Compos Mentis

The Value of History

(Eds. note: I've mentioned I keep a notebook where I jot down ideas and such. I don't often move those writings here - I think I mentioned it the one other time I did it. I'm not very happy with this one, and though I've cleaned it up a bit I think the tone is still off. Still, I'm hoping it's interesting; it does deal with some other things I've written here.)

Two things brought about this train of thought. The first was reading, in a book of essays by the philosopher A.C. Grayling, that the best thing to read for the autodidact was history; it was the best reading for those wishing to improve their lives because it showed the best people acting out their lives. The second was remembering something my history tutor last term mentioned when I said my primary tutorial was philosophy. This man, perhaps the most brilliant person I've ever met, said, "Philosophy? I never could wrap my mind around that stuff. It's too deep for me." This surprised me, because I thought if there was anyone I met while in Oxford who didn't need more philosophical thinking, it was him.
Besides the obvious point that people tend to think that things that they don't understand are more difficult than they actually are, the combination surprised me: the philosopher praising history, the historian acknowledging philosophy's complexity. The two statements aren't exactly the same; I can't imagine my tutor going on to say that everyone should study philosophy because of or despite of its difficulty. But the similarity of the two statements are suggestive. I think it is because of a misunderstanding of the methods of these two disciplines. By method, I don't mean to imply the historian's or the philosopher's version of the scientific method; the method of looking at the data. I mean method in terms of the goal. Philosophy aims to explicate and analyze reasons, while historians look to track causes. Again, these two things sound similar, but they are not quite the same and they require different skills. A philosopher should be creative and perceptive on the one hand and hold a sharp analytic razor in the other. A historian should ideally be able to abstract cause and effect from discrete data rather than just re-relate what has happened in the past; but he or she should also realize where there is not enough information and not be creative in interpreting in the same way a philosopher might be.
I've talked about what I think philosophy should be elsewhere. But history has shown itself quite capable of resisting radical change. Historiography is an old and relatively stable science, when compared to the radical nature of philosophy and the modern genesis of such disciplines as psychology, sociology, and anthropology that study fairly similar things. History as a discipline has showed fortitude against post-modern and post-structuralist attacks in the same way the hard sciences have, and this is quite an accomplishment considering the way the majority of the humanities have made way for some levels of relativism and irrationalism. Either the discipline of history generally attracts epistemologically conservative scholars or the field itself is naturally resilient to such attacks. Most of the methods modern historians use would not have been too foreign to Herodotus and Thucydides; perhaps updated somewhat, but the intent is fairly clear. Tell what happened and more importantly why it happened.
This search for cause is part of what links philosophy and history. Philosophers create explanations which best fit what they perceive; historians have an advantage in that the explanations should already be present; it is but a matter of finding them. How much they in fact create is a matter of debate but for me the evidence is on the side of the historians.
So, if this is the case, I can take a look at Dr. Grayling's statement. Would I agree with him that history is the thing for those who wish to educate themselves? Let me begin by saying history is not good biography. Reading history will not tell you how to be like Napoleon, or Jesus, or Han Fei-Tzu. The best you can hope for in that case is to try to learn what other people are like, what makes them tick. And for that, I would say novels are a better source of information than history, since the sensitive novelist can create a character much more life-like than any honest biographer or historian. You can learn more about how people work from Jane Austen than from Edward Gibbon or Thomas Carlyle, except for when Carlyle writes like a novelist. But I've said that historians are supposed to tease out cause and effect. Wouldn't reading history be a good way to learn that? Perhaps. But reading history does not have the same effect as doing the job of a historian. A history book lays out the causes and effects that the historian has found. The reader hopefully will analyze the arguments made - but that lies, as I have it, under philosophy. Other than the methodical practices learned, history is excellent for teaching the causes of the modern processes we have; but that is not a reason to claim that origin implies actuality. The genetic fallacy is one of the most pernicious; it is very easy to claim that where or how something originates determines what it is.
I think many people have the idea that history is the subject best for self-education, and I believe people think this because they trust in the adage: those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it. But I have a hard time with this idea, since there are only rarely occasions when the circumstances are similar enough to provide a guide. This is especially true when one thinks about the lack of perfect information at the time a given decision is being made; it is easy in hindsight to find a correspondence between two given events. Or the opposite situation occurs: people jump to a conclusion that something is the case because it is similar to a certain event in the past: look at how all of the revisionist historians looking at Japan in the 1980's claimed that Japan's remarkable growth in taking over market shares was simply a holdover from the rampant nationalism of the 1930's. It turned out only afterward that Japan's economy was only doing so well because of the inflated performance of the stock market and that the single drive to take over economically was non-existent.
But the fact remains that if history is what interests you than it should be the thing you read. I have been treating all of these disciplines as means: learn philosophy so that you can learn to think critically; learn history and you will learn to extract causes. But that's not why anyone learns a subject - which I'm considering in a broad sense. I'd like to think that people who read find themselves fascinated with a certain problem, or a certain question, or a certain beauty in a theory, explanation or explication. And if that's the case, they will already have some leg up in figuring out what books should be on their reading list. On the other hand, if someone wants to educate him or herself without that drive then there is very little which will give them active improvement. They are honestly better off finding something that they love to do, and hopefully it will be something of more value to the human race than sitting around thinking about these problems; something like raising a family or helping people or simply fixing things and making sure every part fits. There is nothing more useless than a person who does something only because everyone else is doing it or it is the "thing to do"; the only thing that comes close is someone who has found what it is they love and it turns out to be academic.

posted by Emmett @ 06:06