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Comment by jdm2212 | Hacker News Reader

My dad is a historian, and it's always pretty entertaining to run the current faddy "big idea" in popular history past him.

There's always two parts to his response:

1. $bigIdea is not a result of serious historical research; it's a reflection of laypeople projecting their preferred narratives onto history

2. literally dozens of counterexamples that he can cite on the spot from across different continents and historical eras

My takeaway: laws of history are the stuff of cranks and oversimplified history popularizations.

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I’ve taken a few grad level history courses, enough where I feel “safe” reading primary sources, and assessing the relative quality of history-oriented literature. I like to read “dull history”, especially social and economic histories with focuses on labor.

I totally agree with your dad. The HN community likes to dis Malcolm Gladwell (for example) but reveres Harari and Diamond. They’re creative smart people, with interesting and sharp ideas.

They like to lean on history or sociology to support their sharp instincts. Their books are good to get a sense for their instincts, and how they’ve occasionally played out through history. But you should never read them as an authoritative account of history or sociology, and you should not seriously consider their historical references to draw conclusions about the inevitability of the future.

I‘ve recently been reading primary sources of intellectuals living in Russia in the immediate months and years before WW1. None of them saw the war coming. None of them saw the revolution. Each of them made bold, evidence-based predictions about the near future, and they were all wrong. Same with (brilliant) Soviet economists in the 80s.

I recommend reading these books for fun if they please you, but please do not think that they’ve given you a comprehensive or correct view of history, even for the specific events they describe.

I love history as a subject but it’s one of those fascinations where the more you dig in the more you learn that the picture is complex and nuanced, which shouldn’t be surprising society now is complex and nuanced why would the past be so different.

As a subject though it was badly taught in my youth (no idea if it’s improved).

We learnt about the Romans then basically nothing till the victorians and the WWII.

Might have perhaps been worth mentioning oh the empire in a UK school you would think.

Agreed on all points. For me, the value of history is how humblingly-nuanced it is. It’s kind of like Simpson’s Law: the more you see and the deeper you look, you learn more but you “know” less (because looking deeper merely exposes you to more nuance). The more widely you study history, the more you see this truth repeating itself.

It’s value is an inoculation against black and white interpretations of anything. This is good for free thinking, but arguably bad for people who want to influence you to think in black and white terms. Maybe that’s why our study of history in secondary school is so superficial! :) (just kidding)

In all seriousness, it’s really hard to cover history at the breadth of a primary and secondary school curriculum, and get to spend any time on depth. The curriculum seems more interested in arming us with superficial facts, than improving our way of thinking, but I’m sure it’s not the same everywhere.

Also bit of a sidebar, but the saxonizing of England, and the whole story of Oliver Cromwell and Scotland is so damn fascinating! It’s a shame they didn’t teach that. So many lessons to learn and interesting counterfactual thought experiments that teenagers would eat up. Although, I guess talking about nationally divisive topics isn’t super palatable. American classrooms are still trying to figure out how to teach slavery in 2020, and it’s been 150 years since emancipation.

What about non-contemporary “laws”?

For example, Polybius’ Anacyclosis. It originated with Plato and Aristotle, and Polybius codified it - and it influenced thinkers such as Machiavelli and Kant.

To a modern reader, or at any rate to this modern reader, it holds water.

Yes, there are counter-examples, but they seem to be vastly outweighed by examples which follow the form. See the French and American revolutions, the glorious revolution, the arc of the Roman Empire, for a few.

I would say (as an absolutely unqualified observer) that we (much of the world) are currently in an ochlocractic state, moving towards monarchies.

I’d be interested in his/your take on an idea that had persisted and influenced for several millennia - I wouldn’t call it a flash in the pan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anacyclosis

How is the French revolution an example for this? That went from a somewhat absolutist monarchy (maybe we could call that "tyranny"? but the king never had sole power) to something that looked like it could have been a constitutional monarchy to mob rule relatively quickly, and then back to tyranny (and then back to monarchy, then to democracy, then to tyranny, then to democracy, then to occupation, then to democracy).

I mean obviously it is somewhat easier for a monarchy or a democracy to change in character (monarchy->tyranny) than in essence (monarchy->democracy), but a) that model doesn't account for changes in essence at all (especially not in the context of revolutions), b) there have been countless examples of monarchs that had to cede power instead of gaining it, c) I can't think of that many historic examples of actual mob rule that remained stable over a longer period.

More fundamentally, it's even questionable that we can come up with clear criteria to distinguish, say, monarchy from tyranny.

