Why You Must Study History, Now More than Ever Before
History is now often treated as a ‘soft’ social science, one seldom acknowledged by most as a field of study students should major in — with recently observed drop in History BA enrollment. And it does seem to make sense from the onset that history is a destitute field of study, for who the hell wants to know about events that happened some 500 years ago? That was yesterday, and this is today. We live in a novel and never before witnessed era where the only constant seems to be change. Yet history remains all too important — do not let the boring and redundant history classes you took when you were younger clout your opinions on the study of history.
If history is the study of the past events that has some form of archival documentation to it (from archive to even a blog post), then the news of yesterday or even this morning posted online is history. As a result, we are somewhat to varying degrees historians. If you are looking at the treasure yields and its forecast 3 months out, you are studying history. Have you read Jim Collins’ Good to Great? Then examples of great businesses are from the past and Jim’s interpretation of their success is a study of history. Have you’ve read the news this morning on while you were on your way to work? It’s history now.
Whether it is yesterday or 500 years ago, we all regularly turn to the past for this simple reason: people have gone through life just as we are now and can thus offer us advice in whichever form it may come from, scientific work, art, political blunders, economic success, emotional control, etc. In short, these are all lessons (of useful information depending on your goal) of history we can learn from with the hopes of avoiding those mistakes. And there are not only lessons to pull from the regrets of your grandparents or that of the last financial crisis, but countless that can be drawn from much deeper into the past, those no longer breathing. In fact, the dead outnumber us 14:1 and only 7% of all the peoples whom have ever lived are presently alive.[1] You must turn to past generations for wisdom. However, it could be argued that we live in such unprecedented times that history is no longer applicable and makes the past the past, irrelevant to our realities.
“The dead outnumber us 14:1 and only 7% of all the peoples whom have ever lived are presently alive.”[1]
As a result, you are forgiven from your lack of humility, or are you?
If your hubris is to be justified, we need to investigate this century old question: does history repeat itself?
Does History Repeat Itself?
The idea that history repeats itself is nothing new. Many thinkers of old have conceptualized history with grand theories focusing on how it has an inherent repetitive nature — or of events themselves if you think of every historical event was once a present moment. Claude Henri de Rouvroy, a French socialist of the 18th century, characterized the past and future as period of organic growth followed by critical decay.[2] Oswald Spengler, a philosopher of the 19th and 20th century, saw history like the changing of seasons, inevitably repeating the same four seasons in a cyclical fashion.[3] The Ancient Roman poet Virgil, saw all events bound to repeat by some “deterministic fatality and in every particular, all those events that had followed that condition before”.[4] And last and most importantly, Thucydides — the man whom we owe as the founding father of Western history if there is such a thing — argued that history repeats itself.
All these thinkers, however the beautiful formulations of their theories of history, are wrong. History does not repeat itself. If it would, then we would be reliving the same past events over and over again and would ultimately be reliving time itself perpetually — a Groundhog Day world. Humans would still in the ancient times fighting over the lands and gold of Babylon (or should I go further in time?) and prove Henry Ford right that “history is bunk”. Perhaps we would be homo erectus still foraging on the plains of the Africa. It all depends on where you think past starts and finishes which in a world that inevitably repeats itself would be arbitrary.
Of all those whom have attempted to theorize the cyclical nature of history, the most well-put and exact characterization was by Mark Twain when he famously said:
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”
All events do not sound off like broken records and Mark Twain said it best by proclaiming that they do rhyme, which he meant that there are similarly sounding situations that reoccur throughout history, but not the exact same sound — the definition of a rhyme. This is confirmed by most modern thinkers. As Will and Ariel Durant state in the Lessons of History, “history repeats itself, but only in outline and in the large”[5]. Carl Hempel, German writer and philosopher, thought of the rhymes of history as ‘covering laws’ in the sense that we can make general statements about events them repeat themselves throughout time. Henry Kissinger, the former Secretary of State of the United States, supported the idea of history rhyming with the proclamation that there is “no precise correspondence” but a “similarity of the problems being confronted” throughout the course of history.[6] There are a lot of rhymes to history. Wars are constant (although vary in nature, cause, and size), nations are created while others have failed (or go bankrupt), democracies fall into dictatorships, technological advances bring with them societal disruptions and — on a larger scale yet arguably also a grad scale — people still experience heartbreak. Joseph Schumpeter creative destruction still holds (just look of the S&P companies of today compared to 50 years ago). And the list goes on. In the details of events, history does not repeat itself but when taken in the ‘large’, they rhyme.
“History repeats itself, but only in outline and in the large” — Will & Ariel Durant
Despite this evidence, valid counterarguments can still be made — or if previous examples weren’t sufficient. In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari himself an historian and professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, stated that we do deviate from the rhymes of history. For one, famine is no longer the widespread fear we have to contend with. Human population is now becoming mostly urbanized, where the urban population is now exceeding the rural count almost throughout the world and this gap is set to widen in the coming decades. The average living standard worldwide have greatly increased and extreme poverty is decreasing. Our technology’s computational power and possibility to connect humans is unprecedented — only the telegraph comes ‘remotely’ close for the former. However, these rebuttals can be debunked.
