Is History Dangerous?
History: harmless and naïve, or a subject deadly in the wrong hands?
History is in a fascinating grey area between the sciences and humanities. It is unique in its conception in that history is in fact more a tool than anything else, akin to the discipline of engineering, in which materials are manipulated to achieve one end or another: to build a chair, a car, or a plane. But engineering techniques can also be harnessed to create an arsenal of weaponry, one that’s capable of terrible things — events like Hiroshima, or simply the invention of gunpowder. It can be extraordinarily dangerous for those who are capable of it.
Yet we do not often call engineering a ‘dangerous’ subject; we don’t think it harmful, nor warn people away, because we are conscientious objectors to the idea of applied science, or the use of mathematics to solve real-world issues. These are necessities to our very way of life; to the advancement of civilization. It seems absurd to follow the common proposition that history is dangerous (for instance, by Eric Hobsbawm), for the same reason as it is for engineering, but it is also equally absurd in the light of sequences of events in Kosovo and Palestine to assume that history is totally harmless.
To get anywhere towards resolving this paradox, we need to imagine that we have totally…