What would you make of “The Lessons of History” by Will Durant? To me, all models are wrong but some, like his, are useful.

If you're just interested in having some understanding of the past, books like that are great.

If you want to predict the future, your analysis should be about 98% detailed study of the present, and 2% history. Much as you would consult mostly this week's weather forecast when deciding to go for a picnic, but maybe adjust slightly based on historical error rates in weather forecasting.

The real usefulness of history research in prediction/policymaking often seems to be in debunking popular myths that shape/bias how we analyze the future and present. The conduct of the Iraq War, for example, was substantially a result of a popular American myth/narrative about how other cultures are, deep down, like us, and democracy is the equilibrium every society gravitates towards. In hindsight those are both obviously false, but at the time a lot of people believed them. Historians help identify and make us cognizant of those narratives.

Yes, history is a fruitful source of evidence to disprove modern conjectures, but a poor way to prove conjectures. The predictive value of history is in how it teaches us to stop trying to make predictions.

> The conduct of the Iraq War, for example, was substantially a result of a popular American myth/narrative about how other cultures are, deep down, like us, and democracy is the equilibrium every society gravitates towards.

can you please elaborate on this? it sounds like you're proposing the offensively wrong notion that the Iraq War was noble and well-founded, truly aimed at restoring democracy to Iraq, but went wrong because the Iraqi people are simply allergic to democracy

> but went wrong because the Iraqi people are simply allergic to democracy

There's an assumption in what you're saying that the "Iraqi people" is a meaningful entity with a collective will that is expressed through collective action. We use that kind of thinking to reason about liberal democracies where there is a meaningful entity (a voting public with a storng shared national identity) and a mechanism (elections) for expressing preferences and a means (representative government, civil society) of taking collective action. It's not a very useful way to analyze a bunch of people who have none of those things.

My point wasn't that "Iraq is allergic to democracy." It was that thinking in terms of societies being drawn to or repulsed by democracy is an error in itself. The way to avoid those errors is to study lots of societies over a long period of time. That's where history helps you identify and understand the narratives and categories you unconsciously use to understand the world.

I don't know whether Iraq's current culture is amenable to democracy. However I don't know that the U.S.'s current culture is actually more amenable to democracy. Further, the idea that the U.S. military effort aims to install democracy has been disproven over and over again - the U.S. military generally aims to install regimes that are friendly to U.S. military and business interests, regardless of the wishes of the local people who are actually governed. This is the opposite of democracy. So it seems inappropriate and even offensive to bring up the question of whether Iraq is ready for democracy, though I don't think you intended to be offensive.

Not the OP, but:

I think that Bush was sincere in his belief that bringing democracy to Iraq was a (if not the) primary goal of the Iraq War, and that doing so would be beneficial to the Iraqis. And I could believe that he felt a "white man's burden" and obligation that, because he could do so, he ought to do so.

[And to be clear: my belief is that the notion of "white man's burden" is incredibly racist and offensive, and I do not condone actions taken in such a manner.]

While I wouldn't call it "allergic to democracy", I can also entertain arguments that successful democratic regimes have preconditions for their success that Iraq simply did not have. I can even entertain arguments that democracy is not the best form of government, and it strikes me as mildly offensive to presume that democracy is automatically better than whatever form of government exists.

I think OP's point is that the Iraq War was undertaken in the [racist] belief that they were bettering the Iraqis by bringing democracy to them, and the failure is that, well, we were racist in the first place to believe that "bringing democracy" to another people is "bettering" them.

> I think that Bush was sincere in his belief that bringing democracy to Iraq was a (if not the) primary goal of the Iraq War, and that doing so would be beneficial to the Iraqis.

I believe that Bush probably stroked himself thinking this way, as did virtually the entire media and political class. However I don't think it was anywhere close to a primary goal, as you say. More to the point: their actual conduct in the war does not indicate in any way that this was a genuine goal as opposed to a piece of propaganda.

> While I wouldn't call it "allergic to democracy", I can also entertain arguments that successful democratic regimes have preconditions for their success that Iraq simply did not have.

Any citations for this notion? But to restate a point I made in another comment: the discussion of whether Iraq is ready for democracy is almost offensively inappropriate and nonsequitur, because the U.S. military does not aim to install democracy, it aims to install regimes that are friendly to U.S. military and business interests, regardless of the wishes of the local people who are governed.

To put it another way, we have no way of knowing whether Iraq is "ready for democracy" based on the Iraq War because the U.S. military did not act in a way to actually try to install democracy.

> Any citations for this notion?

I don't recall if Why Nations Fail specifically covered democracy, but at the very least, you can definitely see why nations caught in the vicious cycles it outlines might suffer more because of democracy.

