The Case for Applied History
historytoday.com
historytoday.com
The range of analogies commonly utilised in public debate is depressingly small – almost any event of significance is related to either the international crises of the 1930s or the economic turmoil of the 1970s. Historians are equipped to enrich that pool with more exotic alternatives.
The article is surprisingly silent about the obvious alternative: social science. Economists and political scientists claim to use historical data in a disciplined, methodical way to make predictions. Personally, I don't buy that claim, but the author didn't think it worth discussing.
I'd like to quibble with the term prediction in this context too. I think it's too strong to say that social scientists use historical data to make predictions. They would use historical data to make inferences about the likely causes of events and use that insight to inform policy going forward. That is not prediction but gaining insight into probable outcomes if certain things are done in certain contexts.
The closest one might come to prediction would be economic forecasting where one looks at various patterns in the data to make an, ahem, educated guesses about likely outcomes. This too is not exactly prediction because one is interested in the likelihood of a range of outcomes. Even those who do these things for a living admit that this is, at best, a guessing game. (As JK Galbraith once quipped, "The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable")
Peter Turchin: https://evolution-institute.org/profile/peter-turchin/
David Christian (Big History) and Kyle Harper (U. OK) comee to mind.
Economic's and economists' record wwith historical data and theory is an exceptionally poor standard to follow. (There are some exceptions to the rule.)
> So why study history? Unlike physics or economics, history is not a means for making accurate predictions. We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine. For example, studying how Europeans came to dominate Africans enables us to realize that there is nothing natural or inevitable about the racial hierarchy, and that the world might well be arranged differently.
--- Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, p. 241
With applied history, they could be actively studying ways to prevent mistakes of the past. Then also, blending with the contexts of modern-day life, inform more useful ways of living in the present and future.
Mostly it’s taught me that things are always more complex than they seem. Like, if you zoom out and see history, events make sense. Augustus chose Christianity as the state religion of Rome because it was a great tool to unify the different cultures under emperorial rule. Then when you actually look at why that made sense, you’re at a loss, because it makes sense in the grand picture, but the actual decision makes no damn sense. They had a myriad of religions to chose from, so why exactly did they chose the one they did? Nobody knows, and if you put yourself in the same situation, ignoring everything that came after, you’d probably have a hard time justifying it. Yet it’s one of the most significant decisions in western civilization. That’s just one example, and I probably worded it a little poorly, English isn’t my first language, but knowing things are complex is a real relief, because you’ll rarely get the feeling that people or systems are intentionally out to get you.
Another thing it’s taught me is to be more positive, or at least less doomsaying. I’m liberal and nationalism being on the rise isn’t exactly great news to me, but because I know history, I know there is a pendulum at work, and it’ll eventually swing the other way again.
Sure things typically suck in regions of the world, but they’ve never sucked everywhere at once, and frankly, we’ve mostly seen progression since we started recoding history, and that’s really comforting, to me at least.
I think it would be nice if we could apply this, I just don’t know how we would do that.
Constantine's mother, Helena, converted to Christianity, and that greatly influenced his thinking, whether or not you believe he actually was a Christian himself.
As a fellow history major, the worst thing in the world is when you make a simple error and everyone calls you on it saying "I thought you were a history major". ;)
My only defense is that classical history was a 5ECTS course during my first year and I never actually finished the full five years before I went into CS. I should’ve obviously looked it up before posting to HN though.
As a little ironic/funny side note, the reason I changed to CS was because I was really bored by the fact that I had spent two years mainly learning how to work with source material and scientific methods, which wasn’t exactly what I’d hoped “history” would be. Now that just bit me in the ass, again. ;p
The shallow jingoism of history as taught in school is indeed quite dangerous, and without the "trail knowledge" Collingwood mentions you really can't see what you're walking through.
For example, people love to sling around (or reject) the "nazi" analogy for the current USA, but a far more insightful one is 1930s France.
Apparently in US schools all you learn is that the French ultimately (or, as they are taught, "quickly") surrendered to the Germans in 1940, but why is where the insight lies. It is there, with the Action Française and the communists literally fighting with their respective armies in the streets, and the desire of the right wing to surrender in order to "purge" the country of socialism that most closely matches the path the US is on.
(I don't believe the US will actually get to where France was in 1940, but understanding the 30s helps me understand what's going on now).
But it seems unreasonable to expect the government wouldn't surrender, once the Nazis were in Paris holding guns to their heads.
That's very true, but there are further interesting subtleties. To over simplify in the name of brevity:
The French army was likely the most powerful in Europe in 1940 -- certainly everyone believed so. The German general staff prepared for a long difficult invasion (Blitzkrieg notwithstanding) and in fact ran past their own supply lines and had to slow down shows that they didn't expect the invasion to go so quickly. I don't consider this one particularly relevant to the US, though you could make a case.
The unprecidented loss of French youth in WWI (IIRC multiple entire years of graduates of St-Cyr were wiped out to a man) had a serious toll on willingness to fight. Again, I don't consider this particularly relevant.
Like I mentioned above, significant welcome on the right for national renewal and anti-communist purge through the agency of the Germans. I see this point to have the most relevance to the US. If you can get beyond the lazy tropes of "racism" and "idiocy", the core of the current republican message and of "MAGA" is at its core a revanchist belief in a return to some sort of prelapsarian time of harmony and moral clarity. This is, at its heart, the core of many right wing (which I would distinguish from "conservative") parties today. Yes, there are of course racists and idiots among the right wing supporters, but certainly idiocy and other pathologies are rife among the Democrats and the left, mixed in among the reasonable folks. You can see a parallel to the French situation with the