wrong career path if I thought anything of the sort.
Rather, I see several reasons to study history:
The first, and lesser, of these reasons is that I do not
think you can ever know what knowledge will be useful to the future. By studying
history you are studying the past activities of humanity, and this means you
learn a vast amount of information about what humans have done in various
circumstances, when you write history you make those ideas and information available
to others, and this can change the world. It can inspire both governmental systems
and revolutions, and so on and so forth.
But this is really a lesser reason as far as I am concerned,
the most important reason is that I see a constant study of history as one of
the best ways to develop a critical mind and an understanding of how the world
works and why. Basically, the more you try to understand how and why something
was the way it was in the past, the easier it is to come up with theories about
how and why things work in the present. Basically, history provides, at a much
faster rate, the same sorts of lessons that life teaches people. The mind can
only work with the data that it is provided, after all, so providing it with a
large diet of history effectively adds massive amounts of material that can be
used when processing any new issues that are presented to it.
Any systematic study would do this, but some bodies of
material are more useful than others for questioning how and why the world works,
also history tends to suggest an approach that is questioning of the material
rather than accepting. I could gain just as much “raw data” about human
interactions from reading hundreds of novels a year as I do from history, and I
did so during much of my childhood, but that data is not designed to be
questioned. It is just a story that you are supposed to read for enjoyment and
accept.
By developing a historical mindset, one in which I am
constantly asking questions about why things are the way they are, and one in
which I am quite used to questioning the truth value of my sources, suddenly
all that basically useless data about science fiction and fantasy worlds became
useful again. Where before I just enjoyed and was, in fact, molded by the
ideals and ideas presented as stories in novels, now I can see how each of
those ideas was itself a product of a modern historical context and I can
question and reject or accept those ideals in a way that would not have been
the case if I had not been fascinated with the stories that were based on real
events as well as those that humans had made up entirely. Tolkien is just as enthralling as he was in
fourth grade, but now I read his stories as Epics that consist of a truly impressive
collection of modern day myths put in an archaic guise, many of which I can
point to specifically as important to my own worldview. Sometimes I wonder if I would be significantly
more detached from reality than I already am if I had not been interested in
history to the point that I started viewing novels as primary sources for the
modern day.
Speaking of primary sources, the historical method is easily
one of the more useful things in my life on a regular basis. The systematic
rating of sources by their relevance to answer whatever question I am asking at
the time is something that is useful for any issue. Take, for example, a presidential
speech:
If the question is “what did he say?” the articles written
by those who were present are secondary to the actual text/audio of the speech.
If the question is “what did the pundits make of it?” the
pundits become the primary source, and the speech itself becomes a control by
which I can see exactly how the pundits manipulate the material to fit their
own goals.
In this new world of google news providing dozens of links
for any news story, this sort of sorting process becomes incredibly useful for
trying to understand the world around me.
Ultimately, the most important thing that learning to write
history teaches, to my mind, is to never quit asking questions and to never
really be satisfied with your answers until you cannot find problems with them
anymore. It is not the only discipline to teach this, any academic discipline
worth studying should teach this, but this is easily one of the most important
lessons that I think anyone can learn in life.
Of course, the most important reason I study history, albeit
one that is entirely personal, is that I pathologically cannot stop studying it.
If I wasn’t doing it for a career, I would be constantly working on a
historical project as a hobby (and probably starving as I am singularly
unsuited for most jobs that do not involve studying dead things). So, all of
the above rationales should probably be taken with at least a grain or two of
salt as the self congratulatory musings that they almost certainly are.