> because the U.S. military does not aim to install democracy, it aims to install regimes that are friendly to U.S. military and business interests

No. The US military does not aim to install any regime, it aims to defeat the enemy's military. That's the big thing of what went so horribly wrong in Iraq: the US kept pushing military solution after military solution to fix very-non-military problems and was confused as to why it didn't work.

> The US military does not aim to install any regime, it aims to defeat the enemy's military.

If you look at U.S. foreign policy (covert and overt, CIA, military) over history, one consistent goal is to install regimes that are friendly to the U.S. and to topple regimes which are not. Defeating the military of the hostile regime can be part of that. But if that were it, then the U.S. would just leave once that had been accomplished, and that's not what happens.

The U.S. generally sticks around and tries to install a replacement, often undemocratically. On the occasion that they do implement democratic elections, any winner that is not sufficiently friendly to U.S. interests is undermined or even couped and a (usually right-wing) government is installed undemocratically.

Occasionally the U.S. will even undermine the democratic government of a country it hasn't even officially militarily engaged with, because the leader is threatening U.S. business interests. The history of U.S. relations with Latin America is littered with this type of illegal covert warfare, most recently in Bolivia with Evo Morales who was nationalizing natural resources that U.S. business wanted access to.

> But if that were it, then the U.S. would just leave once that had been accomplished, and that's not what happens.

That is exactly what the US military planned with Iraq, Rumsfeld had outlawed any talk of Phase IV (nation building). The generals wanted out of there as quick as possible because they knew it would be a clusterfk regardless of Rumsfeld, Bush, Cheney thinking State, USAid and the UN would just manage Chalabi’s flowering democracy.

Of course, that fantasy lasted as long as it to blow up the UN HQ in Baghdad.

I think ideological is a better word than racist here.

A racial purist would adopt one of two positions - invade and extract value - or don't waste our money on those people. It's true from the left side they see rightists but this is an optical illusion. It's as how I used to believe a democrats were secret Maoists.

One could argue that Iraqi circumstances are fundamentally less suitable for democracy, not because "the Iraqi people are simply allergic to democracy" but because of the structure of the country divided both by religion (Sunni vs Shia) and ethnicity (the Kurdish regions) - democracy in the region would be much more feasible if the Ottoman empire was divided differently according to the boundaries of the "natural" communities (e.g. instead of the current Iraq/Syria border one would have a Shia state, a Sunni state and a Kurdish state since, say 1930s) but the currently established borders are drawn in a way as if to intentionally maximize the long-term instability within each country.

Like the US, (catholic vs protestant) and ethnicity (some Mexican regions) ... The division of the Ottoman empire was nullified by the War of Independence of the Turks. A Kurdish state would have never been possible, because of the ethnic plurality in the region. The religious divide, is an expression of a political one. The Iraq-Syria border makes as much sense as the US-Mexican border, German-French, still democracy is a possibility.

That sounds plausible though I'm not educated enough to comment on that. But I do know that the question is separate from the Iraq War because the IW never truly aimed to establish an autonomous democracy.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/002202211244385...

They have 50% cousin marriage, which predicts high levels of clannishness and low support of democracy.

It looks like if you want to bring democracy to the middle east, you first have to stop cousin marriage then try again in a few generations time.

This would also reduce genetic disease and raise IQ. There are no charities or programs to pick this low hanging fruit as it's very un-PC to talk about this.

Bit of a scissor statement there. I could argue one side of that on Monday and another on Tuesday.

I dont think Iraq war was noble pursuit of democracy. That on itself is one of narratives - in which American wars are good and just regardless how self-serving and sociopathic people pushing for them are.

I've read The Story of Civilization, but I haven't read that - could you tl;dr? My impression of the Durantian Big Picture is a sense that everything recurs, no big ideas or events are ever really unprecedented, and a kind of skeptical liberalism is the best philosophy.

(Minor point: his wife Ariel was a co-author.)

No offense to your dad, but there’s literally dozens of counter examples for every take on history. The physical evidence and the obvious can fill in the blanks pretty easily from daily human emotional rollercoaster our biology takes us on

Historians fill in a whole lot of gaps based on consensus acceptance of a narrative. There’s never an objective measure of reality. I can read the writings of the dead just fine if they’re in English. Thanks for your the context though, mr historian. How foolish of me

Not just a historian thing.

What’s that? They knew metal smithing and made hand tools? Because they exist? And they did song and dance?

Well those dead humans sure were a thing! Never heard of such a thing before now!

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