In the Square and the Tower, Niall Ferguson explains the misguided belief by the founders of social media networks that their platforms — we can also include the computer and smartphone — were changing the world for the better. Niall proves the contrary. He observes the correspondence of problems with the creation of the printing press. Not only does the advent of the printing press and the personal computer follow the same price to quantity trajectories, as Niall details, they also had the same effect on humans. Armed with a fertile ground for the proliferation of ideas though the mass production of books, it was in the spirit of his fundamentalist interpretation of Catholicism, that Martin Luther went about printing books of his Ninety-five Theses in Germany to fellow Catholics wishing it would infect them with the same spirit, that of Lutheranism. What ensued was the warm embrace of new ideas in Germany (he became a saint there) while being proportionally hated by fellow Catholics where disputes and a deep rupture between the schools of thought emerged, sparking the Reformation and consequently, the Thirty Years Wars. Much like today, social media hasn’t created a worldwide harmonious community online but rather exacerbated tribalism and polarization — yet I am not insinuating wars will erupt. Both the advent of the printing press and social media are both driven by the notion of birds of the same feather flock together, which literally does rhyme. Hence, it is not only apparent rhymes that repeat themselves, but the implicit ones only heard by the trained ear.
Thus, examples of rhymes throughout history are endless: we can affirm that history repeats itself ‘by and large’ which can be explicitly or implicitly observed. Most events will always be of the same nature, but to understand why and not just demonstrate it through the cherry-picking of examples, we need to once again to return to the great historians and philosophers.
Why History Repeats Itself
Thucydides, the father of history and author of the History of the Peloponnesian War, formulated it concisely: “events of future history will be of the same nature — or nearly so — as the history of the past, so long as men are men.” Will Durant echoed Thucydides’ thoughts in the Lessons of History by observing that: “society is founded not on ideals but on the nature of man, and the constitution of man rewrites the constitutions of states” for where he then proceeds to question if man’s constitution (human nature which are our fundamental instincts) dictating much of history has changed or not.[7] Will and Ariel Durant, a prolific historian couple who have dedicated their lives to the deep study of history, remarked that Greeks in Plato’s time behaved much like the modern French, and the Romans were no more different in natural tendencies than those of the British for then they put it:
“Means and instrumentalities change; motives and ends remain the same: to act or rest, to acquire or give, to fight or retreat, to seek association or privacy, to mate or reject, to offer or resent parental care.” [8]
These are the true constants of life and no matter how much technological advances or different instrumentalities through which they are expressed, it will only serve to reinforce our nature. We haven’t evolved biological, but they carefully observed that our evolution has been rather social.[9] We pass things on not by biological mutations but by economic, political, intellectual and moral innovation transmitted from generation to generation by “imitation, custom or education”.[10] Yet I argue that even then, our social innovations reflect our nature, for better or for worse. Even though we had strong regulations, sound institutions, highly networked central banks, a massive financial crisis still took place and wreaked havoc throughout the world in 2008 — history’s rhymes aren’t always pleasant to hear. We have developed modern welfare states and universal education for all and a government capable of immense economic redistributive capabilities yet economic inequality persists and populism still sprouts like weeds in a garden, as was such in the age of Plutarch in Ancient Athens when rampant inequality drove up populism to the brink revolutionary appeals. Plutarch wrote that it took a courageous politician to go against the established elites seeking to preserve their riches by redistributing the wealth. Populism was then vanquished. We have much more advanced economic, political and social institutions than those of the Ancient Athenians but we are still plagued by the corresponding problems.
Since history rhymes means that in a sense it does repeat itself, we need to find a way to identify the correct rhyme scheme for the present and future. In finding those rhymes we can find the lessons of history, and cultivate our humility as a by-product of this process.
How to be Humble: Applied History
There are explicit lessons that can be drawn from history, such as coping with heart breaks on a personal level to the avoidance of wars (don’t infringe on the sovereignty of a country), yet explicit lessons won’t suffice. To truly gain from history by uncovering its lessons, we need to dig for the implicit lessons, the rhymes heard only to the trained ear: we need to become applied historians. A concept originated from Richard Neustadt and Ernest May and recently brought to forefront through Harvard’s Applied History Project, applied history seeks to deviate from historians’ incessant reinterpretations of past events by instead using their knowledge to illuminate the present and anticipate the future. Neustadt and May’s thinking itself was inspired by Winston Churchill’s thought on the utility of history as “the longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward.” To train our ears to learn the implicit lessons from the rhymes of history, we need to learn how an applied historian works.
“The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward.” — Winston Churchill
In Thinking in Time, the applied history manifesto, Neustadt and May lay out a framework for finding the rhymes and lessons of history. The initial step is to be treated like any problem: determine the problem and find its knowns, unknowns and presumptions (of the past).[11] The next step is to then simply create an analogy by taking out a legal pad, dividing the page in half with one side labelled ‘Likeness’, the other, ‘Differences’.[12] Listing the similarities and differences will construct robust analogies (although analogies by definition are not mirror images) for countless analogies can be drawn but can be disproportionately false. Adding credence to this methodology, Henry Kissinger was keen on observing that:
“History teaches by analogy, not identity. This means that the lessons of history are never automatic, that they can be apprehended only by standard which admits the significance of a range of experience, that the answers we obtain will never be better than the questions we pose…”[13]
In developing the analogy, Neustadt and May echo Kissinger emphasis on conceiving of the problem by adding the Goldberg Rule: “what’s the story?”. In assessing the present situation in relation to the past, it is essential to plot the timeline for identifying just how far a story begins for it will give a better picture of the problem by uncovering all its causes. The past will shine light on the present and provide a prescription for the future.
This is applied history.
So dwell further into the past than merely the news of this morning or events of the last decade to learn invaluable lessons applicable to the present which will give you foresight of the future — put simply, find the rhymes. Learn vicariously and by analogy to avoid stumbling in the missteps of those that came before you, for this is the humblest of acts.
References
[1] Ferguson, Niall. Civilization
[2] Durant, Will & Ariel. The Lessons of History
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Page 88
[6] Ferguson, Niall. Henry Kissinger: The Idealist
[7] Durant, Will & Ariel. The Lessons of History
[8] Ibid. 34
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Page. 354
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ferguson, Niall. Henry Kissinger: The Idealist
